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A judge has a role to play, sitting on a bench above the rest of the people in court, passing judgment on the messy results of other people’s life choices. But outside of court judges are people, with spouses, families, apartments, outside interests, and sometimes messy private lives. Fiona Mayes, the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s new novel “The Children Act,” is a High Court judge in the Family Division, responsible for dissolution of marriage, matrimonial proceedings, and proceedings relating to children. She’s used to rendering difficult decisions; one of them, which attracted a great deal of press attention, was whether to separate conjoined twins and cause the death of one, or allow them to die together. Fiona’s not quite as good with her own life. She and her husband, Jack, put off having children as they built their careers that the possibility is now long in the past. As the novel opens, Jack has announced that he would like to render their marriage an open one. Their marriage is cozy and sweet, he says, but “before I drop dead, I want one big passionate affair.”

Fiona doesn’t want to talk, she has work to do, important work, because a hospital wants to transfuse Adam, a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness with leukemia. As she engages with the case Fiona pushes away thoughts of her private life. Her work takes over, and McEwan shows how the work has shaped Fiona’s thoughts, which in turn has transformed her life. Fiona’s had multiple run-of-mill cases, of drug-using parents and neglected children, divorcing couples who’ve seen love turn to hate, and she manages them. It’s a nice scrim against which to view some of the social changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One of Fiona’s more recent cases is a divorce of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple, with a related issue of how secular their daughters’ schooling can be. Fiona twits the father, who has used female counsel in his attempt to limit his daughters’ schooling.

McEwan traces Fiona’s thoughts as she makes her various rulings, rendering the difficult legal and emotional issues clear and convincing. But Adam’s case is different for Fiona, and dangerous, because she lets her personal and professional lives cross. It’s a slip, that starts almost innocently, because Fiona wants to see Adam rather than relying on a social worker’s report, so she speaks with him in the hospital. He’s longing for intellectual contact with the wider world, and sees Fiona as his portal. Missing her husband, thinking of the children she might have had, Fiona is in a way seduced by Adam’s need, and connects with him through poetry and music.

The moment sets off a chain of messy consequences, and the novel explores a set of questions – why do we act the way we do? Why might a decision not to act be just as destructive as an action taken? For Fiona, the consequences are weighty, but at the novel’s end she is just beginning her accounting. The forgiveness McEwan suggests is forthcoming seems too easy for Fiona, too quick an ending, a jarring note in a hugely satisfying and deeply engaging novel.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

The path to true adulthood has twists, and life regularly forces a change of direction on you. And sometimes, when that happens, you need a break from even your best friend. Emily Gould’s novel “Friendship” describes the winding paths Bev Tunney and Amy Schein follow. Bev and Amy are friends, the kind of friends you find first as a teenager and then develop in college: the ones who support you through the first jobs, the bad boyfriends and messy breakups, and the fights with your parents. Eventually, if all goes according to plan, you go to their weddings and they come to yours, and then, very possibly, you grow apart. You have to: spouse, babies, jobs, they all take time.

What makes the Amy and Bev’s friendship, and the novel, so entertaining is that things aren’t going quite according to plan: both are approaching 30. Amy’s career appears to be on a downward trajectory, after some initial success. Bev’s has flatlined – she’s temping. Amy has a boyfriend and her own apartment; Bev has roommates. They do have time for adventure, and one of their adventures is agreeing to house-sit in the perfect upstate house, one that belongs to Sally and Jason. Sally and Jason’s relationship seems to be every bit as polished and presentable as their house, except for one thing: they have been unable to have children.

A pair of events force Amy and Bev out of their extended adolescence: Amy’s boyfriend, Sam, accepts a two-month residency in Spain and at about the same time, Bev realizes she’s pregnant after a one-night stand. (The standee is a perfectly nice guy, in Gould’s description, but Bev has no interest in him.) Bev considers first the morning-after pill (but passes once she realizes she can’t afford it, and figures the chances of pregnancy from one encounter are slim) and then decides first on an abortion and then, once Sally has said she will “help,” to keep the baby. Calculation of costs is not an area of strength for these two, though even Bev and Amy can see that such a loose arrangement will cause trouble. Bev decides to go ahead anyway. The consequences of that decision, for Bev, for Sally, for Amy, and for Bev and Amy’s friendship, play out through the rest of this satisfying novel.

