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Ryan (The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir) again focuses on women braving the dangers of WWII in this exciting tale of espionage and love. In 1941, Mrs. Braithwaite is stripped of her vaunted village position as the leader of the Women’s Voluntary Service for being too bossy. Mrs. Braithwaite, a woman of more gusto than height, heads to London to reconnect with her daughter, Betty, who she hasn’t seen in two years. But when she gets to Betty’s boarding house, no one has seen her in days; she also hasn’t been to work at her listed employment for years. As Mrs. Braithwaite searches for answers, she makes a reluctant companion of Mr. Norris, Betty’s landlord and a timid accountant who is worried Betty might be in trouble. Soon they discover Betty is working for British intelligence, and Mrs. Braithwaite and Mr. Norris become embroiled in a plot to root out Nazi-sympathizers in London. Mrs. Braithwaite shakes up Mr. Norris’s life in unexpected, welcome ways as they form an unlikely friendship and almost get Betty captured while she is working undercover. With its eccentric, believable characters and plot of home front intrigue, this delightful drama will appeal to fans of Martha Hall Kelly. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Weiner brilliantly crafts this heartwrenching multigenerational tale of love, loss, and family, which is partly inspired by Little Women. As sisters Jo and Bethie Kaufman move into a new home in Detroit in 1951, they are excited by all of the possibilities it offers—then their beloved father dies. Bethie, the “perfect” child, is repeatedly molested by her father’s younger brother, which drives her into an eating disorder and later into drug use. Jo, a daddy’s girl who epically clashes with her mother, realizes early on that she prefers to date women, but after her girlfriend marries a man, Jo likewise finds a husband and bears three daughters. Eventually, both sisters follow their hearts, even when it’s tremendously difficult. Weiner’s talent for characterization, tight pacing, and detail will thrill her fans and easily draw new ones into her orbit. Her expert handling of difficult subjects—abortion, rape, and racism among them—will force readers to examine their own beliefs and consider unexpected nuances. Weiner tugs every heartstring with this vivid tale. Agent: Joanna Pulcini, Joanna Pulcini Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Shalvis’s sensuous third Wildstone contemporary romantic novel (after Rainy Day Friends) reunites former lovers. Brooke Lemon lives in Los Angeles and is a producer of documentaries. When Brooke’s older sister, Mindy, shows up at her door after a year out of contact, Brooke is stunned. Normally very put together, Mindy is disheveled and has her three young children with her. She recites a litany of woes, including business troubles, potty training, and the disappearance of her sex life. Brooke offers to take Mindy’s children so Mindy can stay in L.A. for a few days and get some much-needed rest. Mindy agrees, and Brooke takes her niece and nephews back to Mindy’s house in their hometown of Wildstone, on California’s central coast. As Brooke bonds with the kids, she reunites with Garrett Montgomery, the boyfriend she left behind seven years before after a helicopter crash that caused her to miscarry their baby. Though she has never forgotten Garrett, she knows that her departure devastated him. Brooke and Garrett’s discovery that their attraction is stronger than ever leads them to explore getting back together. Flawed, believable characters and plenty of sizzling love scenes make this an enjoyable outing. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Russell’s latest historical, a carefully researched rendering of the Copper Country strike of 1913–1914, pays meticulous attention to detail that is often fascinating but occasionally tedious. Charlie Miller comes to Calumet, a company town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to organize the local copper miners, and his rhetoric inspires idealistic Annie Clements to lead the Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners, Local 15, despite her husband’s disapproval. After a worker is fatally injured—an all-too-common event—the miners vote to strike. As weeks turn into months, the Women’s Auxiliary works tirelessly to keep the miners and their families fed and clothed and to keep everyone’s spirits up. The painstakingly comprehensive narrative and omniscient point of view make for a deliberate pace, but they also ensure readers completely understand what happened. The tale is often bleak, but it serves as a worthwhile counterpoint to historical writing centered on “great men.” Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich, & Bourret. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this magical novel, Bauermeister (The School of Essential Ingredients) transports readers to a secluded island in the Pacific Northwest where a girl is raised alone by her father. Emmeline has always lived alone with her scientist father on an island where he collects and studies scents that he preserves in small glass bottles. Emmeline is completely shut off from the modern world and believes mermaids bring them supplies. That fantasy is shattered when Emmeline sees a man named Henry leaving packages on the beach, and, angry about having been lied to, she begins throwing her father’s vials over a bluff. Her father plunges to his death trying to recover one special vial. In the book’s second part, with the help of Henry and his wife, Colette, Emmeline, now a teenager, clumsily navigates her new reality living in a small coastal town outside Vancouver. While Emmeline adjusts to simple things such as using a stove, she helps Henry run his boardinghouse, starts studying with Colette, and yearns for the scents locked in her father’s vials. As she gets older, she slowly begins to uncover the past her father had been desperately been trying to seal away. Blending fantasy with a realist family drama, Bauermeister’s novel will enchant fans of Katherine Paterson. (May)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Haller’s