Entertainer Peggy Lee has long inhabited a cultural limbo. Certainly we know her finger-snapping hit "Fever" and the world-weary "Is That All There Is?" Bette Midler paid her tribute last fall with a CD of Lee classics. But Lee was perhaps too accomplished: She was impossible to be categorized in an industry bent on pigeonholing performers. Her chops were stunning, whether singing jazz, blues or the cocktail numbers that ominated her 50-year career. (Like Mildred Bailey, Lee was that rare bird: a white woman who could tame the blues like Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday.) But few remember that Lee also penned the songs for the Disney cartoon Lady and the Tramp and nabbed an Oscar nod in Pete Kelly's Blues.

GQ feature writer Peter Richmond appreciates Lee's breadth of artistry. In this exhaustive biography, the Dutchess County resident not only revives the legendary lady but also recreates her eras, from the dive bars of the '30s to the nightclubs of the '50s, the frightening days of the '60s when popular music left Lee behind, and the waning days of her career in the '80s, when sheer narcissism kept her serenading audiences composed equally of longtime fans and the morbidly curious.

Richmond has a gift for conjuring distant places and times. Drawing from sources as disparate as letters, newspaper clippings, and personal interviews with friends, relatives, and show business colleagues, he seamlessly recreates Peggy Lee's life from the beginning, when Norma Deloris Egstrom, a shy girl from 1930s North Dakota, realized that her talent for song would be the only escape from an abusive stepmother and a loving but alcoholic father who chose to ignore his daughter's torment. At age eight, little Norma, already performing at local events, told a childhood friend, "I'm going to be in show business some day."

In strokes broad and colorful, the author captures the jazz world. Consider this paragraph, which bops along flawlessly on its own verbal syncopation: "The Minneapolis that greeted Peggy Lee was a city of worldliness and style. The fragrance that rode the north wind down Nicollet Avenue was redolent not of cattle, but of the exhaust of taxis and the electric ozone scent of the streetcars that delivered dancers to the doors of the Marigold Ballroom, where jitterbuggers did their best to bring credence to the ballroom's famous sign: 'Never Grow Old Dancing at the Marigold.'"

Even neophytes to the jazz-blues-swing scene get a history lesson at once illuminating and accessible. Richmond records what the avatars of the era were doing while young Peggy made her way from a stint on a Fargo radio station to her first journey to Los Angeles. Predecessors and contemporaries are shadowed until their paths cross with the platinum-haired canary who would first gain fame as a singer for bandleader Benny Goodman.

Unfortunately, Richmond is just as capable of singing flat. However, a better editor would have excised Richmond's wearying repetitions, trimming the book by 50 pages. Consider this account of Lee's friendship with singer Bobby Darin: "For a brief time...Peg welcomed the frequent visits of another musician." Two sentences later, Richmond continues: "He was a frequent visitor for a brief time."

Despite such recurring distractions, Fever earns its indispensability with track-by-track reviews of the best of Lee's overwhelming, if erratic, output of 66 albums as well as vivid on-the-aisle accounts of her best (and worst) concerts. While the author occasionally oversells his subject, he doesn't shy from Miss Lee's four failed marriages nor her increasingly bizarre behavior: diva-like outbursts, weight gains, plastic surgeries, an embarrassing one-woman show meant to exorcise the ghosts of her childhood and, finally, years as a recluse in bed, albeit dressed to the nines, a silver shoebox of pills within reach.

Meticulously researched, Fever is an engaging chronicle of a life lived unwisely and too well. Songwriter, artist, sculptor, actress, and designer, Peggy Lee first and foremost was born to sing—and live—the blues.

Recombined families aren't rare in this age of one divorce for every marriage, but writers who write about them seem to be rare indeed. The subject of stepfamily is not one for the faint of heart, but editor Anne Burt has assembled a selection of writers brave enough to tackle it.

My Father Married Your Mother is a collection of 28 piercingly honest essays that explore a wide-ranging variety of perspectives on the subject of blended family. Burt drew the idea for the book from her own experience: Her second husband had an "amazing three-year-old-daughter" to bookend her own. A stepfamily made in heaven?  As Burt and the rest of the writers in My Father Married Your Mother reveal, there is no such beast.

Some talented big names are featured here, along with a slew of talented newcomers. Several of the writers are Mid-Hudson locals; David Goodwillie is from Woodstock, Dana Kinstler, from Tivoli. But what all share is the willingness to explore a frequently bitter, occasionally grace-filled, and across-the-board extraordinarily challenging experience.

There are stories here that represent every angle of the stepfamily equation, including a selection of stereotype-busting steps, like the stepfather who became a big part of Kate Christensen's life after he divorced her mother, and Leslie Morgan Steiner's stepmother, who did what no blood relative dared—she told Steiner to leave her abusive husband.

