I hope you’re all enjoying the pretty weather and getting some good reading time in. We have a few new fiction titles, not by high-demand authors, but really good nonetheless. The Queen of Tuesday by Darin Strauss offers a glimpse of mid-century American culture and establishes Lucille Ball as the main influencer of her time. The story revolves around a romance – an affair that the author’s grandfather may have had with Lucille Ball – but mixes the fiction of the romance with some of the facts of Ball’s life. Be prepared to be surprised to learn that there was much more to Lucille Ball’s life than what we saw on television.
Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman is set in a book store in Paris during World War II. It looks at the toll that living in France during the War and Occupation took on many.
How Lulu Lost Her Mind by Rachel Gibson is a mother and daughter relationship story that is told with humor and compassion that will resonate with the reader as they contemplate their relationships with their own mothers.
Monogamy by Sue Miller will probably be my favorite book of 2020. It’s the story of the complications of marriage and blended families with one big secret that tears down everything a woman believed about her life. The relationships in the book are messy, but the book is engrossing. I couldn’t put it down.
I received an early copy of The Big Door Prize by M.O. Walsh earlier this year and have been impatient for it to be published so I could share it with you all! In a small Louisiana town, a machine appears in the local grocery store that changes quite a bit for this small Southern town. For two dollars and a swab of a person’s cheek, it can tell them what their life’s potential is. And the revelations that the machine offers challenges people’s relationships, self-esteem and satisfaction levels. This book is magical realism at its best, and the graceful writing will have the readers enthralled.
Just a few other new fiction titles to mention are The Geometry of Holding Hands, the newest installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series; The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue is a work of historical fiction with modern and real-life influences. It’s a survival story set against the back drop of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
Robert Galbraith (also known as J.K. Rowling) adds another title to her Cormoran Strike novels in Troubled Blood.
And lastly in my discussion about new fiction titles is Dear Ann by Bobbie Ann Mason. Her first novel, In Country, is now considered a post-modern classic, and this latest title probably will be as well. Dear Ann leads the reader down the path of a re-examination of a first love and all the living that the main character either did or didn’t do in her life. It’s as gritty and real as In Country.
New non-fiction titles on our shelves include The Hard Things about Hard Things by entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and His Power of Hope by Jon Meacham, and Everything Beautiful In Its Time: Seasons of Love and Loss by Jenna Bush Hager. If you want to understand more about Netflix and how it has reinvented itself over and over, then read No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings. In A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany K Barnett takes readers on her journey to understand the American justice system when, as a young law student, she comes across a case that will change her life forever. We have Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ memoir, titled Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House and we now have Killing Crazy Horse: The Merciless Indian Wars in America by Bill O’Reilly.
Stayed tuned for the next post, which is all about some great Halloween reads you may or may not have thought about for the spooky time of year.