“Friendship” is a nice parody of several aspects of modern life. Amy works at a startup blog, whose owners, a pair of siblings with two much money and time, send a lot of emails about things like SEO optimization that often contradict their emails from the week before. Sally and Jason, who at first seem secondary to the story, become central to it, offering Gould an opportunity to tweak overly precious design mavens: Jason is the editor-in-chief of “an international design magazine” who spends his free time in the basement building small scale replicas of his carefully-selected furniture. The tangling that results when Sally and Jason meet Bev and Amy becomes a catalyst that results in change for all four. “Friendship’s” ending is by no means a symmetrical outcome, but it is a satisfying one.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com or reach me via twitter @abowie917.

Mark Miodownik opens his entertaining and interesting book on materials science with a compelling anecdote: when he was a teenager, he was slashed with a steel razor during a mugging. At the emergency room, Miodownik relates, he was riveted by the staple holding two pages of a form together. It was his first encounter with the idea that a material, in this case steel, can have so many different uses. Then he noticed it everywhere: in the tip of the ballpoint pen, forming the body of the family’s car, and at the table – utensils are made of stainless steel. Miodownik grew up to be a materials scientist, and a good writer. The world is a better place for it, and so are we. “Stuff Matters” is a fascinating exploration of the forms, uses, evolution, and underlying structures of things – plates, tables, paper – we take for granted every day.

A photograph of Miodownik sitting on his roof deck at a table with a book and a cup of – perhaps it’s coffee? – provides the scaffolding for the book. Each chapter dissects an element (of the photograph, not – necessarily – a chemical element). The first chapter, Indomitable (it’s titled, like the rest, with an abstraction) discusses steel: where it comes from, its shape, and why it bends sometimes (think of a paper clip) while in other places it holds up buildings and bridges. One reason is dislocations: defects in the metal’s crystals that allow the metal crystals to change shape. Another is the content. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, but the proportions have to be just right: too much carbon and the steel becomes brittle. Miodownik carries the evolutionary tale from the Stone Age to the development of stainless steel (a layer of chromium oxide provides the protection).

Later chapters cover paper (“Trusted”), concrete (“Fundamental” and fascinating, especially Miodownik’s discussion of self-healing concrete and concrete cloth), plastic (“Imaginative”), glass (“Invisible”) and carbon (“Unbreakable”). Perhaps my favorite is about chocolate (“Delicious,” obviously). It’s as technically complex as steel or concrete, says Miodownik, and has taken several centuries to master.

Through sheer ingenuity, we have found a way to turn an unpromising tropical rainforest nut that tastes revolting into a cold, dark brittle solid designed for one purpose only: to melt in your mouth, flood your senses with warm, fragrant, bittersweet flavors, and ignite the pleasure centers of the brain. Despite our scientific understanding, words or formulae are not enough to describe it. It’s as close as we get, I would say, to a material poem. . .

There’s a subtle educational component underway here as well, slipped in the way some mothers slip vegetables into their children’s food. “The central idea behind materials science is that changes at these invisibly small scales impact a material’s behavior at the human scale.” In his final chapter, “Synthesis,” Miodownik ties the chemistry, physics, technology and philosophy together and compares animate and inanimate objects on a scale that moves from the human to the atomic. “[M]aterials are, in fact, composed of many different entities that combine to form the whole, and these different entities reveal themselves at different scales.” We can see tissues, gels, fibers, fabrics, and even crystals but not atoms or molecules. Yet by manipulating what we can see, we affect and change what we can’t. It’s a powerful lesson, and metaphor. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

I don’t normally link to the trailers for the books I review, but Miodownik’s excitement is quite entertaining and adds a touch of whimsy to the book. You can view it here.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

I’ve played it. And so have you, probably. But if you’re like me, you’ve given the mini-golf course and the people who run it almost no thought. That will change when you pick up June Melby’s entertaining and loving memoir of her family’s Tom Thumb Mini Golf course, “My Family and Other Hazards.”

