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Reviews

Reviews

by Mai Nguyen - Fiction, Humor

Vietnamese refugees Debbie and Phil Tran have built a comfortable life for themselves in Toronto with their family nail salon. But when an ultra-glam chain salon opens across the street, their world is rocked. Complicating matters further, their landlord has jacked up the rent, and it seems only a matter of time before they lose their business and everything they’ve built. They enlist the help of their daughter, Jessica, who has just returned home after a messy breakup and a messier firing. Together with their son, Dustin, and niece, Thuy, they devise some good old-fashioned sabotage. Relationships are put to the test as the line between right and wrong gets blurred. Debbie and Phil must choose: Do they keep their family intact or fight for their salon?

by Marisa de los Santos - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Cornelia Brown is reeling from a terrifying act of violence when she gets word that her mother, Ellie, has been badly injured in an accident. She returns to Virginia, to the house she grew up in, and in the weeks that follow, she watches her mother struggle to recover. In grief-stricken tones, Ellie begs Cornelia to bring her the Northern Lights, and despite her confusion at this mysterious plea, Cornelia vows to do so. With the help of her prickly sister, Ollie, Cornelia embarks on a mission to piece together the lost years of their mother’s life. Their quest takes them to unexpected places and into the worlds of strangers whose lives Ellie touched and irrevocably changed.

by Elliot Page - Memoir, Nonfiction

“Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back. With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent. Until enough was enough.

by Bronwyn Fischer - Fiction

Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles, watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone, whoever that might be. And then she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. She begins spending more and more of her time at Nora’s perfect, tidy home in her beautiful, quiet world. Natalie lies to her floormates about her absence, inventing a fake off-campus boyfriend, and carefully protects this sacred, adult relationship. This only deepens her obsession, even as she comes to suspect that Nora is hiding something.

by Audrey Bellezza and Emily Harding - Comedy, Fiction, Humor, Romance

Emma Woodhouse has lived 23 years in her tight-knit Upper East Side neighborhood with very little to distress her…that is, until her budding matchmaking hobby results in her sister’s marriage --- and subsequent move downtown. Now, Emma must start her final year of grad school grappling with an entirely new emotion: boredom. So when she meets Nadine, a wide-eyed Ohio transplant, Emma not only sees a potential new friend but a new project. If only her overbearing neighbor, George Knightley, would get out of her way. The only thing that frustrates Knightley more than a corked whiskey is his childhood friend, Emma. But despite his gripes, Knightley can’t help but notice that the girl next door is a woman now…one who he suddenly can’t get out of his head.

by Brandon Taylor - Fiction

In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” As each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives --- a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

by Melissa Coss Aquino - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls --- more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen’s upbringing. Durka is more than a beneficent force in their Bronx neighborhood, though. She’s also the leader of an underground drug empire, a larger-than-life matriarch who understands the vital importance of taking what power she can in a world too often ruled by violent men. So, when Durka dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, Carmen and Grace’s lives are thrown into chaos.

by TJ Klune - Fantasy, Fiction

In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees live three robots --- fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labeled “HAP,” he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio --- a past spent hunting humans. When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic’s assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission…or worse, reprogramming.

by Ramona Ausubel - Fiction

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and their single mother might not be so happy either. Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, 4,000-year-old baby mammoth. This sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world --- or at least this family.

by Stephanie Marie Thornton - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

1792. As the author of A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN, Mary Wollstonecraft refuses to bow to society’s conventions and instead supports herself with her pen until an illicit love affair challenges her every belief about romance and marriage. When she gives birth to a daughter and is stricken with childbed fever, Mary fears it will be her many critics who recount her life’s extraordinary odyssey. 1818. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley struggles to balance an ever-complicated marriage with motherhood while nursing twin hopes that she might write something of her own one day and discover the truth of her mother’s unconventional life. Mary’s journey will unlock her mother’s secrets, all while leading to her own destiny as the groundbreaking author of FRANKENSTEIN.