Marina’s annual summer visit home to the island of Pag in Croatia has turned into an extended stay. Marina has a lot to figure out, and home seems like the place to do it, if indeed Pag is still home.

Kristin Vukovic’s debut novel is a mouthwatering platter of culture, history and the everlasting struggle for balance between tradition and progress. “The Cheesemaker’s Daughter” is told from Marina’s perspective on Pag as Croatia counts down the days before officially joining the European Union in 2013.

After moving to New York as a refugee from the Yugoslav wars, Marina built a life in the bustling city. But her job is unfulfilling and her co-workers unfriendly; her husband is inattentive and unfaithful; and with her trouble having children, it seems like that life she built is wearing down to nothing.

There are plenty of distractions for Marina back on Pag, including a struggling family cheese business and a rival cheesemaker whose son, Marina’s first love, could be her family’s reputational ruin if he keeps bumping into her and sending sparks flying between them.

Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing push and pull between the characters over gender issues — when to jostle for parity and when to respect tradition and leave it be.

Dedicated to the author’s Croatian grandparents who made America home, the novel is culturally rich. Vukovic takes us on a tour of Croatian history and cheesemaking that requires no prior knowledge of either. She takes care to explain everything in due time, slowly introducing and building upon the religion, traditions, food and music Marina experiences.

“The Cheesemaker’s Daughter” is a quiet but commanding debut. It’s not the kind of book that leaves you on the edge of your seat needing to know what happens next, but it did leave me yearning to be back in that world after I finished the book. — Donna Edwards, Associated Press

Alison Espach is a master of taking the seemingly mundane and creating moments that transfix. Take, for instance, the beginning of “The Wedding People,” her latest book. Phoebe has arrived at the Cornwall Inn in Newport, Rhode Island, and she is waiting in line to check in, “the kind of line she expected to see at the airport, and not at a Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean.”

Then Phoebe realizes the many people in line and milling about the lobby are part of a wedding: “It’s unsettling, like in that movie ‘The Birds’ her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage.”

Phoebe eavesdrops on conversations and mentally catalogs the guests, gathering information as if she were an anthropologist dropped into the middle of a rarely studied human ritual. And it is that in a way, because interaction of any kind is overwhelming to her in the immediate aftermath of COVID-19, among other recent traumas.

“Removed” is the best way to describe Phoebe, who is not a member of the wedding — the only person besides hotel staff who isn’t — and has arrived, luggageless, for a decidedly different reason. Then she and the bride end up in the elevator together, upending everything.

What’s so mesmerizing about the level of detail in Espach’s work is that it feels less like reading than being a fly on the wall. You’re always observing but vaguely unaware that a plot is humming along below the surface.

Espach’s characters never hold back, but that warts-and-all approach is leavened with unexpected humor. In “Wedding People,” it’s the kind of tragicomedy only a wedding can conjure, especially an over-the-top extravaganza that is slated to last six days.

It’s bound to be a train wreck, and you’re invited. — Maren Longbella, Minneapolis Star Tribune