You don’t have to share Yo’s literary ambitions to understand her witchy charm. Julia Alvarez, author of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In The Time of the Butterflies,” has a nearly irresistible way of portraying her poet-subject. Each chapter of this book is told from a different person’s point of view, as if they all sat down with a tape recorder after a couple of drinks and uncorked their hidden agitations. Yo’s mother, her frou-frou cousin Lucinda, the caretakers at Yo’s old family place in the D.R. and a number of interested men are invited to spill the beans. Even her crazy stalker, a man she doesn’t know, gets to have his say. They all believe she’s selfish, yet undoubtedly trusting and kind. When Yo’s (very personal) books get popular, though, these same people find themselves naked to the world, and they hate it. Still, they forgive her, because Yo has a knack for reconnecting people to the parts of themselves they’ve forgotten. She might even have the same effect on you.

Alvarez’s style is blunt, but so light and eager it’s absolutely captivating. Her eye for psychological detail can move the heart. And she’s funny, too. Just one snag: Is writing such a sacred calling that it justifies Yo’s casual destructiveness? At this book’s least convincing moments, Alvarez comes close to saying yes. It’s when she lets you consider her subject as a small, disobedient planet in the human galaxy that “Yo!” sheds the most light.

Adams is best known for two earlier books, “Watership Down” and “The Plague Dogs,” and for the films made from them. (He is also the author of “Traveler,” a moving and perceptive biography of Robert E. Lee’s legendary war horse.) None of these quite convey the striking and often scary atmosphere he brings to this new collection, a full 20 years after we last heard from him.

Aside from the rabbits’ vocabulary, which can be distracting, there’s nothing prissy or inconsequential here. Adams clearly understands a great deal about rabbits, surely among God’s poor because, as the old saw goes, He made so many of them. Rabbits are not only prey to what Adams calls “the thousand enemies,” but to the cruel whims of the seasons. But few people can conjure up weather like Adams can, and hardly anybody has ever made an overgrown field in England sound so gorgeous and full of promise.

Rabbits’ lives don’t really have a point to them, not in any way people understand. Adams concerns himself instead with aspects of destiny that have to do with mysticism and nature — stuff we think we understand but really don’t. The pure, unfamiliar feelings evoked in “The Story of the Three Cows” and in the gory “The Hole in the Sky” — just two of the stories here — persist for quite a while after you’ve finished reading them. How often do you get to step inside a wounded rabbit’s delirium, or taste “the blessing of the years,” a small animal’s dreams of youth? And a laugh-out-loud nonsense yarn by a rabbit named Speedwell, with its crocus boats and sky-blue horses, may be the best carrot of all.

Whatever direction you approach Roiphe from, she’s definitely a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who’s absolutely nuts about children. This book, her eleventh, is about what happens when her two causes mix. Drawing from personal experience, academic writing and a feminist canon that spans much of this century, “Fruitful” describes how the women’s movement continues to sell mothers out. “We’re shooting ourselves in the collective foot,” she writes, and even radical readers will be forced, at times, to agree.

Roiphe rounds up some of the headiest precepts of women’s lib and holds them up to her struggle to do right by her own impossible kids. It’s great being freed from the picture-perfect domestic roles of the ’50s, she argues, but women headed down the wrong road soon after that. Now we realize that refusing to accept the pleasures of mothering may be one of the great sins of our time. It is a self-denial that sometimes adds up to spiritual suicide. Children suffered. So did men.

Roiphe’s unconventional ideas about how to redress society’s wrongs can be off-putting. Furthermore, she chains clauses together like someone muttering to herself. But from this account, her childraising trials — particularly at the hands of her chaos-causing, lie-telling, intravenous drug-sampling eldest daughter — could push anyone over the edge. How could someone burdened by Roiphe’s expansive conscience and ballooning guilt be so consistently crazy for yet another baby? The plaintive gasps of her heart seem unbidden, until we learn that the difficult daughter has HIV. This mother’s still not right all the time, but she wins over her witnesses.

Oscar Wilde wrote: “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” As good a mother as Roiphe has tried to be, her daughters may never forgive her. But, God help me, I do.

Now 31, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang (her first name is from an ancestral poem; her middle from her mother’s love of Tolstoy) was a Chinese studies major at Harvard when her great aunt’s name popped up in a textbook. That great aunt, Chang Yu-i — who had been, among other things, a bank president — was born into an illustrious Shanghai family in 1900 and died in 1988. Her fate took its first unusual turn when she was three. One of her brothers was so moved by her screams when her feet were being bound that he persuaded Yu-i’s mother to let the little girl go. “Sheng jing bing. Crazy, my amah said about Mama’s decision,” Chang Yu-i recalled during one of her hundreds of interviews with the author. Translation: Who would marry a girl like that?

That someone did was not a de facto blessing. Chang Yu-i got funneled into a very fast part of the stream of progress, and found that though she was too modern for most of China, she wasn’t modern enough for Hsu Chi-Mo, her soon-to-be-famous poet husband. Pregnant for the second time, she followed him all the way to Oxford, where he ditched her for one of a series of racier candidates. At 22, she made history as the first Chinese wife to have a Western-style divorce.

In the ensuing struggle simply to keep going, Yu-i had to learn, in her words, to stand on her own two feet. And that’s how Pang-Mei Chang found her: in an apartment in New York, oceans away from her past and ready, shyly at first, to talk. That this lady’s been afforded such a splendid forum for her life story might have pleased her. It’s certainly more than an ordinary pleasure for us.

French’s prose is so light-footed and pleasing that it’s tempting to overlook the imprint of fossilized indignation that shades this work. One old-guard feminist literary ethic has it that society is essentially deaf to the truth about how women make their way in this world. “I had a vague sense that women’s lives lay untouched, unseen, like tiny violets covered with snow. No one knew they were there, and no one cared, really,” Hermione muses, while the reader wonders whether French has been living under a washtub since her novel “The Women’s Room” came out. And with George so consistently boring and remote, the only mystery is how the author will pull it all together in the end.

Indeed, French knows a lot about the exquisite agonies of being jerked around, but the nuts and bolts of dependency seem to confuse her. To express female neediness, she has Hermione issue serial lunch invitations. “I met a man,” the heroine whispers to each eager confidant, who invariably slams his or her wine glass down on the table as if the second coming had just been announced. Such cinematic gullibility may be commonplace in French’s party circuit. There are probably a lot of fish in her world riding bicycles, too.