Melby’s parents were schoolteachers in a small Iowa town. One summer they bought a mini golf course, and every summer after, starting when Melby was 11, they packed up their three girls and spent the summer running a Wisconsin mini golf. It was an unlikely purchase for a farm boy who became a teacher of physics and chemistry and a school librarian, and Melby wonders what her parents could have been thinking. It was lots and lots of fun, but running Tom Thumb required a great deal of hard work, and the three girls were required to do their share of it: selling tickets, selling snacks, painting, and covering up hazards when it rained.

Hazards. That’s the technical term for the obstacles on the course, and provide Melby’s work with its structure. Each of the 18 hazards has a name and a story, and each becomes a chapter. Each hazard also provides an abstraction that Melby uses as a jumping off point into the themes she explores: family, work and fun, love, among others.

Hole #5, for example is the Horse. It’s a child’s rocking horse, and the person who built the course cut off the springs and placed it there. “Duct tape holds the horse together. Also, fiberglass, paint, and cement on the back . . . “ Melby writes. “A forty-pound toddler would crack the thing now. It is an artifact, perhaps, something for a museum. Or a dumpster.” Hole # 5 is about history – mini golf was invented in the 1920s, an offshoot of real golf that an enterprising resort owner built, perhaps to keep the wives and children of his golfers entertained. It took off in the 1930s. Melby also explains the origins of Putt-Putt golf, if you’ve ever wondered (I have).

Melby’s father experimented with the hazards, designing and building new ones, trying out with colored lights, barrels, and other unexpected items. Melby and her sisters grew up on the course, where they learned to be independent, discovered the benefits of taking initiative, and observed a lot of boys. Their mother learned the hard way (intoxicants) to be specific about signage. They all study the intricacies of cotton candy, popcorn, and sno-cones. Melby zig-zags between her own and the family’s history, including, for example, a story of a gig doing stand-up at a nudist colony. And then comes Hole #16, the Weird Blue Pipe Thing, and Melby’s bewilderment at her reaction to her parents’ decision to sell the mini golf.

Melby’s narrative circles through her themes, and she touches on her parents and sisters, their lives, and her own. She’s particularly good at capturing a person or type of person. One day a week every summer a group of boys from the boys camp across the lake canoed over to play mini golf.

Forty to fifty boys carried their leftovers on paper plates to our dog, Bo. ‘Please don’t feed the dog,’ we would say, but each week they were different boys, and each was away from home and his own beloved dog, and each felt a need to spoil our dog instead; to tickle his ears and tell him he was good-looking, and see if he liked to eat cotton candy (just a little) or popcorn (quite a lot).

“My Family and Other Hazards” is exceptionally funny and well-written, and worth your time. One of my favorite bits is the way Melby captures the middle-child experience. What’s yours? Let us know that, or tell us about your favorite mini golf memory, in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

Over in the meadow, the old song tells us, live turtles, fish, rats, birds, bees, owls, frogs, and lizards, among the trees and flowers and rushes. All of them are dependent on smaller but still visible animals, insects mostly, including spiders, beetles, snails, and butterflies. They in turn are dependent on even smaller creatures, and so on down to the bacteria. We love the larger animals, most of them, and we need the plants to keep us alive. We understand the web that enmeshes us with the larger animals and plants, and even insects. We also regard many more of the insects as nuisances or worse, and are bent on destroying them without considering the consequences to us. Dave Goulson is a biologist, and he loves bugs for themselves – their life cycles, their evolutionary niches and challenges, their different reproductive strategies. But his larger point is that insects are necessary to the continuity of life – the growth and decay of plants – and we destroy them, and their habitat, at our peril.

Goulson is lucky enough to have bought a farmhouse and the surrounding land in a rural part of France, the Charente, and the first part of his book consists of an extended tour through the fauna (and some of the flora) surrounding or inside the house. There’s a chapter about newts, and another about flies. If you’re interested in why dragon flies often zip around locked together, or whether female mantises always eat their mates during copulation, there’s a chapter about that. Goulson describes an experiment to see whether males were willing meals as well as mates.

The results of our studies were pretty clear. At no point could we discern any sign that the male was a willing victim of cannibalism. Their approaches to females were cautious, and after mating they would either leap off and run for it or edge discreetly off her back, keeping well away from her front end . . . When confined with a female in a simple, undecorated cage, the males were more likely to be consumed, usually without mating, than when there were plentiful twigs and leaves. When confined with a hungry female, their chances were not great.

