Susan Wiggs is known for novels with relatable characters and narratives that hook the reader from the start, and her newest novel, “Wayward Girls,” is historical fiction at its best. In this gripping story, we meet young girls who were forced to leave school, their homes, and their families, to work at a Catholic laundry masquerading as a charity home for wayward girls in New York.
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“Far and Away” is as large as life, as its Texas setting might imply, but it’s also filled with art and culture, as one might presume from the other setting in Berlin. Amy Poeppel is an equal opportunity author; she’s brutally frank about the Texas heat in the summer, and she’s equally upfront about culture shock an American might experience in Germany. This novel is touching and tender, but it’s also quirky and filled with misunderstandings and missed opportunities. There’s humor and there’s deception, but most of all there’s love of family.
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Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, and his novels reflect not only his love of that Everglade-filled, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean-bound state, but also his disgust for the crooked politicians and right-wing fanatics who also inhabit the state. His newest novel, “Fever Beach,” is filled with the quirky characters Hiaasen is famous for, as well as an outrageously insane plot that is so very Hiaasen. And we love every minute.
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Catherine Ryan Hyde is the bestselling author of almost fifty books, but her latest novel, “Michael Without Apololgy,” might be her most compelling one. She told me it’s a personal favorite and it’s “special.” (I think she’s guilty of gross understatement.) In this brilliant novel, like so many of her others, after we turn the last page, we have not only shared an incredible journey with the main character, we’ve learned and grown along with him. This novel will stay with you for a long, long time.
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There are three female main characters in Laura Anthony’s “The Women on Platform Two,” and they couldn’t be more different.
The story opens with Saoirse in 2023, finding out that she is not pregnant. She is relieved; her fiancé is not. We quickly learn that while she doesn’t want a child, her fiancé Miles is desperate to have a child with her. They cannot reconcile their differences, and she leaves the apartment after they argue. She accidentally ends up on a train headed for Belfast as she returns a photograph to an elderly woman who dropped it in the station. The train leaves the station before Saoirse can get off, so she joins Maura, the woman who dropped the photograph. Maura is making her yearly pilgrimage to Belfast, and this year she tells Saoirse the story of why, every year on May 22, Maura travels from Dublin to Belfast on this train.
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“The Lotus Shoes” is a novel of old China, set there in the late 1800s. In this engrossing novel, Jane Yang recounts the sometimes-tragic lives of girls and women in a time and place where their lives have no value. Little Flower’s father died when she was six, and her mother was forced to sell her as a slave to a wealthy family in order that Little Flower’s brother not starve to death. She was to be a maidservant to Linjing, the daughter of the family, who was the same age as Little Flower.
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While both these children’s picture books are historical fiction, they are both based on real occurrences. One is based on the actual court case when a Chinese American family wanted to send their daughter to school in California and fought in the courts for that right. The other is based on the experiences of Black women who, after centuries of not having rights, and decades of not being able to vote, finally went to the voting booth.
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The title and cover art of Scott Phillips’ new novel, “The Devil Raises His Own,” suggest that the reader is about to embark on another Phillips noir novel. At the bottom of the scene on the cover is a smoking pistol belching a black miasma that envelops a night-time view of a large, perhaps crime-ridden city neighborhood. But by the time we arrive at chapter two, barely six pages in, we suspect that the cover artist and the novelist are playing tricks on us.
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Christine Wells’ newest historical fiction, “The Paris Gown,” takes us back to the capital of France, where her novel “Sisters of the Resistance” was set. The title gown is a Christian Dior confection, and while the story doesn’t center around the gown itself, the couture dress serves as a symbol of the ties that bind the three main characters, young women, together.
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Jodi Picoult’s masterful new novel, “By Any Other Name,” tackles a question that has been bandied about regarding the most famous of playwrights, William Shakespeare. Did that man, revered for over 400 years, really write the plays with which he is credited? Plays which feature outspoken, feminist women, a Jew who utters an extraordinarily sympathetic speech, and many works which were set in locations that Shakespeare had never visited, like Italy and Denmark.
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Imagine sending an honest letter to those who have wronged you so that after your death, everyone knows how you really felt. Now imagine those heartfelt, very frank letters being sent accidentally before your death. In “One Last Word,” author Suzanne Park imagines that happening to Sara Chae, who has been working on an app she thinks has great potential. But when her honest emails go out to her former employers, her former landlord, her parents, and even a former high school crush, she has a lot to worry about.
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Award-winning author Sarah Beth Durst’s new novel, “The Lies Among Us,” is a bit of a mystery at first. We are taken aback as we meet Hannah, the first person narrator, when she is inside her mother’s casket just before burial. That’s our first clue that Hannah isn’t a flesh-and-blood person. We quickly learn that Hannah’s mother has just died, leaving only Hannah’s sister Leah. And Leah can’t see or hear Hannah, so basically, Hannah is alone for the first time in her life.
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