Hi everyone, here are our recommended reads for the week!
*More information on the three catalogs and available formats is found at the end of the list of recommended reads*
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Weekly Suggested Reading postings are published on Wednesday.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, November 22, 2023.
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The Adults by Caroline Hulse
(Available Formats: Print Book)
Coparenting is difficult any time of year, but trying to create a happy, memorable Christmas for seven-year-old Scarlett leads Claire and Matt to make seriously questionable choices. No one remembers who suggested the trip to family fun park Happy Forest, but both parents, their new partners, their daughter, and her imaginary friend Posey, a large purple rabbit, are all set to spend the holiday “having fun” together, or not? All the characters are genuinely likable and relatable, especially in their flaws.
VERDICT A snappy writing style and changing viewpoints make the pages of this debut fly by as readers will want to know what happens next. – Starred Library Journal Review
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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(Available Formats: Print Book, CD Audiobook, Libby eAudiobook & Hoopla Instant Checkout eAudiobook)
If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. Unlike his previous works, The 27th City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), which tackled St. Louis and Boston, respectively, this one skips from city to city (New York; St. Jude; Philadelphia; Vilnius, Lithuania) as it follows the delamination of the Lambert family—Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson’s-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking, Eastern-Bloc politician. As in his other novels, Franzen blends these personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.–Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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The Glass Kitchen by Linda Francis Lee
(Available Formats: Print Book & Large Print)
Portia Cuthcart wakes up in her Manhattan apartment with the taste of chocolate cake in her mouth. Recognizing the strange gift that comes in the form of compulsions to bake, mix, boil, or cook any given thing at any given time, she heads to the store to pick up the ingredients. After years of ignoring her cooking talents in favor of being the perfect politician’s wife, Portia is excited and a little scared to know that her gift has come back. With the support of her two older sisters and a terrifyingly handsome investor, Portia begins to make her dream of opening a restaurant in New York City a very real possibility. With shades of The Tempest, Chocolat, and Stepmom, The Glass Kitchen is a story of redemption, rediscovery, and renewal through the marriage of love and food. Lee includes several recipes in this fun addition for book clubs and culinarily minded readers. A tantalizing mix of romance, wit, and family secrets, it will leave fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Erin McGraw, and Sophie Kinsella hungry for more. – Booklist Review
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The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, Libby eAudiobook)
Lombardo’s impressive debut follows the Sorenson clan—physician David, wife Marilyn, and their four daughters: Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace—through the 1970s to 2017. David and Marilyn raised the family in a rambling suburban Chicago house that belonged to Marilyn’s father. The daughters find varying degrees of success in their professional lives but fail to find the passion and romance that their parents continue to have in their own marriage. Wendy is a wealthy widow with a foul mouth and a drinking problem. Violet is a former lawyer turned stay-at-home mother of two young sons. At 32, Liza is a tenured professor with a depressive boyfriend. The baby of the family, 20-something Grace, is the only one of the daughters to have moved away, and now lives in Oregon. The daughters’ lives are in various stages of tumult: Wendy locates Jonah, the teenage son Violet gave up for adoption years prior; Violet struggles to integrate Jonah into her perfectly controlled life; Liza is shocked to discover she is pregnant; and Grace lies about being in law school after she was rejected. Lombardo captures the complexity of a large family with characters who light up the page with their competition, secrets, and worries. Despite its length and number of plotlines, the momentum never flags, making for a rich and rewarding family saga. – Publishers Weekly Review
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The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie
(Available Formats: Print Book & Hoopla Instant Checkout eAudiobook)
An endearing young woman arrives into adulthood intact, despite a histrionic mother who chose to name her daughter after a somewhat obscure social scientist. Veblen’s coping skills involve a love of typing and of the natural world, especially the squirrels that live near her cottage in Palo Alto, CA. Paul, the neurologist to whom she is engaged, has family issues as well: he grew up in a commune where behavioral boundaries were lax and where his disabled brother commanded attention. In Paul’s lab at Stanford University, he invents a device that minimizes brain trauma in combat situations, and a large medical corporation entices him to join its ranks. From there, everything goes awry. Amid all the craziness, Veblen’s innate sweetness and relative groundedness keep this large cast of characters from spinning out of orbit.
