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Reviews

Reviews

by Emily Giffin - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Growing up, Josie and Meredith Garland shared a close relationship. But when tragedy strikes their family, they grow apart. Fifteen years later, Josie and Meredith are following different paths. Josie is a first grade teacher with the yearning to become a mother. Meredith is a successful attorney, married and raising a four-year-old-daughter, yet questions whether this is the life she truly desires. As the anniversary of their tragedy looms, they must confront the issues that divide them and also come to terms with their own choices.

by Elisha Cooper - Memoir, Nonfiction

Elisha Cooper spends his mornings writing and illustrating children's books, his afternoons playing with his two daughters. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoë's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes. In FALLING, Elisha writes about what it took for him and his wife to preserve a sense of normalcy and joy in their daughters' lives; how the family emerged from this experience profoundly changed; and how we are all transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love.

by Ramona Ausubel - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life. Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman.

by Emma Cline - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park and is immediately caught by their freedom and dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, she is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic and thrilling --- a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.

by Lisa Jewell - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years, and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really? On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her 13-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?

by Liz Kay - Comedy, Fiction, Romance

When Stacey Lane writes a feminist take on FRANKENSTEIN, she never imagines it will catch the eye of unbelievably sexy Hollywood star Tommy DeMarco. Tommy’s passion for her book --- and for her --- threatens to turn her life upside down, or maybe right-side up. From their first poolside meeting the two are set on a collision course as they go about making the book into a movie, making each other crazy and making love, if only in secret. 

by Jennifer Haigh - Fiction

Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism, or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile, his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling --- until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives.

by Robin Wasserman - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

On Halloween in 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods and disappears. Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand. In the wake of this incident, bright but lonely Hannah Dexter is befriended by the charismatic, seductive Lacey Champlain. Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image and unleashing a fierce defiance that neither girl expected. But as Lacey gradually lures Dex away from her safe life into a feverish spiral of obsession, rebellion and ever greater risk, an unwelcome figure appears on the horizon --- and Lacey’s secret history collides with Dex’s worst nightmare.

by Mark Kurlansky - History, Nonfiction

Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay.

by Lydia Millet - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

SWEET LAMB OF HEAVEN is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who has just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists --- and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined.