Fiction

Need a break from American foibles? Here is a perfect chance to laugh at both the English and the French instead.

I loved A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle, about an expat making a home in the French countryside. His account is filled with plenty of humor and not a little exasperation, but ultimately the author showcases the beauty of the belle vie. Stephen Clarke follows suit with his congenial lambast of French and Parisian culture. His novel (or thinly-disguised tell-all?) takes us away from provincial life and explores the inner workings of professional and urban scenes, with not so much

If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a good psychological thriller. I’m not alone – it seems like every year there’s a flood of books that are all trying to be the next Gone Girl or Girl on the Train. As 2017 begins, we’ve already seen a bunch of novels attempt to take that particular crown, so let’s start our survey of new releases with some thrillers to get your blood flowing and your heart pumping.

Her Every Fear by Peter Swanson, is a wonderful follow-up to 2015’s stellar The Kind Worth Killing. What Swanson does best is create a handful of realistic characters and then play them

For lovers of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Love in Lowercase, by Francesc Miralles, shares many of the same elements, but with a lighter touch; philosophical, humorous, it is a story of loneliness and love, coincidence – and cats.

Samuel, a rather solitary professor, begins a new year with the appearance of a surprise visitor, which sets off a chain of events that draw him out of his stagnant routine and into relationships with some colorful characters. The story takes place in Barcelona, which is sure to charm lovers of that city, as Samuel wanders through many of its well-known streets on

To the Bright Edge of the World deserves all the praise it has been receiving. In 1885, newly-married Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small group of men on an expedition into untamed Alaska Territory to explore the possibilities for future settlements and trade routes. He leaves his pregnant wife, Sophie, behind and they exchange letters, writing about the hardships they each face while away from the other.

It is written mainly as a series of journal entries, but photographs, drawings, newspaper articles, and official army reports are interspersed, making it seem more like memoir than a work

Antoinette Conway and her partner, Stephen Moran, are rookies and outsiders on the Dublin Murder Squad. Just as they're about to finish up their night shift, the boss gives them another dud case: Aislinn Murray has been reported dead via an anonymous call to a local police station. It was obviously her boyfriend, with whom she had a dinner date planned. Open-and-closed. So why does the boss put a senior detective, Breslin, on the case to watch over them? And why does his help seem more like obstruction?

While mysteries, Tana French's novels defy the most basic genre conventions. For example

Isabelle comes back to her family home after the death of her sister to find an autistic savant growing up in her sister's home. She teaches the girl, Karen, how to function in the world. Karen learns how to interact with the whole, not only through her aunt's patience, but also through the animals with whom she shares a special connection. Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World is Karen's story. She goes out into the world to gain the knowledge to, eventually, take over the family's failing tuna cannery. Her intelligence and her connection with animals leads her to create the first "humane"

“They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind”- Kinneson family motto.

In 1930, in the Vermont town of Kingdom Common-- sharing a border with Canada-- lives the fiercely independent Miss Jane Hubble Kinneson, known to most as Miss Jane. On the dawn of her 50th birthday, she finds herself embroiled in a battle with her cousin, Eben Kinneson Esquire, for the preservation of her beloved land, Kingdom Mountain-- some of the last untouched wilderness and home to glacial ponds, flora and fauna, and wildlife dating  back 10,000 years. Enter Henry Satterfield, a weather

This is the first in a six book series, totaling some 3,000 pages, about a quiet man from Norway reflecting on parts of his life. It is boring and breathtaking at the same time. The author ruminates on the death of his father and his own mortality as he shuffles through memories of his childhood and then the more recent past. Day-to-day events such as making breakfast, working at a computer, and making phone calls take center stage. We all do things like this every day and then forget about them. Somehow, Karl Ove Knausgaard makes them memorable.

Happy December and welcome to our year-end edition of the new releases that will be hitting the shelves – and your hold lists – this month.

December is a time to look back and see what happened this year. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush to keep up with the hot new releases, but forget the books that took a while to find their audience. In this edition, instead of looking forward to see what is coming out this month, we’ll look backward to see the best books of the year. Here in Johnson County, we’ve had an exceptionally mild fall, but recently the temperature is finally dripping and

"After their English aunt dies, listless American twins Julia and Valentina travel to London to live in their aunt's now empty flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery. There they become embroiled in the day-to-day sagas of their eccentric neighbors. But soon they discover that something is alive in Highgate--something unable to move on."

A haunted, aging apartment in north London, bordering one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, complete with an unusual set of inhabitants and a bit of London's darker history sprinkled throughout . . . no one had to convince me to pick this one up. 

