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Reviews

Reviews

by Barbara Delinsky - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Caroline MacAfee is a skilled carpenter, and her daughter Jamie is a talented architect. Together they are the faces of “Gut It!,” a home renovation series on local public television. But when Caroline is told the network wants her daughter to replace her as host, she is devastated. For Jamie, life changes overnight when, soon after learning of the host shift, her father and his new wife die in a car accident that orphans their two-year-old son. Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they've built their lives around suddenly need revising.

by Michael Callahan - Fiction, Historical Fiction

For a small-town girl with a big dream in 1955, there is no address more glamorous than New York’s Barbizon Hotel. Together, three young ladies embark on a journey of self-discovery that will take them from the penthouse salons of Park Avenue to the Beat scene of Greenwich Village to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier --- and into the arms of very different men who will alter their lives forever.

by James Anderson - Fiction, Mystery, Romance

Ben Jones is on the verge of losing his small trucking company when he is drawn into a love affair with a mysterious woman named Claire. Her appearance, seemingly out of nowhere, reignites a decades-old tragedy at a roadside café referred to by the locals as The Never-Open Desert Diner. As he faces bankruptcy and the possible loss of everything that matters to him, he finds himself at the heart of a horrific crime that was committed 40 years earlier and now threatens to destroy the lives of those left in its wake.

by Mette Ivie Harrison - Fiction, Mystery

One cold winter night, a young wife and mother named Carrie Helm disappears, leaving behind everything she owns. Carrie’s husband, Jared, claims his wife has always been unstable and that she has abandoned the family. Linda Wallheim, a devout Mormon and the wife of a bishop, doesn’t trust him. As Linda snoops in the Helm family’s circumstances, she becomes convinced that Jared has murdered his wife and painted himself as a wronged husband.

by Jason Schmidt - Nonfiction, Young Adult 14+

Jason Schmidt wasn’t surprised when he came home one day during his junior year of high school and found his father, Mark, crawling around in a giant pool of blood. Things like that had been happening a lot since Mark had been diagnosed with HIV, three years earlier. A LIST OF THINGS THAT DIDN'T KILL ME is a funny, disturbing memoir full of brutal insights and unexpected wit that explores the question: How do you find your moral center in a world that doesn't seem to have one?

written by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann - Fiction

Gillian is content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital completely disfigured. Only slowly, after many twists and turns, does she put her life back together and reconnects with a love interest of the past who becomes a possible future --- or so it seems.

by Craig K. Collins - Nonfiction

In this beautifully written and powerful memoir, author Craig K. Collins ushers readers down a remarkable path --- one that wends from the American frontier to present-day suburbia. Along the way, he explores the meaning of a history --- of his family’s and his country’s --- that is infused with the culture of the gun. Stops include an Indian massacre at Bad Axe, the siege of Vicksburg, the slaughter of buffalo in Montana, and the discovery of gold in a remote Nevada canyon.

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.