With her latest introspective novel, “Just a Regular Boy,” Catherine Ryan Hyde takes us on a journey that we’d never imagine taking ourselves — going with a survivalist and his five-year-old son into the wilds of northern Idaho to survive what he believes is a coming apocalypse. Remy’s father, Roy, plans to survive off the land, and he believes that he has everything they need to survive.
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Can the stories we tell ourselves have the power to save us? In “The Secret Book of Flora Lea,” author Patti Callahan Henry brings us a tale within a tale as we meet two sisters, bound by the fantasy world that the elder sister, Hazel, creates and shares with her much younger sister, Flora, during difficult times. Their father is killed the first week he starts training to fight in WWII, and the family is bereft from his loss. When their mother goes to work to do her part in the war effort, Hazel cares for Flora and tells her stories to keep her busy and happy. We especially see the sisters’ bond as they are evacuated from London and parted from their very loving mother, and sent to a small village on the River Thames near Oxford, where they are lucky enough to go live with a wonderful woman and her son.
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Forget the debutantes in this clever new historical romance series starting with “The Scandalous Ladies of London: The Countess,” by Sophie Jordan. This series isn’t about the teenage girls (because aren’t seventeen and eighteen-year old girls still pretty much children?), but rather about their mothers and other women who are not quite in their prime. While these “ladies of London” are not still in the early blush of youth, they are mature women who want to have romance and love in their lives.
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It’s not often that a sequel is written over four decades after the first book, but in “Where Are the Children Now?” that’s exactly what Alafair Burke has done with Mary Higgins Clark’s “Where Are the Children?” which was published in 1975. While some readers might want to reread the first book, it’s really not necessary as Burke does a masterful job cluing us in as to what transpired all those years before, while making the sharing of that backstory completely natural and a part of the story.
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Author Charlie N. Holmberg writes a lot of fantasy, and her latest novel, “Heir of Uncertain Magic” is the sequel to “Keeper of Enchanted Rooms,” the first book in the “Whimbrel House” series. Unfortunately, neither title gives even a hint of the delightful character of this magic-filled series about two fairly tortured souls in search of some stability and in desperate need of some love in their lives. We meet those two, Merritt Fernsby and Hulda Larkin, in the first book as Merritt inherits a magical house, and Hulda is sent to help him figure out how to control the magic of the house. It’s filled with action, danger, and some truly heart-wrenching moments.
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In his latest novel, brilliant “Going Zero,” author Anthony McCarten goes to great lengths to scare the dickens out of us by exploring the issue of privacy—and the fact that any notion that it still exists is archaic—in this brave new world of technology which surrounds us almost everywhere we go. Billionaire tech mogul Cy Baxter has a brilliant idea for the future. His technology will enable the law enforcement agencies of our country to stop crime almost before it happens. The only downside? In order for it to work, the government, in concert with his tech company, will be able to monitor virtually our every move, every conversation, every action.
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While “The Seaside Library” is about the lengths to which friends will go to protect and support each other, it’s not basically about a library. The setting is Mariners Island, a fictional island author Brenda Novak imagines off the coast of New England where all three main characters grew up. Ivy, Ariana, and Cam were best friends, and when a tragedy occurred one summer, the teenagers lied to protect Cam. That lie grew and took on a life of its own in the next two decades.
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Lauren Willig is known for historical fiction that delves deeply into little-known aspects of war and the women who have supported victims of war. In “Two Wars and a Wedding,” she presents Betsy Hayes, a valiant woman, who is based on a real figure. Betsy becomes a nurse and ultimately saves lives when those in charge of the war efforts would do otherwise.
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Perhaps the threat of certain books being banned makes it even more important that those books be shared and read. Two books that certainly fit the bill are “That Flag” by Tameka Fryer Brown and Nikkolas Smith and “Love is Loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement” by Sandra Neil Wallace and Bryan Collier. While the books are very different—one is a very touching story about the Confederate flag and its effect on the friendship of two girls, while the other is a nonfiction account of a valiant woman whom few have heard of. Both are books about topics that would certainly damage the fragile sensibilities of those who cringe at any reference to our racist past and our often-uncomfortable current racist reality.
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There’s a saying that no good deed goes unpunished, and in “Not So Perfect Strangers,” L. S. Stratton takes that adage to the max by showing how Tasha Jenkins suffers from the good deed she does late one night when she gives a stranger a ride. Tasha has been planning to leave her abusive husband, and she and her teenage son are staying in a hotel just prior to getting on a plane and going back South, where Tasha has family, to live. She is determined to leave D.C. and Kordell Jenkins, whose abusive tendencies have kept her basically a prisoner in her own home. To “punish” her, he took away Tasha’s car keys, her phone, her credit cards. And he hasn’t let her work. So when she finally makes plans to get away, she is shocked when her son disappears and she finds a note in their hotel room that he doesn’t want to leave his dad or his girlfriend.
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In his second book in the Logan Foster series, “The Unforgettable Logan Foster and the Shadow of Doubt,” author Shawn Peters asks readers to consider the power of actual strength, as in super strength, versus the power of the mind. The main character, Logan Foster, starts his narrative by explaining that while he is “a twelve-year-old orphan living on the Westside of Lost Angeles,” he’s halfway through high school because he has an eidetic memory. He tells us, “I’ve retained every word, sound, and image that I’ve seen or heard since I was three.” He also makes it clear that he is writing this narrative for his younger brother, whom he is hoping to find and with whom he hopes to be reunited.
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The question of love—is it something that hits like lightning at first sight or is it something that grows slowly, over time—is one of the issues that Sally Hepworth explores in her newest novel, “The Soulmate.” The other main issue is about trust and how much we can ever trust another person. As in many of her novels, Hepworth plays with the information she provides. The narrative is told from the perspectives of Amanda and Pippa, the two female main characters, with Amanda’s narrative providing “before” and “after” indicators and Pippa’s narrative shared with “now” and “then” labels.
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