Un

This consists of four stories--"quarters," Sedgwick calls them--from four different eras. Each is a compelling, haunting meditation on human nature. Each has horror undertones, confronts suffering and misery. Each is distinct in style, tone, setting, and action. Each involves philosophical musings about the meaning of spirals in the way of Jungian archetypes (universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct; Wikipedia).

There is the girl who watches as her prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe is ambushed and hunted by

Told mostly in reverse order, But I Love Him chronicles the relationship between Anna and Connor. The reader is introduced to Anna, a high school senior, who has spent the past year focused on Connor, and has slowly given up the people and things that were important to her prior to meeting him.

Through Anna’s accounts of her interactions with Connor and people in their lives, the reader gets a sense of the conflicted feelings Anna has toward him. The story being told from end to beginning is similar to viewing a mess being picked up—it starts off as a disaster, but piece by piece, things get

Welcome to a quick look at some new releases that will be hitting the bookshelves of a library near you!

Zadie Smith’s deep, enriching novels have been mainstays of book clubs for years, and her newest, Swing Time, follows that very same course charted in novels like White Teeth and On Beauty. Here, a young mixed-race girl in 1980s underclass London meets another brown girl and they bond over their shared love of dancing and obsession over the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The novel follows our unnamed narrator through her teen years and twenties as the two friends drift apart

If you knew the world was going to end, but you had the power to stop it, would you?

A Man Said to the Universe



A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”



~ Stephen Crane

Does an ant's life matter to you when you step on it?



Does your life matter to the universe when it steps on you?



Henry certainly doesn't think so. He doesn't think anyone's life matters. And he sees no reason to push the button that would save the world from destruction. Our lives are as meaningless as ants'

I’m of two minds about The Hopefuls. On the one hand, it is a thought-provoking look at a marriage under stress. On the other hand, I found the main character to be a bit lackluster.

Beth Kelly is a writer who loves her husband, Matt, enough to leave her beloved New York and move to an alien place – Washington D.C. Matt is an aspiring politician who joins the Obama campaign and gets a job in the administration after Obama’s victory. Beth finds a job that is definitely not her dream job, but it’s writing, and it keeps her occupied.

She has trouble acclimating to her new environment until

I’ve been obsessed with Abigail Thomas’s work, and I've been reading everything she’s written one after the other. I decided I wanted to read something else, not only to cleanse my palate, but so I would have a book I already know I’ll love waiting for me at some time in the future when I really, really need a good book to read. So I compromised and read an author whom Thomas had thanked in her acknowledgments. It worked out beautifully. Stephen Dobyns is a poet with a large body of work, but the only title readily available was The Burn Palace. I’m not typically drawn to police procedurals

I suffered through this book! (I know what you're thinking, "Why? Life is too short to read books you don't like! Yada yada . . . .") Well I finished it because I had to lead the discussion at book club. (Spoiler! I'm the only one who finished it! Everyone else quit.)

Allan Karlson climbs out the widow because he doesn't want to go to his 100th birthday party. He then manages to steal 50 thousand dollars and forms a group of unlikely friends (which includes an elephant.) They precede to run and hide from both a police detective and the criminal gang he stole from. Through mostly good luck

British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, is living in Mexico in self-imposed exile, solitary and saturated with liquor.  He was once happy, or maybe ne never was.  He isn’t sure now that he’s too riddled by alcoholism to even put on his socks.  But on this day, The Day of the Dead, 1938, he has a visitor.  His wife Yvonne has come to rescue the consul from himself.  Maybe she can persuade him to leave Mexico behind and start over with her.  Maybe she can salvage their marriage, left in ruins by her string of affairs with Geoffrey’s two best friends – both of whom are there with him in Mexico.  They

Aspiring writer, Guinevere Beck, thinks nothing of her “chance” meeting with Joe Goldberg, the guy at the local bookstore. The fact that he happens to be her perfect match down to the last detail just shows how lucky she is to have found him. Right?

Joe Goldberg knows it is meant to be when Guinevere Beck walks into his bookstore, but fate moves too slowly. Joe takes matters into his own hands and soon enough, with help from social media, Joe finds out everything he needs to know. Armed with her address, best friends’ names, access to her email, and so many other details of Beck’s life, Joe

Now, as I read it all over again, I wonder . . .

They call that literary analysis, Stella, and I'm not particularly good at it. My job is to write. Your job is to figure out the deep stuff.

And there is deep stuff going on here, isn't there? For the love of Luna, I hope so.

Oh, there is. There definitely is deep stuff going on here. You know because you feel it. Sometimes, though, feelings are hard to pinpoint. Hard to analyze. That's how this is. It doesn't necessarily need the literary analysis because it creates a depth of feeling not dependent on explicit definition.

