Skip to main content

Features

The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her hard life on the swamp and her harsh father. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she's holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio. As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.

Week of April 5, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of April 5th include BIG SUMMER by Jennifer Weiner, a deliciously funny and remarkably poignant novel about the power of friendship, the lure of frenemies, and the importance of making peace with yourself through all of life’s ups and downs; JACK, the fourth entry in Marilynne Robinson's now-classic series set in the world of Gilead, which tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher; A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA, Isabel Allende's masterful work of historical fiction that follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home; and PRETTY THINGS, a page-turner from Janelle Brown in which two wildly different women --- one a grifter, the other an heiress --- are brought together by the scam of a lifetime.

Kelly Mustian, author of The Girls in the Stilt House

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her hard life on the swamp and her harsh father. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.