VERDICT McKenzie (MacGregor Tells the World) skewers modern American culture while quoting from a panoply of voices, with Frank Zappa, Robert Reich, and, of course, Thorstein Veblen among them. The result is a wise and thoroughly engaging story in a satirical style comparable to the works of Christopher Moore and Carl Hiaasen. – Library Journal Review
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The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky
(Available Formats: Print Book)
In the sleek and polished third novel by the author of Bad Marie, aspiring novelist Leah receives the bequest of the titular vehicle from her former boss Judy, killed when a driver runs a red light. Leah, 33 and unhappily married to the perhaps too-conveniently villainous Hans, whom she married when they were both graduate students and he needed a green card, takes off from Queens for San Francisco to retrieve the car. There follows a series of surreal adventures with old coworkers, a college friend “worth insane amounts of money,” a hippie mechanic, and a motel receptionist, as Leah begins to imagine the possibility of a happier future for herself. Dermansky’s short, punchy chapters keep the tightly written novel moving smoothly along, and flashbacks to her past add depth without slowing momentum. When fantasy elements—such as the fact that Leah constantly hears the deceased Judy talking to her, as well as the alleged “haunting” of a car that wants its drivers to exceed the speed limit—threaten to steer the novel off course, the author brings it sharply back in line with snappy dialogue and a great ending. – Publishers Weekly Review
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The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, CD Audiobook & Libby eAudiobook)
A recently married couple new to a New England college town purchases one-half of a double house because Nathan, a history professor, is thrilled to learn that the other half is owned by the famous, now retired senator Tom Naughton. But it seems that Delia, the senator’s wife, lives alone. In her seventies, she is glamorous, charming, considerate, and armored to the teeth. Nathans sly, smart, and moody wife, Meri, unnerved by her accidental pregnancy, becomes rather too intrigued with her secretive neighbor. Best-selling and impeccably literary Miller shrewdly contrasts the high drama of Delia and Toms epically difficult marriage with the newlywed’s raw skirmishes, creating characters of intense interest and infusing everything thing they do with a kaleidoscopic array of meanings. Miller not only sharply illuminates the paradoxes of family life the difficulty of sustaining one’s autonomy in marriage, complicated love for one’s children, brutal shifts in power, the grimness of old age she also takes an askance view of Clintonian Washington and tests the thin membrane between private and public lives as she weighs the marathon demands on a politician’s spouse. Millers remarkable grasp of both grand passion and the consolation of the daily makes this an incandescent tale of betrayal and the perpetual divide between men and women, and a galvanizing novel of lifes imperative to use yourself up. – Starred Booklist Review
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, CD Audiobook, Libby eBook & eAudiobook)
Mathis’s remarkable debut traces the life of Hattie Shepherd through the eyes of her offspring, depicting a family whose members are distant, fiercely proud, and desperate for connection with their mother. When 16-year-old Hattie’s newborn twins, her first with husband August, die from pneumonia in the winter of 1925, it is a devastation that will disfigure her for the rest of her life. As the novel moves from closeted musician Floyd’s fearful attempt to love another man in 1948, to Six’s flight to Alabama two years later after beating a boy nearly to death, Alice’s rift with her brother Billups in the late 1960s, consumptive Bell’s aborted suicide in 1975, and Cassie’s descent into schizophrenia in the early 1980s, what ties these lives together is a longing for tenderness from the mother they call the General. Strong, angry Hattie despairs as August, an ineffectual though affectionate father, reveals himself to be a womanizer who is incapable of supporting the family. Hattie finds happiness with Lawrence, a gambler; after having his baby, Hattie leaves August and her other children and goes with Lawrence to Baltimore, but returns to the house on Wayne Street, in Philadelphia, almost immediately. Sick with longing for her dead twins and all that her children will never have, Hattie retreats into coldness. As her children age, they come to terms with their intense need for and resentment of the mother who kept them alive but starved their hearts, while Hattie faces a choice between anger and peace. Mathis weaves this story with confidence, proving herself a gifted and powerful writer. Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, Libby eBook, Hoopla eBook & eAudiobook)