There are also the typical stepmothers-from-hell that Jacquelyn Mitchard, Roxana Robinson, and Susan Cheever humbly admit they probably became. Robinson explains the syndrome beautifully. "It seems that your stepdaughter is not a whole, separate person to you as anyone else's child would be. Your stepdaughter is a transparent form, an outline in space through which you can see Her Mother. Everything your stepdaughter does, her clothes, her haircut, her habits, her speech, all speak threateningly to you of that rival organization, The First Marriage."

There is no such thing as a normal stepfamily, says Sandra Tsing Loh, whose father's Chinese mail order bride helped her father drop his lifelong combative stance. In Sheila Kohler's "The Uses of Animals," it's a dog that bridges her relationship with her husband's children. In "My Papa Married Your Mama," Ted Rose's relationship with his former stepbrother provides a marriage's most lasting family bond.

Laugh-instead-of-cry humor abounds, as in Susan Davis's delight in discovering that, though many children of divorce suspect this of divorcing parents, one of hers was actually losing his mind. Lucia Nevai offers an agonizingly funny account of a stepfamily vacation that includes this advice: "Accept the inevitable—there will be a Big Fight that almost ruins the Second Marriage."

Hard-won wisdom can follow heartache, as shown in Candy J. Cooper's story of a Thanksgiving gathering: "Our contours were no longer defined by blood, but by loss and then love, by present, shading past, by ritual meeting ritual."

There is no sense of pulled punches here, or of voices muted by fear of being politically incorrect. There is instead actual trauma, real flying fur, genuine blood on the floor as these writers mine the subtle fissures caused by death, infidelity, and divorce. The authors are honest to the point of possible embarrassment—showing faces they'd probably rather not acknowledge, let alone reveal. The collective result is a deeply affecting anthology that tempts the reading of one more essay, and then just one more...

Kinship is where you find it, these stories say, and love can equal ties of blood. Families can arise from odd, unlikely material, and stepfamilies aren't made in heaven; they're forged here on earth (and sometimes, in neck-deep mud). Congratulations to the authors of this book. It takes enormous courage to become a blended family—and to write about one as well.

In August, even the most austere of readers may start to crave something perfect to stuff in a beach bag. If you're seeking a fun, engaging, and fast read, Alisa Kwitney's latest novel, Sex as a Second Language, is a great bet. In 2004, the Hudson Valley resident was dubbed one of Associated Press's Chick-Lit Breakout Authors for her novel The Dominant Blonde. Once again, Kwitney provides a girl-meets-boy story with the steam but without the sap.

In Sex as a Second Language, Kwitney introduces us to Kat Miner, almost 40, almost divorced, and for all intents and purposes a single mother. She's a former actress who can neither find a decent role nor keep her ex-husband's paws off her dwindling bank account. In the book's opening line, Kat declares to her group of somewhat catty girlfriends that she's planning on retiring from sex. (This is the kind of declaration that begs to be overturned; see the title for clues.) Kat doesn't hate men, she just doesn't trust them, she informs her girlfriends and her mother, who keep encouraging her to get over the breakup and hit the dating scene.

Kat has good reason to lack a little faith when it comes to men. Her father, a CIA operative, left home on a mission when she was 10 and never came back, or sent word. Her husband of 10 years, Logan, who co-starred with her on the popular soap opera "South of Heaven," has abandoned her to pursue younger women and his own career, halting any contact with their nine-year-old son, Dashiell. While Logan's acting career continues to soar, Kat has been forced to take a break from hers to raise their child. Now pushing middle age, struggling to pay the bills without child support, she can't find her way back in.

While her agent sends her on one self-effacing infomercial audition after another, Kat continues her single-mom juggling act, raising a sweet but unorthodox child and showing up for the adult English as a Second Language classes that she teaches to make ends meet. She finds herself enjoying these students from all corners of the world; two men in particular—a tall, shy Icelander named Magnus and a suave Frenchman named Luc—appear to take more than a student-teacher interest in her. As she's trying to fend off their advances, Kat receives a mysterious package from her father, written in code, telling her that he must speak with her, that she's being followed, and that she must be careful.

One of the students pursuing Kat is a CIA agent looking for her father, but she doesn't know which one. Nor can she figure out what to believe or who to trust. The one thing Kat does begin to discover with certainty is her own anger: toward friends who mistreat her; toward her mother, who's loving in ways that can suffocate; and toward her soon-to-be ex-husband, who never picks up the phone to call his son, but who, Kat discovers, has been sleeping with one of her best friends.

The pages turn fast, and the reader almost cheers Kat on as she tells the infomercial cameraman where to stuff it, berates her loathsome ex in a grocery store, and reluctantly takes the plunge to find both sex and love fulfilling once again.

This novel has great twists and turns, but mostly it has a compelling main character. No longer a "Desperate Housewives"-like flunky, Kat finds a greater sense of passion and purpose as she turns 40 than she was able to summon during her glitzy soap-opera prime with her flaky co-star-turned-husband-turned-loser.

Don't be fooled by the chick-lit tag: Kwitney has produced a delightful new book that reveals real women and real men, living and struggling to define themselves, and to find each other in everyday life. She's a great friend to bring to the beach.