"The Universe Versus Alex Woods ($16) [is] highly, highly underrated — I've encountered about a half dozen people who also read it, and I've been recommending it all over for ages (all the others I talked to loved it as much as I did.) Absolutely amazing. One of those books that's impossible to explain without it sounding totally insane . . . 'Young English boy with psychic mother, who is the second person in history struck by a meteorite, has an inauspicious encounter with a disabled, pacifist American Vietnam veteran with a passion for Kurt Vonnegut, and eventually winds up detained at border security with an urn and a lot of pot.' There's no way it should work as a coherent story, and yet somehow it does, and it's relatable and dryly hilarious and incredibly poignant — the book handles some very heavy issues in a very mature way. A bildungsroman like nothing else I've ever read, or probably will ever read. Everyone should read this book, and it frustrates me immensely that so few people have." — Kylie M.