Skip to main content

Reviews

Reviews

by Charlee Fam - Fiction

Aubrey Glass has a collection of potential suicide notes just in case. And now, five years --- and five notes --- after leaving her hometown, Rachel is the one who goes and kills herself. There’s a voicemail from Aubrey’s former friend, left only days before her death, that Aubrey can’t bring herself to listen to --- and worse, a macabre memorial-turned-high-school reunion that promises the opportunity to catch up with everyone…including the man responsible for everything that went wrong between Aubrey and Rachel.

by Héctor Tobar - Biography, Nonfiction

When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped 33 miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking 69 days. The entire world watched what transpired above-ground during the grueling and protracted rescue, but the saga of the miners' experiences below the Earth's surface --- and the lives that led them there --- has never been heard until now.

written by Diogo Mainardi, translated by Margaret Jull Costa - Nonfiction

THE FALL’s 424 short passages match the number of steps taken by Diogo Mainardi's son Tito as he walks, with great difficulty, alongside his father through the streets of Venice, the city where a medical mishap during Tito's birth left him with cerebral palsy. As they make their way toward the hospital where both their lives changed forever, Mainardi begins to draw on his knowledge of art and history, seeking to better explain a tragedy that was entirely avoidable.

by Ann Hood - Fiction, Historical Fiction

AN ITALIAN WIFE begins in turn-of-the-century Italy, when 14-year-old Josephine Rimaldi is forced into an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know or love who is about to depart for America, where she later joins him. Bound by tradition, Josephine gives birth to seven children. The last, Valentina, is conceived in passion, born in secret and given up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for her lost child, keeping her secret even as her other children go off to war, get married and make their own mistakes.

by A.J. Betts - Fiction, Young Adult 14+

“When I was little I believed in Jesus and Santa, spontaneous combustion, and the Loch Ness monster. Now I believe in science, statistics, and antibiotics.” So says 17-year-old Zac Meier during a long, grueling leukemia treatment in Perth, Australia. A loud blast of Lady Gaga alerts him to the presence of Mia, the angry, not-at-all-stoic cancer patient in the room next door. Once released, the two near-strangers can’t forget each other, even as they desperately try to resume normal lives.