Also of interest...in colorful kin

Great Expectations

by Robert Gottlieb (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

Profiles of Charles Dickens abound, but no other biography “has yet gone so deeply” into the great novelist’s career as a father, said Michael Gorra in TheDailyBeast.com. Though Dickens was “one of the world’s greatest writers on childhood,” he was a less than patient parent, regarding many of his 10 children as disappointments. Even so, two of them wrote memoirs lauding their father, underscoring a key Gottlieb point: that a true charismatic often casts a spell on his own circle.

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The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg (Grand Central, $25)

Sixty-year-old Edie Middlestein’s slide into life-threatening food addiction is depicted with “unfailing emotional accuracy” in Jami Attenberg’s “largely brilliant” third novel, said Julie Orringer in The New York Times. Attenberg alternates between nine different perspectives in telling how a Jewish family in suburban Chicago reacts to the decline of their matriarch. The “many engaging stories in play” clutter the narrative somewhat, but all add up to a complex study of a flawed but loving brood.

Brothers

by George Howe Colt (Scribner, $30)

George Howe Colt has written “the book on sibling rivalry,” said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. In a series of “sometimes jaw-dropping mini-biographies,” the onetime National Book Award finalist walks us through a history of fraternal relations from the heartening (the Marx Brothers) to the ugly (actors Edwin and John Wilkes Booth). Colt intersperses memoir throughout, and offers just enough uplift “to prevent his book from being held up as an argument for only children.”

The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria (Harper Perennial, $15)

Despite some rough edges, Sophia Al-Maria’s new memoir offers “much to beguile you,” said Marie Arana in The Washington Post. The child of a devoutly Muslim Saudi Bedouin and a wannabe Rockette from rural Washington state, Al-Maria has chronicled her parents’ ill-fated marriage as well as her own upbringing “with an undeniable urgency.” As she shuttles between American and Qatari cultures, she seems to be “vacillating between worlds that are never entirely her own.”