“One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother Beverley, thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.” Thus begins Commonwealth, Ann Patchett’s seventh and most autobiographical novel to date. Like its first…
Stuck in your genealogy research?? It happens to everyone! At our October Genealogy Networking Group, we talked about some ways to get unstuck! First, you can find a book and learn more about the area, its history and geography. After this library, you can try Arlington Heights Public Library or even Newberry Library. A great…
“The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.” ― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad Cora, the teenage protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, is an unlikely…
“It occurred to him that no one who hadn’t been in battle could know what things were worth.” ― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven Chris Cleave’s latest book, Everyone Brave is Forgiven, has earned a spot on my list of All-Time Favorites. Based loosely on letters Cleave’s grandfather wrote to his grandmother during…
A private jet ferrying eleven people from Martha’s Vineyard back to New York City one summer night plunges into the water sixteen minutes after takeoff and only two passengers survive----Scott Burroughs, a last-minute add to the flight and the ten-year-old son of another passenger, the head of a controversial television news station about to be…
This summer’s blockbuster beach read, I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh felt to me like Gone Girl if Nicholas Sparks had written it. In a shocking act whose repercussions reverberate through the entire novel, Jenna Gray drives up on a curb and hits and kills a young boy as his mother watches in horror.…
At our recent Genealogy Networking Group, we brainstormed various places we might visit this summer to do some onsite genealogy research. The list below was generated by those who attended this meeting and afterwards I added links to each location's website for those who might be interested in planning a trip. We talked about the…
“And at that moment the alligators burst into the room.” The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman As a spy for the mysterious Invisible Library, Irene has assumed many identities and when we first meet her, she’s working as a housekeeper in a boy’s boarding school. Her job is to find and then ‘harvest’ (because Librarians…
In his most recent book, It’s. Nice. Outside., Jim Kokoris has created a big hot mess of a family traveling to another state for a family wedding. Everything that could go wrong, does and then some. Although this premise could lead to a depressing or sappy book, Kokoris has written a heart-warming, life-affirming, laugh-out-loud story…
If you like time travel, science fiction, mystery and fantasy----I’ve got just the book for you! Aracadia by Iain Pears is the ultimate mash-up of these genres, plus the author has created an app in which readers can select the ending that they’d prefer rather than the one the author chose. This genre-blending page-turner tells…
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