It could only happen in the world of magical realism. A scavenging seagull finds a latex bag of love, and soon after, hatches one mighty weird chick. A loser named Ernesto Zanpa hears the strange creature crying one night, names it Franco after his father, and takes it home to raise.

What follows is an outrageous fable set in a modern-day Coney Island that's a far cry from the seaside getaway our grandparents cherished. It's become a seedy, timeworn wreck, where Russian mobsters outnumber the fun-seekers—the perfect backdrop for this earthy farce.

The seagull/human hybrid has white feathers instead of hair, the legs of a human, and the wings of a bird. But despite his birdlike appendages and appetite for raw fish, inside his pointed, pigeon chest beats a warm-blooded heart. His arrival completely alters his benefactor's life: To support the child, Ernesto shucks his listless ways and becomes a workaholic cook, gathering a supportive family of boardwalk characters around them. Franco reaches maturity at an avian pace; in just one year, he's teenage-size and facing teenage problems, a fact his father doesn't seem to notice.

Gullboy is itself a Coney Island freak show. The story is subplot-heavy, packed with tales of social outcasts and their crooked, lonely lives. There's Venus, Ernesto's venal wife, and Uncle Sammy, her Internet pimp; Irv, the lawyer who sees dollar signs instead of feathers on Gullboy's wings; and Tatiana, the true-hearted secretary with a couple of twisty secrets. Characterization is where this author really shines: He's a shapeshifter on the page, with a great ear for dialect and a painter's eye for visual detail. Rubenstein has been a lawyer, which explains his spot-on depiction of that character. But he's also convincing as a surgeon, a cook, a teenage girl, an old Jewish man, and an Hispanic gangbanger. The characterizations are remarkable, making each subplot a richly textured addition.

A native of Brooklyn, Rubenstein is currently a Rhinebeck resident who's trained with boxer Floyd Patterson in New Paltz and written for the Taconic newspapers. (The chapter-heading illustrations are by another Rhinebeck resident, New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan.) Impressively, Gullboy is Rubenstein's first novel, and the story owes an obvious debt to such literary antecedents as Franz Kafka, Tom Robbins, and John Kennedy Toole (in fact, A Confederacy of Dunces has a walk-on role in this book). The lineage is deserved—Rubenstein can really write. This is a keenly observed story, packed with grit, belly laughs, and tears. (A note to the squeamish: This author doesn't shy away from observing every part of the human experience, including the lavatory kind.)

Despite the huge roster of characters, Rubenstein doesn't stint on conclusions. The ending is Dickens at his darkest: His characters all seem to end up with what they deserve, if not what they want. There's even a scene where two of the most repugnant players off each other, a bittersweet denouement that resounds throughout the book's finale.

But could a Gullboy find love, happiness, and acceptance in a world of rotting boardwalks and ramshackle carnival rides? Could someone stay slender and healthy on a diet of fried dough and Nathan's hot dogs?

When Franco was a baby, a doctor offered to fix his "deformed" arms surgically. But Ernesto refused, hoping that one day his son would be able to fly. And will he? You'll have to read the book to see. However, I'll make one disclosure: The Gullboy's real purpose doesn't seem to be to take flight, but to show others their own wings.

Rob Cea entered the NYPD training academy gung-ho and eager, with an inquisitive mind and a consuming passion to make the streets safer. What he encountered on those streets—and in dealing with the realpolitik of the department and the court system—nearly killed him.

Zealous and alert, Cea had a knack for figuring out which folks on the street were "strapped." Figuring that concealed weapons had to be dealt with, he'd pursue and tackle those folks, only to find that "I just knew from the way he acted" didn't meet a legal definition of probable cause. His cases kept getting tossed out.

Until he figured out that just a few little words of perjury made all the difference in the world.

No Lights, No Sirens moves like an Amtrak train through a nightmare. Cea reports on the absolute underside of the urban American experience, and it's grotesque: Heroin is cheap, life is cheaper, and the way to make the grade as a protector and servant is to become better at running game on the bad guys than they are at running it on you. Predictably, this leads to a certain blurring of distinctions, and Cea finds his idealism—and his fairytale love affair with an upscale financial analyst—receding into the distance, sacrificed to his adrenaline addiction.

The style is intimate, full of New York cop-speak that Cea doesn't bother to explain—he knows that if we keep listening, we'll get it, and we do. The often gory details are vivid. The moral dilemmas are continuous and soul-shattering. And despite a laundry list of broken rules—he trades heroin to junkies for information, leaves his gun on the ground at his feet as he ecstatically plumbs a gin-mill wench, and gets his picture taken in playful poses with a corpse at a homicide scene—"C" has a heart and a conscience, and the more he ignores the latter, the more the former hurts him.