Food comes first, before reproduction, at least for the mantis.

In the second part, Goulson focuses on the role of insects, particularly bees, in pollination, “a web of deception, competition and robbery” that gives rise to a great diversity of life. Here Goulson touches on some of the ground he covered in his earlier book “A Sting in the Tale,” reviewed here. As in the first part, each chapter begins with a diary note that includes the time of the day’s run and the species he spotted. It’s an attempt to recapture the charming persona evident in the first book, and wears a little thin – better to skip the lists and focus on the epigraphs, which capture Goulson’s sense of humor.

It’s in the third and final section that the book comes together, because that’s where Goulson makes his argument: the world is full of a huge number of things, all of them interrelated in ways that we don’t at all understand, for all our ability to decode the genome of any of them. Plants and animals, fungi, viruses and bacteria, most of which we haven’t even identified, do not live in isolation, he says. “Their lives, and ours, are inextricably woven together. We don’t know how it all works- and yet we are thoughtlessly picking it apart.” One of his examples is disappearing bees, more formally known as Colony Collapse Disorder. One contributor to that disaster seems to be a new kind of pesticide, neonicotinoids, applied in a new kind of way – to the seed, which then incorporates the pesticide into the plant. The pesticide stays around long enough to allow the plant to grow, but then deconstructs by the time of harvest. The manufacturers produced studies showing that bees absorbed doses too low to be lethal. But longer term studies showed that bees that fed on those crops produced fewer queens, and with fewer queens there will be fewer bees. The European Union suspended the use of three neonicotinoids in 2013, and the EPA has restricted their use in this country as well. Writ large, and in combination with climate change, Colony Collapse Disorder and similar collapses of insect populations could mean a very different world for our grandchildren.

What’s your take on this thoughtful book? Of if you’d rather, your favorite insect? (This reviewer is partial to the death watch beetles.) Let us know in the comments.

Grace Reinhart has it all. Her loving husband, Jonathan Sachs, is a pediatric oncologist dedicated to his patients. Her well-behaved 12-year old son, Henry, attends a competitive private school and studies violin with an aging middle-European exile with high standards. Grace and her family live in a charming Upper East Side apartment, and her therapy practice is thriving. Her relationship book, “You Should Have Known,” is about to be published and is generating enough interest that bookers from national talk shows have been calling.

In the first third of the novel we learn all this, and a bit more. Grace misses her mom, who died when she was in college. Grace was very young when she married, only 21, and she hadn’t known Jonathan very long. She doesn’t have the best relationship with her father and his second wife, who is very formal. She is no longer in touch with her best friend from growing up and misses her. Jonathan grew up in a dysfunctional family and has no interest in regular contact with his parents and brother, and Grace barely notices that most of the rest of her friends have fallen away. Why should she? She has to take care of her husband and family and practice. So it’s no surprise, really, that Grace ignores a loose end here, a hole there, even as the signs that something is amiss accumulate. Then, over the course of one awful week, Grace’s comfortable life collapses. Psychologist: heal thyself.

Grace has utterly misjudged her husband who may, she learns, have committed a dreadful crime. She has misjudged her father, her friend, and, most of all, her capacity for judgment. The second and third parts of the novel follow Grace as she explores her faults and copes with the results, both large – she and Henry leave their New York apartment to escape the media circus – and well, large, as she resets most of the relationships in her life. (Fortunately for her most of the important people are loving and forgiving.) Grace does live in a state of grace, as almost everyone she has wronged is ready to forgive her, often just as she comes to the realization that, once again, everything she thought she knew was wrong. Perhaps as a result Grace remains confident even as she learns she is as fallible as her patients.

Jonathan remains offstage throughout the novel, an interesting authorial choice, as it means that we have to trust that Grace is becoming more and more reliable even as her creator slowly reveals how unreliable she has been since the start. It’s to Korelitz’s credit that she pulls this reversal off persuasively. Much of the novel recounts Grace’s inner life — this reader’s only complaint is that perhaps it’s recounted in too much detail – as Grace learns what she has missed in the 18 years of her marriage. She can’t get the time back, but she can make up for it, and that’s what she’s doing as the novel comes to an end.

Take “You Should Have Known” with you on vacation or save it for a long plane ride. And let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.