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Reviews

Reviews

by Therese Walsh - Fiction

After their mother's probable suicide, sisters Olivia and Jazz take steps to move on with their lives. Jazz, logical and forward-thinking, decides to get a new job, but spirited, strong-willed Olivia --- who can see sounds, taste words and smell sights --- is determined to travel to the remote setting of their mother's unfinished novel to lay her spirit properly to rest.

by Elizabeth Blackwell - Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fantasy, Historical Fiction

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told. And so begins Elise Dalriss’s story. When she hears her great-granddaughter recount a minstrel’s tale about a beautiful princess asleep in a tower, it pushes open a door to the past, a door Elise has long kept locked. For Elise was the companion to the real princess who slumbered --- and she is the only one left who knows what actually happened so many years ago.

by Helen Peppe - Nonfiction

With everything happening on Helen Peppe’s backwoods Maine farm --- ferocious sibling rivalry, rock-bottom poverty, feral male chauvinism, sex in the hayloft --- life was out of control, even for the animals. Despite the chaos, in telling her family’s story, Peppe manages deadpan humor, an unerring eye for the absurd, and a touching compassion for her utterly overwhelmed parents.

by Julianna Baggott - Fiction, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Inside the Dome, Partridge has taken his father's place as leader of the Pures. His intent had been to bring down the Dome from the inside with the help of the secret resistance force led by Partridge's former teacher, Glassings. But from his new position of power, things don't seem quite as clear. Outside the Dome, Pressia and Bradwell continue piecing together the clues left to them by their parents from the time before the detonations. Can they still trust their friend and ally, Partridge, to see their plan through? Or will a new war begin?

by Jenny Offill - Fiction

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation. As they confront an array of common catastrophes, the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it.

by Wendy Webb - Fiction, Gothic, Suspense, Thriller

Just as Julia Bishop’s life is collapsing around her, a stranger appears on her doorstep with an intriguing job offer --- he asks Julia to be a companion for his elderly mother, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist Amaris Sinclair, whom Julia has always admired...and who the whole world thinks is dead. Julia jumps at the chance for a fresh start. But when she arrives at Havenwood, the Sinclairs’ magnificent, centuries-old estate in the middle of the wilderness near Lake Superior, she begins to suspect her too-good-to-be-true job offer is exactly that. 

by Rachel Louise Snyder - Fiction

Nestled on the edge of Chicago’s gritty west side, Oak Park is a suburb in flux. To the west, theaters and shops frame posh houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. To the east lies a neighborhood still recovering from urban decline. In the center of the community sits Ilios Lane, a pristine cul-de-sac dotted with quiet homes that bridge the surrounding extremes of wealth and poverty. On the first warm day in April, Mary Elizabeth McPherson, a lifelong resident of Ilios Lane, skips school with her friend Sofia. As the two experiment with a heavy dose of ecstasy in Mary Elizabeth’s dining room, a series of home invasions rocks their neighborhood. At first the community is determined to band together, but rising suspicions soon threaten to destroy the world they were attempting to create.

by Nicola Griffith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.

by Sherill Tippins - History, Nonfiction

The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed FEBRUARY HOUSE, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there.

by Dianne Dixon - Fiction

California girl Livvi Gray has always been haunted by a terrifying nightmare of an eerily beautiful stranger in a shimmering silver dress. Shortly before Livvi’s 30th birthday, she will come face to face with the stranger from her dream, an encounter that will not only alter Livvi’s future, but change much of what she thinks she knows about the past.