Things come to a head in a hurry. Mia, the foxy financial analyst, has an abortion rather than have a baby with a husband by whom she feels utterly abandoned. Cholito, Cea's favorite informant, is killed. And the suspicions of the Internal Affairs officers, for whom Cea has less use than the thugs, fall on him. In a consummate irony, the man who perfected his "test-i-lying" skills is being framed.

Hitting adrenaline-junkie bottom, he seeks redemption, using his finely honed intuition in a harrowing pursuit of a vicious serial rapist, almost getting killed. It's the end of the line, and Cea knows it, although he finishes a couple more years playing more by the book. When he retires, it is as a decorated hero.

Cea, who now lives in New Paltz, had to wait 10 years for the statute of limitations to run out, so that he could not be prosecuted for the things he describes in gut-twisting detail. But it seems unlikely that the mean streets have gotten any mellower. And although he makes it clear that he's not apologizing for police as a species, his book raises fascinating questions about the ideals involved in crime and punishment. Are there any? Are they even imaginable, down where the blood flows in the gutter?

There are probably people still locked in cells who would scoff, but Cea's biggest problem as an officer was the idealism and underlying sensitivity that made him so eager to do it right. If being good at doing good means that you're required to become really good at being bad, the moral conundrums can become more than the human soul can bear. No Lights, No Sirens is not a pretty book, but it's heroic in its honesty.

There's nothing like being in the right place at the right time, especially if you're a newspaper reporter whose controversies usually run to franchise coffeehouses and broken sewer pipes. A whopper of a story—like New Paltz Mayor Jason West's decision to marry 25 same-sex couples on February 24, 2004—gives her readers the chance to find out just how good she is. And Erin Quinn, who writes for the New Paltz Times, is very good indeed.

Quinn's book Pride and Politics: The Tale of a Big Story in a Small Town, arises from her award-winning coverage of the weddings and their aftermath. It was a febrile time for New Paltz, where the hopes and fears of gay activists and conservative local politicians brewed with special intensity in the months before the presidential election.

It's easy to forget how quickly the same-sex marriage controversy boiled over. On February 25, 2004 (after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry), George Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

Two days later, following the lead of the Mayor of San Francisco, West married gay couples in the parking lot of the village hall. On March 2, Ulster County D.A. Don Williams brought criminal charges against West for marrying couples without valid marriage licenses. The next day, longtime village trustee Bob Hebel brought a civil suit against West requesting that he be removed from office.

Quinn, a mother of three, got little sleep that spring. One of the most appealing narrators I've met in a long time, she dashes to keep up with the story: Her sweater seems perpetually crusty with baby spit-up, her hair not quite dry, and her ballpoint out of ink. But the national media, which pounces on New Paltz like a duck on a junebug, makes everyone a little discombobulated. So do the illustrious sorts who come to town. When presidential candidate Ralph Nader calls on the eve of his speech at SUNY New Paltz, Quinn's backing out of her driveway, kids in tow, and no note-taking paper in sight. (The pace of Quinn's prose is just as likeably headlong. The evening I read Pride & Politics, I kept making bargains with myself—just one more chapter, then bed—but the narrative kept lolloping on, and I followed.)

Pride & Politics is what my grandmother would have called a book of good countenance. Quinn is candid about her own left-leaning politics (she's a member of the Green Party), but she's no polemicist. A native New Paltzian, she gives a fair shake to all the characters in this drama: Each emerges as flawed and brave, admirable and stubborn. Her representation of D.A. Williams, who had West arraigned on criminal charges, is especially subtle.

Inevitably, the figure who dominates the story is charismatic West, the 26-year-old Green party candidate nobody expected to be elected mayor in the first place. If his actions on February 27, 2004, were motivated by an affection for Billiam van Roestenberg and Jeffrey McGowan, the first couple married that day, afterward, as the "cult of Jason" grew, his motivations became harder to read, his wisdom less sure. When a Baptist church congregation from Kansas rolled into town shrieking against New Paltz's "sodomite zeitgeist," the young mayor needed prodding to meet with them.

"I really didn't know who Jason was, or what he would become," Quinn writes. "I only knew that in his presence, you could taste potential. Like a lick of mint or the hot steam of Irish tea, this young man, with all of his foibles and personal failings, was positioned on a trajectory that could only rise."

