An alphabetical list of all of Carmen’s reviews. For a specific title, please use our search feature. Enjoy!
Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin
Summary: An obsessive young woman has been waiting half her life—since she was twelve years old—for this moment. She has planned. Researched. Trained. Imagined every scenario. Now she is almost certain the man who kidnapped and murdered her sister sits in the...
Younger by Suzanne Munshower
Summary: When PR pro Anna Wallingham gets dumped by her last client, she finds herself running out of options in LA, where looks trump experience. Desperate to prove she is still relevant, the fiftysomething accepts a shady job offer from Pierre Barton, secretive...
Centuries of June by Keith Donohue
Summary: Face down on the bathroom floor after "a conk on the skull," Jack, the narrator of Donohue's unconventional latest, embarks on an epic and darkly funny journey through time and space without traveling much beyond his own bathroom. My take: 3.5 looks ...
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Summary: Charlie Manx burned a man to death in his black 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith, but that’s not the worst of it. Rumor has it that he kidnapped dozens of children, taking them to a place he calls “Christmasland.” The only child ever to escape was a very lucky girl...
Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel
Summary: Go behind the scenes of seven of today’s most popular narrative radio shows and podcasts, including This American Life and RadioLab, in graphic narrative. Every week, millions of devoted fans tune in to or download This American Life, The Moth, Radiolab,...
The Passenger by Lisa Lutz
Summary: Forty-eight hours after leaving her husband’s body at the base of the stairs, Tanya Dubois cashes in her credit cards, dyes her hair brown, demands a new name from a shadowy voice over the phone, and flees town. It’s not the first time. She meets Blue, a...
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Summary: "Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind. Tonight is January 21, 1882. There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television. 'Nuclear' appears in no dictionary. You have never...
House by Frank Peretti
Summary: Enter House - where you'll find yourself thrown into a killer's deadly game in which the only way to win is to lose...and the only way out is in. The stakes of the game become clear when a tin can is tossed into the house with rules scrawled on it. Rules that...
77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz
Summary: Enter the world of the Pendleton: The original owner became a recluse - and was rumored to be more than half mad - after his wife and two children disappeared in 1897 and were never found. The second owner suffered a worse tragedy in 1935, when his house...
The Silver Crown by Robert O’Brien
Summary: On her tenth birthday, Ellen wakes up to find a silver crown on her pillow; a few minutes later her house burns up, her parents disappear, and she is launched on an adventure involving a trek through the woods, a castle full of brainwashed captives, and the...
Dark Objects by Gillian Flynn
Summary: I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She...
The Memory of Love by Linda Olsson
Summary: Marion Flint, in her early fifties, has spent fifteen years living a quiet life on the rugged coast of New Zealand, a life that allows the door to her past to remain firmly shut. But a chance meeting with a young boy, Ika, and her desire to help him force...
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Summary: In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets in which signs are now pictures instead of words because...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Summary: Who, you might ask, is Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) and why is she the subject of a book? On the surface, this short-lived African American Virginian seems an unlikely candidate for immortality. The most remarkable thing about her, some might argue, is that...
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Summary: In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a...
October Baby by Eric Wilson
Summary: "You saw me before I was born." Psalm 139:16 (NLT) As the curtain rises, Hannah hesitantly steps onto the stage for her theatrical debut in college. Yet before she can utter her first lines, Hannah—unscripted—collapses in front of the stunned audience. After...
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
Summary: The lonely young Appalachian woman joins the historical Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a librarian, riding across slippery creek beds and up treacherous mountains on her faithful mule to deliver books and other reading material to the...
Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand
Summary: Welcome to Paradise, the first book in the Paradise series, has everything that readers have come to know and love about an Elin Hilderbrand novel, plus a healthy dose of intrigue. Irene Steele’s idyllic life-house, husband, family-is shattered when she is...
When the Lights Go Out by Mary Kubica
Summary: Jessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after years of caring for her ailing mother. She rents a new apartment and applies for college. But when the college informs her that her social security number has raised a red flag, Jessie discovers a...
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
Summary: In this poignant and sparkling debut, a lovable widower embarks on a life-changing adventureSixty-nine-year-old Arthur Pepper lives a simple life. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a.m., just as he did when his wife, Miriam, was alive. He dresses in the...
A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
Summary: To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life....
The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict
Summary: Hedy Kiesler is lucky. Her beauty leads to a starring role in a controversial film and marriage to a powerful Austrian arms dealer, allowing her to evade Nazi persecution despite her Jewish heritage. But Hedy is also intelligent. At lavish Vienna dinner...
What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Summary: A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The...
