Novels Now

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Historical Fiction
2009 Amy Einhorn Books
Finished on 3/25/09
Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)
Product Description
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on [...]

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult
Contemporary Fiction
2009 Atria Books
Finished on 2/16/09
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
ARC - Due out on March 3, 2009
Synopsis (from author’s website):
When Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe’s daughter, Willow, is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, they are devastated – she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. As the [...]

The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth
Medical History/Memoir
2009 Penguin
Finished on 4/28/09
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Product Description
An unforgettable story of the joy of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the hope of one extraordinary woman
At the age of twenty-two, Jennifer Worth leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent [...]

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Fiction
2009 Simon & Schuster
Finished on 4/9/09
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!)
Product Description
From the author of the international bestseller Incendiary comes a haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers — one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.
We don’t want to tell you what happens in [...]

 
The Likeness by Tana French
Mystery
2008 Viking
Finished on 2/27/09
Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding!)
Product Description
The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestselling psychological thriller In the Woods
Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She’s transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O’Neill, but she’s too [...]

The Laws of Harmony by Judith Ryan Hendricks
Fiction
Copyright 2009 Harper
Finished on 2/5/09
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!!)
Publisher’s Blurb:
In 1989 Sunny Cooper escaped to Albuquerque. Fourteen years later she’s still there, struggling to make a living, to shore up her floundering relationship, and to forget her childhood on a commune, where a freak accident killed her younger sister, Mari.
Just when the [...]

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
Fiction - Culinary
2009 J. P. Putnam’s Sons
Finished on 3/14/09
Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding!)
Product Description:
Once a month on Monday night, eight students gather in Lillian’s restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has [...]

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Young Adult Fiction
2008 Scholastic Press
Finished on 4/15/09
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!)
Product Description:
Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of [...]

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Fiction
2009 Ballantine Books
Finished on 1/5/09
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
ARC - Due out on January 27, 2009
Publisher’s Blurb
In 1986, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. The hotel has been boarded up for decades, but now a [...]

Wife in the North by Judith O’Reilly
Memoir
2008 Public Affairs Books
Finished on 12/12/08
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Publisher’s Blurb:
Perhaps it was because she was pregnant and hormones had eaten her brain that Judith O’Reilly was persuaded by her husband to leave London for the northern wilds. But pregnancy hadn’t addled her enough not to have a back-up plan: [...]

I don’t usually read “holiday” books, but a couple of weeks ago, as I was helping set one of the Christmas tables at work, I spied the new Lorna Landvik book. The colorful cover caught my eye, so I flipped it open and discovered it’s an epistolary. What perfect timing!! I had just set my new end cap and knew this would be the perfect eye-catching book to sit in the #1 position on the display. Of course, I really like to have read all the books I recommend, so I got a copy and brought it home to read as soon as I finished my current book.

What a treat!! I could have easily read it in an afternoon, but as life seems to go around here, I wound up reading it over the course of two days [...]

The Darker Side by Cody McFadyen
Thriller
2008 Bantam
368 pages
Finished on 8/28/08
Rating: 4.5/5 Very Good
Publisher’s Blurb:
Cody McFadyen has shocked even the most jaded suspense fans with Shadow Man and The Face of Death. Now comes a thriller that outdoes them all, featuring a psychopath on a perverse crusade of murder. And the one woman who can stop [...]

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Contemporary Fiction - Epistolary
2008 The Dial Press
Finished on 7/23/08
Rating: 4.75//5 (Fabulous!)
ARC - Release date of July 29th
“Here’s who will love this book—anyone who nods in profound agreement with the statement,’Reading keeps you from going gaga.’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel [...]

Made in the U.S.A. by Billie Letts
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Grand Central Publishing
Finished on 6/29/08
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fair)
Fate sometimes thought that God was looking out for him and Lutie. The notes left for them, and the food they found on the hood of the car and in the library. All of that came from someone. And if it [...]

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Ballantine Books
Finished on 5/28/08
Rating: 3.5 (Good)
ARC - Due out on June 17
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I [...]

Stone Creek by Victoria Lustbader
Contemporary Fiction
2008 HarperCollins
Finished on 5/18/08
Rating: 3.5 (Good)
Publisher’s Description:
In a small town in upstate New York, a random meeting will offer hope and the chance of love for two lonely people.
Though he still grieves for the young wife he loved and lost, Danny, a widower, knows he must move on for the [...]

The Space Between Before and After by Jean Reynolds Page
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Avon (HarperCollins)
Quit on 5/12/08
Rating: DNF
Product Description

Forty-two and divorced, Holli Templeton has just begun to realize the pleasures of owning her life for the first time. But the experience is short-lived. Her son Conner has unexpectedly fled college in Rhode Island and moved to Texas [...]

Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman
Mystery/Thriller
2008 Ballantine Books
Finished on 5/7/08
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)
Product Description
Once again, the depths of the criminal mind and the darkest side of a glittering city fuel #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman’s brilliant storytelling. And no one conducts a more harrowing and suspenseful manhunt than the modern Sherlock Holmes of the [...]

Summer Blowout by Claire Cook
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Voice (Hyperion)
Finished on 5/2/08
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
ARC - Due out on June 3rd
Book Description
Bella Shaughnessy is addicted to lipstick with names like My Chihuahua Bites and Kiss My Lips, an occupational hazard, since she works as a stylist and makeup artist for her family’s small chain of beauty salons [...]

Keeper and Kid by Edward Hardy
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press)
Finished on 4/29/08
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Publisher’s Blurb
Eight years ago, James Keeper fell in love with his upstairs neighbor in Boston, a sassy pastry chef with gray eyes and a fierce attitude. They got married, found a dog, and shopped for cilantro. But conflicting [...]