There are certain books we keep as reminders of who we are and where we've been. As we display them on our shelves for the world to see, we are in essence baring pieces of our souls. They are books we read over and over again, in bits and pieces, to calm our minds.

Dakota Lane has written a book that will likely serve this purpose for many teenagers as they turn into adults, reassuring them that everyone goes through obsessive love at least once and comes out the other side. In The Orpheus Obsession, the object of desire is an alternative rock star named Orpheus. Lane's protagonist is 16-year-old Anooshka Stargirl, a borderline manic-depressive who lives with her emotionally unstable mother just outside Woodstock. Her father lives in India, and her older sister, Zoetrope Zallulah (ZZ) Moon, has moved to New York City. Anooshka's only other companion at home is a beloved parakeet named Zack.

Faced with a summer of meaningless social meandering and waitressing for tourists, Anooshka finds solace in the connection she makes with Orpheus's music. After a chance meeting in a garden maze, Anooshka begins to see him as a vulnerable human being like herself. Her curiosity leads her to his online blog, which convinces her they are psychically connected. Restless and bored at home, Anooshka travels to the city to pursue her obsession. But when Orpheus returns her interest, and fantasy turns into reality, the fragile Anooshka learns one of life's hardest lessons.

While as an adult it's hard to remember ever falling for lines such as, "You're so complex. You're like oxygen," Lane is adept at painting that naivete into a real character, who also inspires us with her wide-eyed passion. Reading The Orpheus Obsession is like jumping back into the adolescent mind and absorbing all of life's experiences in colorful, passionate bursts of energy. Lane's ability to create and maintain this world is astounding.

"I can sometimes hear a color, see a sound," Anooshka says. "Why else would we feel emotion in our bodies? I could never explain that to anyone, and in this one simple line I feel Orpheus gets it."

Interlaced with photographs and lyrics, Orpheus is also a journey into writing as an art form, with a literary quality that is sorely lacking in much popular young adult fiction today. Among the Harry Potter and Sweet Valley High knock-offs saturating the market are a few struggling gems by writers like Lane, who have worked hard to hone their craft, and are giving it back to the next generation honestly, in all its messy, complex glory. Lane's characters are acutely human: observant, sensitive, and flawed. Anooshka is both naive and wise; her mother is both kind and brutal. Orpheus is grounded, yet lost.

Teens and adults alike will appreciate the intellectual undercurrent of this novel, as Lane loosely recreates the original Greek myth of Orpheus, a great musician and poet whose songs charmed wild beasts. But according to legend, when Orpheus received a chance to save his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld, his ego caused him to lose her forever. In Lane's version, with its New York underworld, Anooshka and her Orpheus are destined to a similar fate.

Dakota Lane's first novel, Johnny Voodoo, was published in 1996 by Delacorte, and gained a cult following, as well as accolades as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. She is currently working on a graphic-novel series. With her ability to transcend the emotional and visual world of life's most painful years, Lane is on her way to becoming a consistent, reassuring voice in the world of young adult fiction.

John Darnton has done a near-impossible thing: to craft a thriller, using Charles Darwin as a foil, yet sidestep the current religious brouhaha about evolution. Well, not entirely. By the end of the book it's clear that science and common sense are still safe, even as Darwin himself is peeled open as a near-plagiarist, possible murderer, and all-around nervous wreck.

It's hard to tell, though, if the scholarship and historical theorizing that saturate this story constitute some meaningful ideas on the author's part, or if they're just there to serve the story. The novel is flat-out engrossing, and deftly weaves present-day amateur detectives, young Darwin's voyage of discovery, and his last, troubled days. The Darwin Conspiracy is really a serial cliffhanger, and guaranteed to agitate the reader at the end of every chapter the way the genre should. Darnton even manages to include a real cliffhanging scene, an act of wit on the author's part, but absolutely crucial to the plot.

I was lured in by the prospect of exposing Darwin, the brilliant thinker, the heroic disruptor of sacred cows (turns out they're just cows!) as—a villain. I also admit I was worried (is this thickly disguised antiscientism?), but ultimately it's just a tease. The mystery's the thing, and it's jim-dandy.

Of course, few fundamentalists will be taken in. Anything short of outright refutation and denunciation of evolution is seen as coddling poor Charlie, but a few might be fooled by the title, and will squirm with delight as the clues pile up and Darwin's own daughter, Lizzie, begins to revile him. Have at thee, rationality! Even so, materialistic science is not undone.