That's been

First up, we'll take a look at Today Will be Different, a followup to 2013’s brilliant Where'd You Go Bernadette, Semple, a former writer for the TV show Arrested Development, continues her unique blend of scattershot, witty skewerings of the domestic world. Following one day in the life of Seattle wife and mother, Eleanor, who wishes she could be someone else – someone who can navigate through the world with ease and confidence instead of teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The plot, involving family and marriage secrets, isn’t as important as how Semple goes about telling it, and

When you are a contestant on a reality TV show, how can you tell the difference between what is real and what is manufactured for the program? One woman faces this dilemma as real-world events collide with simulated ones.

The survival-type show begins with twelve contestants sent into the woods to face numerous challenges--singly and in groups, physical and mental. The contestant who outlasts the others wins a cash prize. It seems simple enough, nothing that hasn’t been seen on these types of shows before. Some participants are in it purely for the money; some are out for the adventure. None

Eligible is a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Set in modern day, the five Bennet sisters are all back at home after Mr. Bennet has health issues--though some of the sisters have never left. CrossFit, reality shows, fertility treatments, and dating make for some humorous situations. I found the plot enjoyable, funny, and sometimes refreshingly real when dealing with more serious situations. Unfortunately, I did not like our main character, Liz, very much. Liz is important as the glue that hold the Bennets together, but her modern-day past was a bit disappointing for me

In Don't Look for Me, private investigator Amos Walker is hired to track down a missing wife. He has no solid leads, so he starts at the herbal remedies store that she frequented. All of a sudden, people are tailing him and people are dying! Raymond Chandler once said that when he didn’t know what to do, he would send a man through the door with a gun in his hand. I get the sense that Estleman's approach is the same.

Estleman holds true to the private eye formula, and he plots well, but I think he tries too hard when it comes to dialog. Nonetheless, I enjoyed his latest effort. 

Slow and steady wins the race, right? Then what’s the deal with all the timed tests our kids have to suffer though in school? Last to Finish is a great book to help kids who experience anxiety over timed math tests understand that they are not alone, and, in fact, they just might be kinda special. As the mom of a kid who freaks out when the teacher whips out the timer, I recommend this book for kids and caregivers to read together to foster discussion about math anxiety.

I like this quote from the back of the book:

"Surprisingly, many of history's greatest mathematicians have been slow

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett is a lyrical and sprawling book about how a single action rebounds and spreads out over time. Here, an impulsive romantic action between two married (to other) people leads to tons of unexpected consequences, the shattering and then blending of two different families, and an unflinching look at how that action unfolds and ricochets over time. Patchett is a master of deep, thoughtful characters, and this look at domestic complications should not only satisfy fans of her previous books that include Bel Canto and State of Wonder but should pull in new fans as well. 

Hildy Good has two tricks to find out anything about anyone. First, as the top real estate agent in her area, she's able to figure out more than you'd think by looking at the condition of someone's house, including the state of their health, or the state of their marriage. And second, she claims to be a mind-reader. Oh sure, it's just a party trick that involves being very good at interpreting micro-expressions and body language, but with her skills and the fact that her ancestor was Sarah Good, who was among the first to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, she's managed to

As a children’s librarian, it’s uncommon that I recommend a book about a teenage runaway to parents looking for a book about relationship-building. But author Jennifer Mathieu has written an uncommon book. I just can’t recommend it highly enough. In this cautionary tale of what can go wrong when parents put too many restrictions on their teens, Rachel Walker is a seventeen-year-old girl who runs away from her strict, Quiverfull-adhering, fundamentalist Christian home in an effort to feed her curious mind and to build a life of her own. What I like most about this book is how complexly the

In Laura Lippman's latest mystery, Wilde Lake, Luisa Brant is the newly-elected state's attorney for Howard County, Maryland, and she has some big shoes to fill. Her father held the position and was greatly admired (to the extent that any politician can be) during much of her childhood, and Luisa has just beaten out her mentor for the role in a hotly-contested election. Eager to prove herself worthy of her new position, she decides to personally act as the prosecutor in the first murder case that comes across her desk. The seemingly-straightforward killing of a single woman in her apartment by

The Choices We Make is a beautifully written, powerful, heart-shattering story about friendship and motherhood. Hannah and Kate have been as close as sisters since they met in fifth grade. Hannah cannot help but feel envious of Kate's family, complete with two little girls. Meanwhile, after six years of trying every method she and her husband can endure, Hannah has just found out that she is unable to get pregnant. Kate chooses to be Hannah’s surrogate, and this is where the journey begins. Everything goes according to plan until a shocking tragedy puts everything the two women have set out