The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna Van Praag is a book set in Cambridge, England full of magical realism. After Alba has the worst experience of her life and is forced to leave Cambridge University she finds herself being called to a mysterious house run by a beautiful older woman who takes her in and tells her she can stay there for 99 days while she turns her life around. There are two other women staying…
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan is a book more about computers than books. I was very excited to read this book about a small bookstore in San Francisco, only to find it was really about secret societies and breaking codes using mega computers and finding eternal life and very little about books. That all sounds pretty cool, and some would probably love this, but personally I was disappointed; maybe because I’m jaded at this point and few books…
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a fantastic new novel by one of my favorite writers, Lisa See. It is about the Akha hill tribe people in the Yunnan region of China, who for generations have farmed tea, and held on to their customs and traditions despite the modern world encroaching upon them. See has written many books of historical fiction based in China and her books are always meticulously researched, this one is no exception. I loved every…
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson is a hilarious and mildly disturbing book taken mostly from her blog, The Bloggess. Lawson starts with her early life, growing up poor in rural Texas with a taxidermist Dad and the stories are laugh out loud funny at the same time as they are truly unsettling. Lawson goes in for shock value each chapter and I was getting a bit tired of it by the end of…
The Last Anniversary, is an early novel by one of my favorite writers, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty always weaves a good tale full of interesting characters and keeps the reader in a bit of suspense waiting to find out what happens. Set on tiny Scribbly Gum Island, just off the coast of Sydney, Sophie inherits a house and becomes part of a family mystery about parents who left their newborn baby and disappeared without a trace. As Sophie’s biological clock is…
Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller is a novel about life on the Lakota reservation for two Native American cousins who choose very different paths. Fuller captures the wisdom and humor, as well as great sadness and injustice experienced by the Lakota on the reservation. Fuller is one of my favorite writers and I still much prefer her non-fiction, but this is an engaging debut novel worth checking out.