Weekend picks for book lovers

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include the new novel by best-selling author Jojo Moyes and The Last Magazine, a journalism satire by Michael Hastings, who was just 33 when he died in a car wreck.

One Plus One by Jojo Moyes (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 368 pp.; fiction)

Jess is a single mum living with her daughter and stepson along England's southern coast. Since her deadbeat husband, Marty, decamped two years earlier to his mother's house, Jess has supported their daughter, Tanzie, and her Goth stepson, Nicky, by working as a house cleaner and a barmaid at a local pub.

Tanzie, 10, is a maths (that's Brit-speak) whiz and is offered a scholarship to a top private school, but even with the scholarship, the school fees are beyond Jess' reach. When Tanzie's teacher tells her of a Maths Olympiad with prize money, Jess packs up the children and their large and malodorous dog, Norman, into an aging Rolls-Royce that Jess' ex bought on eBay, and they head for the contest in Scotland.

Jess' trip is quickly aborted by her lack of driving skills and uninsured vehicle. Her unlikely rescuer is Ed Nicholls, a software developer banished from the company he co-founded after he tried to get rid of a clingy girlfriend by offering her an illegal stock tip. Ed also happens to be one of Jess' housecleaning clients, whom she rescued when he drank himself into a self-pitying stupor at the bar where she works.

USA TODAY says: * * * * out of four. "One Plus One adds up to a delightful summer read, where the whole is greater than the sum of its charming parts."

The Last Magazine by Michael Hastings (Blue Rider, 336 pp.; fiction)

Posthumous, semi-autobiographical satire narrated by a smart, ironic young writer and fact-checker named Michael Hastings. It's set at a magazine like Newsweek during the rush to war in Iraq.

USA TODAY says: * * *. "If journalism is best read as the first draft of history, then The Last Magazine can be read as a not-fully-polished draft of what Hastings might have done as a novelist. Sadly, it's also his last draft."

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (Grand Central, 512 pp.; fiction)

Story of Lillian Dunkle, who flees a Russian shtetl as a child for the slums of the Lower East Side circa 1913, only to climb to the top of an ice-cream empire.

USA TODAY says: * * *. "Ice Cream Queen is polished yet pointed, deceptively cheery but shaded in the sinister — an upside-down, funhouse treat."

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (Knopf ; 272 pp., non-fiction)

Memoir about the time Rakoff, then an aspiring young writer, took an entry-level job at a renowned literary agency whose star client was J.D. Salinger.

USA TODAY says: * * *. "The memoir is touching, and it's easy to empathize with …Rakoff."

Brutal Youth by Anthony Breznican (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 410 pp.; fiction)

Debut novel set in a morally and physically decaying Catholic high school in the Pittsburgh area in the early 1990s; story follows three freshmen and involves nasty hazing ritual.

USA TODAY says: * * *. "Crackling-good entertainment."

Contributing reviewers: Patty Rhule, Bob Minzesheimer, Olivia Barker, Roberta Bernstein, Kevin Nance