Chinese immigrant Charles Wang made a fortune with his cosmetics empire. His three children and their stepmother had all they could want, including a palatial home in Bel Air, CA. Then things came crashing down. Soon the family must travel in a rickety old car to New York in order to move in with eldest daughter, Saina, an artist. En route they have an accident that brings them closer as they become better acquainted. Chang’s clever minibiographies of each family member are informative and enjoyable. “Baby” Grace is the warmest, while middle child Andrew is sweet and hesitant. The siblings’ banter is charming and illustrates how well they relate. Once he reaches New York, Charles decides to follow his dream of returning to China to reclaim his ancestral land. After he’s admitted to a Chinese hospital, the family travels to see him. It’s apparent their bond is stronger than ever. Debut author Chang leaves it to readers to interpret the conclusion in their own way. VERDICT Fans of sweeping family sagas will be rewarded. – Library Journal Review
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print & Libby eBook)
What is the boundary between human and animal beings and what happens when that boundary is blurred are two of many questions raised in Fowler’s provocative sixth novel (The Jane Austen Book Club, 2004, etc.), the narration of a young woman grieving over her lost sister, who happens to be a chimpanzee. Rosemary recounts her family history at first haltingly and then with increasingly articulate passion. In 1996, she is a troubled student at U.C. Davis who rarely speaks out loud. She thinks as little as possible about her childhood and the two siblings no longer part of her family. But during a Thanksgiving visit home to Bloomington, Ind., where her father is a psychology professor, that past resurfaces. Rosemary recalls her distress as a 5-year-old when she returned from visiting her grandparents to find her family living in a new house and her sister Fern gone. Denying any memory of why Fern disappeared, she claims to remember only the aftermath: her mother’s breakdown; her father’s withdrawal; her older brother Lowell’s accelerating anger until he left the family at 18 to find Fern and become an animal rights activist/terrorist; her own continuing inability to fit in with human peers. Gradually, Rosemary acknowledges an idyllic earlier childhood when she and Fern were inseparable playmates on a farm, their intact family shared with psych grad students. By waiting to clarify that Fern was a chimpanzee, Rosemary challenges readers to rethink concepts of kinship and selfhood; for Rosemary and Lowell, Fern was and will always be a sister, not an experiment in raising a chimpanzee with human children. And when, after 10 years of silence, Lowell shows up in Davis to describe Fern’s current living conditions, he shakes free more memories for Rosemary of her sibling relationship with Fern, the superior twin she loved, envied and sometimes resented. Readers will forgive Fowler’s occasional didacticism about animal experimentation since Rosemary’s voice–vulnerable, angry, shockingly honest–is so compelling and the cast of characters, including Fern, irresistible. A fantastic novel: technically and intellectually complex, while emotionally gripping. – Starred Kirkus Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Have questions or want to request a book?
Feel free to call the library! Our telephone number is 607-936-3713.
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the three library catalogs
Digital Catalog: https://stls.overdrive.com/
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, Downloadable Audiobooks, digital magazines and a handful of streaming videos. The catalog, which allows one to download content to a PC, also has a companion app, Libby, which you can download to your mobile device; so you can enjoy eBooks and Downloadable Audiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
The Hoopla Catalog features instant checkouts of eBooks, Downloadable Audiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV series. Patron check out limit is 6 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla App is available for Android or Apple devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
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Format Note: Under each book title you’ll find a list of all the different formats that specific title is available in; including: Print Books, Large Print Books, CD Audiobooks, eBooks & Downloadable Audiobooks from the Digital Catalog (Libby app) and Hoopla eBooks & Hoopla Downloadable Audiobooks (Hoopla app).
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Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 