Hudson Valley resident Darnton, a 35-year veteran of the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reportage on Poland under martial law. His description of the original voyage of the Beagle, with shipboard details, revelatory jungle excursions, insect discoveries, and professional jealousies, is memorable, even thrilling. The sleuthing subplot has Darwin's "lesser" daughter emerging from dim history and struggling to reconcile the father she idolizes with his accomplishments, and possible crimes. It's highly effective, but relies on a literary device that's problematic.

Evoking this young girl (and then woman) by tracing the arc of her tragic life, her filial devotion and unappreciated brilliance, is an original and plausible way to enter Darwin's life and times. Darnton says all the right things, even when Lizzie is merely advancing the plot. He wisely shows feminist subtext sparingly, and without demagoguery. But the author (male, middle-aged) attempts a Herculean task: writing as a 19th-century girl, one from a literary, well-heeled family. It was a time when well-formed sentences were expected, even from females.

Juggling all this requires exquisite balance and excruciatingly precise word choices. While Lizzie is credible overall, and effective as an ensemble character, she doesn't quite come through as an adolescent girl. I longed for a few just-so stumbles in that formidable syntax, some juvenile choices in her diary prose, something to reveal the stifled inner life and emotional depth of such a unique character. There is none of the occasional panic that accompanies the transit to womanhood in any age. At no time is Darnton incorrect with Lizzie's voice, but she carries too much of the story to remain at arm's length emotionally.

We need this book. Darwin changed everything, deflating our conceit about human importance and elevating our knowledge. His careful observations turned pieties about "God's creation" into a rich, ever-evolving, as it were, engagement with the natural world. He was not, even so, a "god," or even demiurge, and The Darwin Conspiracy elevates his accomplishment while examining, with Darwinian attention to detail, his feet of clay.

I don't think there are many people living in America today who would deny that we are a nation in thrall to its stuff. Obsessed as we are with having things, we don't tend to spend much time thinking about them in any guise other than that of "possession." So it is refreshing and welcome to come across a book that ponders the nature of our relationships with inanimate objects.

Disguised as a series of essays on design, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects is really a series of meditations. Dutchess County resident Akiko Busch, editor of Design Is and author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live, begins with the question, "What gives ordinary objects their value?" It's a good question, and the notion of pausing to think about some of the things that inhabit our lives—a telephone, a mailbox, a stroller, a vegetable peeler—seems deliciously subversive. Busch gives these "common objects" their due, in terms of the emotional and symbolic roles they play in our lives, calling them "our partners in experience," the "witnesses and accomplices" of our lives. She also points to the sometimes hazy line between possessor and possessed. Who hasn't felt, at one time or other, enslaved by some object, or helpless without another?

Each of the 12 essays is accompanied by an elegant pencil drawing, in color, by George Skelcher. The essays can be as different in tone as the objects are different in their design and purpose. "The Mailbox," for example, is really an essay on trust, on rural neighborliness (or the lack thereof), and on the poetry of design; while her essay on the vegetable peeler is really about design as an act of generosity and love.

Busch's sense of humor is on the subversive side, too, dry and understated. In my favorite essay, "The Cereal Box," Busch explores "the 'eat and learn' phenomenon." She tells us about the "Spoonfuls of Stories" series launched by Cheerios, and the "snack books" attached to various products, such as The Oreo Cookie Counting Book. Taking it a step further, Busch wryly ponders, "Could gourmet cuisine not be used to further adult literacy by pairing certain foods with specific writers—sliced hams, cod roe, toasted cheese with Samuel Pepys or a croissant with Colette? Later in the day, one might even engage in a drink-and-learn phenomenon—rum cocktails with Hemingway, gin and tonic with Cheever."

Busch is not afraid to make philosophical and sociological leaps, some more successful than others. Her afterword essay, "The Golden Slipcover," in which she talks about her mother's aphasia, is a moving meditation on the purposefulness of frivolity, and our sometimes inadequate means of communication.

Less successful is the essay on backpacks, based, as it is, on Busch's premise that what we carry within them is "essential." Busch misses her opportunity here to consider the difference between the necessary and the desirable. Making the desirable seem essential is, of course, what advertising and marketing are all about, and perhaps it is an element of design worth thinking about, too.

Although Busch sometimes makes rather sweeping generalizations, and jumps to some far-fetched conclusions, in the end, it's really not necessary to agree with her, or to accept her ideas; one has only to accept her felicitous invitation to join the discussion, to take a look at "stuff" not merely in terms of its stated purpose, but also in terms of what place it serves in our lives, and in society as a whole. Busch invites us to not just have our things, or use them, or be used by them, but to think about them. And, in terms of design, isn't thinking what our brains are for?