The Masterpiece by Fiona Davis
Summary: For the nearly nine million people who live in New York City, Grand Central Terminal is a crown jewel, a masterpiece of design. But for Clara Darden and Virginia Clay, it represents something quite different. For Clara, the terminal is the stepping stone to...
The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin
Summary: The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the...
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Summary: Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together....
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Summary: At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at...
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Summary: Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her...
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Summary: A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children , an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading...
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Summary: Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. My take: 3 looks Originally reviewed August 15, 2011 Why have I never read this before? It is on the required reading for so many high schools...Well, it was a good read. Short...
The Violets of March by Sarah Jio
Summary: In her twenties, Emily Wilson was on top of the world: she had a bestselling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of GQ, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Ten years later, the tide has turned on Emily's good fortune. So when her great-aunt Bee...
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Summary: Written with a delightfully dry sense of humour and the wisdom of a born storyteller, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand explores the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of family obligation and tradition. When retired Major Pettigrew strikes up an...
Green Angel by Alice Hoffman
Summary: Left on her own when her family dies in a terrible disaster, fifteen-year-old Green is haunted by loss and by the past. Struggling to survive physically and emotionally in a place where nothing seems to grow and ashes are everywhere, Green retreats into the...
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Summary: Kim Edwards’ stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his...
Winkie by Clifford Chase
Summary: In Cliff Chase's scathingly funny and surprisingly humane debut novel, the zeitgeist assumes the form of a one-foot-tall ursine Everyman — a mild-mannered teddy bear named Winkie who finds himself on the wrong side of America's war on terror. After suffering...
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Summary: This true story about the love between a spiritual mentor and his pupil has soared to the bestseller list for many reasons. For starters: it reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. It also...
Black Out by Lisa Unger
Summary: When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic. On the surface, Annie Powers’ life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on...
Fury by Salman Rushdie
Summary: Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he...
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells
Summary: John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it. He's spent his life doing his best not to live up to his potential. He's obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn't want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives...
Tuscaloosa by W. Glasgow Phillips
Summary: They have one summer to find what was lost long ago. "Never settle for less than the truth," she told him. But when you don't even know your real name, the truth gets a little complicated. It can nestle so close to home it's hard to see. It can even flourish...
The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman
Summary: Juno McKay intended to avoid the nearby campus of her alma mater during her fifteenth reunion weekend, but she just can’t turn down the chance to see her longtime friend, Christine Webb, speak at the Penrose College library. Though Juno cringes at the...
The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean
Summary: Dora has always taken the path of least resistance. She went to the college that offered her a scholarship, is majoring in "vagueness studies," and wears whatever shows the least dirt. She falls into a job at the college coffee shop, and a crush on her flirty...
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Summary: The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures...
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
Summary: Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a...
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
Summary: The Story Sisters charts the lives of three sisters–Elv, Claire, and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. Inhabiting their world are a charismatic man...
Operation Bonnet by Kimberly Stuart
Summary: Twenty-year-old Nellie Monroe has a restless brilliance that makes her a bit of an odd duck. She wants to be a private investigator, even though her tiny hometown offers no hope of clients. Until she meets Amos Shetler, an Amish dropout carrying a torch for...
The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass
Summary: In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved...
The Cure by Athol Dickson
Summary: There's a small town in Maine where miracles are happening. In a last bid for survival, Riley sets out and soon finds himself in Dublin, Maine, a coastal village. This once-proud birthplace of mighty wooden ships, then is now suffocating underneath an...
Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery by Charles Martin
Summary: They have one summer to find what was lost long ago. "Never settle for less than the truth," she told him. But when you don't even know your real name, the truth gets a little complicated. It can nestle so close to home it's hard to see. It can even flourish...
The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale
Summary: Mormon housewife Becky Jack is seven months pregnant with her fourth child when she meets celebrity hearththrob Felix Callahan. Twelve hours, one elevator ride, and one alcohol-free dinner later, something has happened…though nothing has happened. It isn’t...
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Summary: A mesmerizing, moving, and elegantly written debut novel, The Language of Flowers beautifully weaves past and present, creating a vivid portrait of an unforgettable woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to...
The Myth of You & Me by Leah Stewart
Summary: When Cameron was fifteen, she and Sonia were best friends—so close it seemed nothing would ever come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet....
Negrophilia by Erik Rush
Summary: Negrophilia studies the undue and inordinate affinity for blacks (as opposed to antipathy toward them) that has been promoted by activists, politicians and the establishment press for the past 40 years and which has fostered an erroneous perception of blacks,...
Great House by Nichole Krauss
Summary: For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police, one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away,...
Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons
Summary: A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery...
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
Summary: Abandoned as a Child on the steps of St Rose Convent in New York. Evangeline Cacciatore grew up knowing little of her parents. Assisting a scholar in the convent one day, she uncovers a disturbning secret conected to her family. My take: 4 looks Originally...
A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff
Summary: Phoebe Sanders runs her own vintage dress shop. But while she stitches and repairs couture suits and glorious dresses, there is something in Phoebe's own past that she cannot restore, and which is stopping her searching for love. My take: 4 looks Originally...
Matched by Ally Condie
Summary: Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one…until she sees another face...
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
Summary: Lucy Hull, a children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. Ian needs Lucy’s help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has...
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Summary: In 1979, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato—a novel about the Vietnam War—won the National Book Award. In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story...
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
Summary: The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named...
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Summary: Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the...
A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
Summary: We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in...
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
Summary: Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes--each its own universe,...
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
Summary: One last full moon — then it will all be over.Jacob Marlowe has lost the will to live. For two hundred years he has wandered the world, enslaved by his lunatic appetites and tormented by the memory of his first and most monstrous crime. Now, the last of his...
Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel
Summary: As a child, Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand, buried deep within the earth. As an adult, she’s dedicated her brilliant scientific career to solving the mystery that began that fateful day: Why was a titanic robot of unknown...
The Worldly Adventures of a Teen-age Tycoon by Roger Eddy
Summary: (abridged from The Bulls and the Bees)Twelve stories humorously recounted by a precocious child of the 1930's who take a slightly skewed and often comedic view of the doings of those enigmatic adults around him. My take: 5 looks Originally reviewed October...
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Summary: Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in...
Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, Ricardo Cortés (Illustrator)
Summary: Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book...
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Summary: Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy...
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, Reg Keeland (Translator)
Summary: Lisbeth Salander - the heart of Larsson's two previous novels - lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She's fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she'll...
The Call by Yannick Murphy
Summary: The warm, wry, and patient voice of a veterinarian father tells the heartfelt story of his young New England family enduring a moving trial of loyalty, hope, and faith after they are confronted with an unthinkable crisis. My take: 5 looks Originally...
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Summary: Some stories cannot be told in just one lifetime. Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived...
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Summary: This charming classic, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both...
The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen
Summary: It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once...
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Summary: The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves,...
Educated by Tara Westover
Summary: Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed...
Elevation by Stephen King, Mark Edward Geyer
Summary: Although Scott Carey doesn’t look any different, he’s been steadily losing weight. There are a couple of other odd things, too. He weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott doesn’t want to be poked and prodded. He...
Harry’s Trees by Jon Cohen
Summary: The first thing you learn when you climb a tree is to hold on. Now it’s time for Harry to learn to let go… Thirty-four-year-old Harry Crane, lifelong lover of trees, works as an analyst in a treeless US Forest Service office. When his wife dies...
Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer, Richard Armitage
Summary: Leningrad, Russia, 1968. Alexander Karpenko is no ordinary child, and from an early age, it is clear he is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, he and his mother will have to escape from Russia...
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Summary: On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste...
The Mystery of Julia Episcopa by John I. Rigoli, Diane Cummings
Summary: CIn ancient Rome, a woman flees for her life. Her enemies are those she once called 'brother'. Hidden beneath her blue cloak are secrets men will kill for - forgeries that prove the newly self-appointed bishops are not followers of the way, but pretenders who...
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Summary: Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever? These nine perfect strangers are about to find out... Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons...
Noir by Christopher Moore
Summary: San Francisco. Summer, 1947. A dame walks into a saloon . . .It’s not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It’s love at first sight, but...
Slade House by David Mitchell
Summary: Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and...
Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
Summary: My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:1. I’m in a coma.2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone...
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
Summary: In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with...
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Originally Reviewed: Nov 2, 2015 Summary: THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac - as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark, from storytelling genius...
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Originally reviewed Nov 20, 2012 Summary: It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in...
A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum
Summary: In Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Deya is starting to meet with suitors. Though she doesn’t want to get married, her grandparents give her no choice. History is repeating itself: Deya’s mother, Isra, also had no choice when she left Palestine as a teenager to...
Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly
Summary: In 1887, Nellie Bly accepted an assignment from publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and went undercover at the lunatic asylum on Blackwell Island, America's first municipal mental hospital. Calling herself "Nellie Brown," she was able to convince...
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
Summary: “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus.” So begins the new novel from the number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings, an extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her...
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia De Luce #4) by Alan Bradley
Summary: It's Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce - an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving - is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when...
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
Summary: Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home...
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Summary: Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a...