Happy second Friday of the summer and the cap to my great summer reading week! This one is almost a no-brainer because Elin Hilderbrand is the quintessential light, vacation-reading author and her newest novel, The Identicals is as refreshing and fun as popsicles (or mojitos) next to the pool. In it, identical twin sisters, Harper and Tabitha, are compared to twin New ... Read More...
Burntown: A Novel
When you are eight-years-old the lines between what is real and what is imagined can still get blurred. So, it might be difficult for Miles to explain to police that he saw a man wearing a chicken mask kill his mother. Except that his statement isn’t even needed—the mask is found in the family’s garage and his father is booked on a murder charge. He commits suicide in ... Read More...
The Fifth Petal: A Novel
I carry no weight, no worth, no influence. I represent nothing. I do not exist…But remember this as you flee: You brought me into existence. I am not the cause, I am merely the effect. The Fifth Petal is set in contemporary Salem, Massachusetts making it a heady concoction of witches, evil, superstition, murder, magic and tragedy. Rose Whelan, a local historian ... Read More...
Loner: A Novel
Loner, by Teddy Wayne is a disquieting mix of everything that makes college worth remembering and everything you’d rather forget. David Federman is a high school loner, but he’s not one of the subgroup of computer or science geek elites, he’s just a little odd. What he does have is a way with words, enough so that he’s the only person from his New Jersey school to get ... Read More...
Rare Objects: A Novel
Before we’ve even met her Maeve has lived a lot of life for a twenty-five-year-old woman in the 1930s. After secretarial school she leaves Boston for New York City, using the lie of a big job opportunity as a way to get out of marriage and town. But because no such job existed in Depression era NYC Maeve ends up working in a dance hall on Broadway where only alcohol ... Read More...
As Close to Us as Breathing
Sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec inherited their family’s cabin on the Connecticut shore and now they convene every summer, staying with their children during the week while their husbands drive up on Friday in time for Shabbos. In As Close to Us as Breathing author Elizabeth Poliner freezes, with the clarity of amber, a very specific time and place and within that the lives ... Read More...
