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Reviews

Reviews

by Jennifer duBois - Fiction

Talk show host Matthew Miller has made his fame by shining a spotlight on the most unlikely and bizarre secrets of society, exposing them on live television in front of millions of gawking viewers. However, the man behind “The Mattie M Show” remains a mystery --- both to his enormous audience and to those who work alongside him every day. But when the high school students responsible for a mass shooting are found to be devoted fans, Mattie is thrust into the glare of public scrutiny, seen as the wry, detached herald of a culture going downhill and going way too far. Soon, the secrets of Mattie’s past as a brilliant young politician in a crime-ridden New York City begin to push their way to the surface.

by Armando Lucas Correa - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Berlin, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the south of France, where the widow of an old friend of her husband’s has agreed to take her in. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape. There, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Once in Haute-Vienne, her brief respite is interrupted by the arrival of Nazi forces, and Amanda finds herself in a labor camp where once again she must make a heroic sacrifice.

by Joanne Ramos - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity --- and all of it for free. In fact, you’re paid big money to stay here. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else. Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a “Host” at Golden Oaks --- or the Farm, as residents call it. But now pregnant, fragile and consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside. Yet she cannot leave the Farm, or she will lose the life-changing fee she’ll receive on the delivery of her child.

by Jennifer McMahon - Fiction, Mystery, Supernatural Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on 44 acres of rural land where they will build the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate into the house --- objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the building project progresses, the house will become a place of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward unimaginable danger.

by Jennifer Cody Epstein - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother, Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava's father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war’s final months? But now Ilse’s ashes have arrived from Germany, and, with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother’s letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew.

by Angie Kim - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident. A powerful showdown unfolds as the story moves across characters who are all maybe keeping secrets, hiding betrayals. Chapter by chapter, we shift alliances and gather evidence: Was it the careless mother of a patient? Was it the owners, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? Could it have been a protester, trying to prove the treatment isn’t safe?

by Erin Somers - Fiction, Humor

When June Bloom, an assistant on the late-night comedy show "Stay Up with Hugo Best," runs into Hugo himself at an open mic following his unexpected retirement, she finds herself fielding a surprising invitation: Hugo asks June to come to his mansion in Greenwich for the long Memorial Day weekend. “No funny business,” he insists. June, in need of a job and money, but harboring the remains of a childhood crush on the charming older comedian and former role model, is confident she can handle herself. She accepts. As the weekend unfolds and the enigmatic Hugo gradually reveals appealingly vulnerable facets to his personality, their dynamic proves to be much more complicated and less predictable than June imagined.

by Susan Choi - Fiction

In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed --- or untoyed with --- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls --- until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside down.

by Mary Norris - Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel, Writing

Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen and bestselling author of BETWEEN YOU & ME, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In GREEK TO ME, she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. GREEK TO ME is filled with Norris’ memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine --- and more than a few Greek men.

by Miriam Toews - Fiction, Women's Fiction

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of them has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, these women --- all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country in which they live --- have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known, or should they dare to escape?