Blog Entries

How would you live your life if you knew the exact date of your death?  Would your choices take you to that fateful day or lead you away?  And most importantly, are they even choices anymore?  Benjamin cleverly explores this dilemma in The Immortalists. This imaginative and gripping family drama follows the scatter shot lives of the four Gold siblings.  As young teens they visit a Roma Gypsy fortune teller who foretells the exact date of their deaths.  Armed with this information they make choices regarding their futures and how they live their lives.  These ch...

Reminiscent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, this emotionally satisfying novel about love and vinyl records is sure to be one of 2018’s best books.

Frank runs a struggling record store in late 1980’s London and he’ll only sell vinyl, despite the fact that his suppliers are breathing down his neck to modernize and buy CDs.  But Frank is so much more than a stubborn shop owner. He’s the “music whisperer.” The man can connect any person with the right music for them-even if they don’t think they want it, and it can change their lives.&...

The story of Ceder Songmaker, a young pregnant woman, is told in a series of frantic journal entries. The world she lives in, a few years away from our own, is falling apart. For reasons unknown, evolution has changed course: birds are becoming lizards, insects grow to the size of cats, and almost all pregnant women are delivering stillborn babies. The government has collapsed, and pregnant women are being rounded up in a desperate attempt to find women who can give birth to healthy babies. Cedar decides to find her biological parents, who join her adoptive parents in an effort to hide her ...

Darren Mathews grew up in rural East Texas on land his family had owned for generations.  He became a Texas Ranger like his uncle.  When the book begins, he is a little down on his luck.  He and his wife are spending some time apart, and he has been suspended at work.  An old friend asks him to investigate a double murder in the tiny town of Lark, Texas that may be racially motivated.  The body of a black lawyer from Chicago was pulled from the bayou.  A few days later a younger white woman’s body was found.  Darren goes to Lark and finds a mystery w...

Gather the Daughtersis the haunting debut novel of author Jennie Melamed. It explores the lives of women both young and old in a fictional patriarchal island society in a postapocolyptic America. The island society was founded by a group of male leaders called the wanderers. The wanderers control all aspects of life on the island, controlling access to technology, education, and resources. Female rights are strictly curtailed and summers are the only time of freedom for young girls of non childbearing age. It is during one summer that the young girls begin to rebel against the system that b...

Mystery author Alan Conway may be horrible to work with, but his bestselling series featuring Detective Atticus Pünd is keeping Susan Ryeland’s publishing company in business. Ryeland is Conway’s book editor and when she receives his latest manuscript, about two murders in a quiet 1950s English village, we read it along with her. We are just as frustrated as she is when the manuscript of the novel-within-the-novel cuts off just as Pünd is set to unmask the killer. Conway’s final chapter is missing.

To make things worse, the author has apparently just commi...

The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s debut novel, tells two stories: the first belongs to Deming Guo, the young child of an undocumented Chinese immigrant. One day, his mother simply never comes home from work. He is eventually adopted by a well-intended white family, who; try as they might, cannot patch the hurt and loss festering within this young boy. He resents his mom for abandoning him and resents his foster parents for being unable to breach the gulf between his own culture and theirs.

The second story goes back in time to follow his mother Polly, born in a small Chinese village who, ...

Eleanor Oliphant is a bit of an oddball.  Her sense of socially appropriate behavior is a bit unconventional and seems to stem from something very mysterious and very bad thing that happened in her past. She spends her free time following a rigid routine consisting mainly of eating pizza, drinking vodka alone in her apartment, and taking Mummy’s weekly phone calls; until she happens upon a musician who she’s decided is the perfect man for her.  

Eleanor is ready to transform her practical and boring appearance in order to land this man, but the whole proces...

This book takes place in the Tahquamenon River Valley in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  That alone made it a fun read.  The descriptions of plants, animals, and insects is vivid.  Helena and her parents lived in a remote cabin that was surrounded by a marsh.  They didn’t have electricity, running water or a car.  She never went to school and learned how to read from old National Geographicmagazines.  Her father taught her all about nature, how to hunt and gather food, and how to survive in her harsh environment.  She never saw anyone other than h...

The Sleepwalker is the newest release by bestselling author Chris Bohjalian.  Bohjalian is a master at creating tightly written novels that are both haunting and mysterious at the same time, and Sleepwalker is no exception.  The book revolves around the very interesting concept of sleepwalking and its profound effects on both the afflicted and their families.  He weaves a compelling mystery around a New England mother and sleepwalker that goes missing and the heartache her family endures while trying to piece together the events leading up to and surrounding her disappearance...

2003: Nearly twenty-five years after escaping the Khmer Rouge as a child, Suteera Aung has returned to Cambodia.

Officially, Teera is there to fulfill the dying wish of the only other member of her extended family to survive the genocide – but she is also responding to a letter she has received from a stranger.

The nameless “Old Musician” who lives at the temple where Teera’s relative is to be memorialized claims to have known her father and been with him in the prison camp where he died. The family had never known what happened to Teera’s father...

Hillbilly Elegy is a captivating analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans- a demographic of our country that has been in decline for over forty years.  J. D. Vance shares his personal experience in order to give better understanding of the struggles of “hillbilly” Americans and how he overcame cultural adversity and achieved success.

The author, 32, is the product of Appalachia, the Marines, Ohio State, and Yale Law. The son of a drug addict mother who married five times and a father who left the home when he was a baby, Vance ...

The Mother’s Promise is the latest novel by Sally Hepworth, whose previous works include The Secrets of Midwivesand The Things We Keep. Although she is considered a writer of “women’s fiction,” to do so would be to limit both her own body of work and our perception of what a woman writing fiction can achieve.

The novel revolves around the stories of four women: Alice, whom has recently been diagnoses with cancer, her teenage daughter Zoe who suffers from crippling anxiety, as well as two hospital workers, Sonja and Kate. Although the story begins somewhat slow...

This unforgettable final volume in Congressman John Lewis’s multi-part memoir about the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s has rightfully won numerous major book awards. Book Three maintains the graphic novel format of the first two parts, moving back and forth in time between when Lewis was a leading member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the day of President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

Nate Powell’s powerful illustrations, which brought to life lunch counter sit-ins and the March on Washington in the earlier book...

Pulitzer Prize finalist, Dan Egan, has just released a new work of non-fiction entitled The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. The book was a winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award – given annually to provide funding necessary for the completion of a non-fiction work focusing on an American topic that is of political and/or social concern.

Egan’s book starts by educating us on the engineering marvels of the late 1800’s that broke down the barriers of the Great Lakes – Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior – for improved shipping and to allow Chicago...