Dietland by Sarai Walker
Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when
you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. With her job answering fan mail for
a teen magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. But when
a mysterious woman in colorful tights and combat boots begins following her,
Plum falls down a rabbit hole into the world of Calliope House — an underground
community of women who reject society’s rules — and is forced to confront the
real costs of becoming “beautiful.” At the same time, a guerilla group begins
terrorizing a world that mistreats women, and Plum becomes entangled in a
sinister plot. The consequences are explosive.
“A giddy revenge fantasy that will shake up your thinking
and burrow under your skin” (Entertainment Weekly), Dietland takes on the
beauty industry, gender inequality, and our weight-loss obsession — with fists
flying. –Amazon Description
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that
traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly
great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable
sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that
shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice
in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different
villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and
lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to
Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons,
sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and
shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in
slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries
of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave
trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children
into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great
Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and
dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day,
Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning
immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a
nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first
novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of
time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical
forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not
to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer. –Amazon Description
One More Day by Kelly Simmons
Don't look away
No one wants to be the mother whose child disappears. It's
unthinkable, the stuff of nightmares. But when she turns her back to pay a
parking meter, Carrie Morgan becomes that mother. Ben is gone, and more than a
year later, it's clear that he is never coming back.
Until he does...for just twenty-four hours, before once
again vanishing from his crib without a trace. Rumors start to circulate
through Carrie's small town. Whispers that she's seeing things. That her alibi
doesn't quite add up.
Her husband and friends start to think she's crazy. The
police start to think she's guilty. As the investigation heats up, Carrie must
decide what to share, and why. Because the crime is about to be solved... and
her secret revealed. – Amazon Description
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
A lush, raw, thrilling novel of the senses about a year in
the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, seductive world
of a famous New York City restaurant.
"Let's say I was born when I came over the George
Washington Bridge..." This is how we meet unforgettable Tess, the
twenty-two-year-old at the heart of this stunning debut. Shot from a mundane,
provincial past, Tess comes to New York in the stifling summer of 2006. Alone,
knowing no one, living in a rented room in Williamsburg, she manages to land a
job as a “backwaiter” at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant. This begins
the year we spend with Tess as she starts to navigate the chaotic, enchanting,
punishing, and privileged life she has chosen, as well as the remorseless and
luminous city around her. What follows is her education: in oysters, Champagne,
the appellations of Burgundy, friendship, cocaine, lust, love, and dive bars.
As her appetites awaken—for food and wine, but also for knowledge, experience,
and belonging—we see her helplessly drawn into a darkly alluring love triangle.
With an orphan’s ardor she latches onto Simone, a senior server at the
restaurant who has lived in ways Tess only dreams of, and against the warnings
of coworkers she falls under the spell of Jake, the elusive, tatted up,
achingly beautiful bartender. These two and their enigmatic connection to each
other will prove to be Tess’s most exhilarating and painful lesson of all.
Stephanie Danler intimately defines the crucial transition
from girl to woman, from living in a place that feels like nowhere to living in
a place that feels like the center of the universe. She deftly conjures the
nonstop and purely adrenalized world of the restaurant—conversations
interrupted, phrases overheard, relationships only partially revealed. And she
evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, the fragility and
brutality of being young in New York with heart-stopping accuracy. A lush novel
of the senses—of taste and hunger, seeing and understanding, love and
desire—Sweetbitter is ultimately about the power of what remains after
disillusionment, and the transformation and wisdom that come from our
experiences, sweet and bitter. –Amazon Description
The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay
A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining
masterpiece in the tradition of Cloud Atlas.
Publishers Weekly raved that "with near-universal
appeal . . . Seay’s debut novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of
wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery,
and an enchanting historical adventure story." Set in three cities in three
eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix
of entertainment and literary bravado.
The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century,
when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's
most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful
fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually
revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject
to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any
of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death.
One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he
thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict,
the ominous Council of Ten . . .
Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California,
circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers
launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . .
All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding
tour-de-force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned,
stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning
conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read
a truly original and thrilling work of art. –Amazon Description
The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon
The latest novel from New York Times bestselling author
Jennifer McMahon (The Winter People) is an atmospheric, gripping, and
suspenseful tale that probes the bond between sisters and the peril of keeping
secrets.
The Tower Motel was once a thriving attraction of rural
Vermont. Today it lies in disrepair, alive only in the memories of the three
women—Amy, Piper, and Piper’s kid sister, Margot—who played there as children.
They loved exploring the abandoned rooms … until the day their innocent games
uncovered something dark and twisted that ruined their friendship forever.
Now, Amy stands accused of committing a horrific crime, and
the only hint to her motives is a hasty message that forces Piper and Margot to
revisit the motel’s past, and the fate of two sisters who lived there in its
heyday. Sylvie Slater had dreams of
running off to Hollywood and becoming Alfred Hitchcock’s leading lady, while
her little sister, Rose, was content with their simple life. Each believed the other
to be something truly monstrous, but only one knows the secret that will haunt
the generations to come. –Amazon Description
These books are available for checkout through the Lake County Library System.
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