debut is a fast-moving ensemble story of an emotionally turbulent summer in a small town, where hormonal teenagers attend a close-knit Vacation Bible School at New Life evangelical church. In Grover Falls, N.Y., 15-year-old Laura Swanson has secretly begun an online relationship with a middle-aged man; her best friend, Bethany, has become attached to someone new; and Laura’s divorced mother, April, has been behaving strangely. Meanwhile, the handsome, brooding musician Paul Frazier has returned to town after finishing college. He’s put off by his mother’s unexpected attachment to the New Life Center, but he begrudgingly agrees to work there as the sound mixer for the worship band. The lives of the children and adults intersect in different ways—April has an affair with a younger man, while Laura sets up an in-person meeting with the man she’s been talking to online—in and out of the church, throughout a summer spent discovering secrets of lifelong friends and adjusting to new interlopers. Haller’s engaging story skillfully portrays how different generations grapple with faith, as well as the temptations of substance use and sexual exploration. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Harrison’s satisfactory debut follows a woman’s life as it’s turned upside down during a summer spent on Long Island. In 1938, Beatrice Bordeaux and her banker husband, Harry, arrive in Montauk, Long Island, where Beatrice will spend the summer while Harry works in New York City during the week, returning for weekends. All of the wealthy socialites have routines and expectations of their peers, planning parties and indulging themselves with fancy foods and expensive clothes. But Beatrice, a country girl, takes solitary bike rides and becomes enamored of the small, beautiful fishing village. Its kindhearted residents serve the elites staying at the Montauk Manor hotel, and the handsome, down-to-earth Thomas Brown, who tends the lighthouse, is especially intriguing to Beatrice. She’s determined to stay faithful to her husband, despite a coolness that has arisen in their marriage, until she learns he has been busy with more than his work back in the city. More details of the era would’ve added much-needed texture to the story; instead, the novel feels like it could be set at any time (with the language often sounding contemporary). Still, readers looking for a story with a strong lead will find one here. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

In her thoughtful, compassionate latest, Keane (Fever) traces two families’ shared history over the course of four decades. When Brian Stanhope and Francis Gleeson meet in 1973, they forge the kind of quick, close-knit friendship that can arise from shared trials—in their case, the pressures of being rookie cops in a tough Bronx precinct. When both young men marry and plan to have children, they purchase neighboring homes in the fictional suburb of Gillam, hoping the 20-mile commute to the city will provide a sufficient buffer between the grind of police work and the pleasures of family life. All is not well in suburbia, however—although Francis’s youngest daughter, Kate, and Brian’s only son, Peter, become fast friends, tensions between the two families eventually flare into violence fueled by alcoholism and untreated mental illness. Years later, Kate and Peter grasp a chance for a hesitant new beginning, despite their fears about recapitulating the past. The two families’ stories offer a visceral portrait of evolving attitudes toward mental health and addiction over the past 40 years. More generally, Keane’s novel, which unfolds through overlapping narratives, illustrates the mutability of memory and the softening effects of time. “We repeat what we don’t repair,” Keane writes, and Kate and Peter’s story poignantly demonstrates how grace can emerge from forgiveness, no matter how hard-won. (June)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Knight (Eveningland) follows a cast of unhappily struggling characters in this superior boarding school novel set in 1994 Virginia. Junior Lenore Littlefield reels from her parents’ messy divorce and has told no one at Briarwood School For Girls she is pregnant. As punishment for missing curfew too many times, she is drafted into the Drama Club’s production of the reclusive alumna Eugenia Marsh’s provocative play about a pregnant Briarwood student who communes with the ghost of a schoolgirl suicide victim. The play, incongruously directed by no-nonsense basketball coach Patricia Fink, aligns with real life as Lenore and her roommate use a Ouija board to contact the ghost haunting their dorm. Lenore confides her pregnancy in history teacher Lucas Bishop, who keeps his promise to remain silent but becomes a focus of ire from the administration when he presents vocal opposition to Disney’s (real) plans to develop an American history amusement park near Manassas Battlefield. In the swirl of these crises, the characters make calm but radical plans to combat their personal disappointments. Knight’s characters are memorable and nuanced—a credit to his sharp, skillful writing. This is a stunning novel with a hint of the supernatural that’s sure to delight readers. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink

Nutt’s exhilarating and exhausting debut follows Shaker, a grifter and failed musician still reeling from the treachery of his ex-wife, who left him and became a rock star. Somewhere in Ohio, he operates a riding mower like a renegade cowboy for a lawn service run by black-marketeering militiamen brothers, and cavorts with his mischievous, murderous cousin, Darb, competing with him as they construct works of art from garbage. Unknown persons are systematically destroying Shaker’s life to avenge some havoc he caused but has no memory of, and after they bulldoze part of the duplex he’s been living in, he’s scooped up and relocated to a ghostly McMansion by the strawberry-blond wife of a stroke victim who impersonates Shaker’s celebrity wife at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Way beyond weary of his rebellion against whatever it is he is rebelling against—heartbreak perhaps—Shaker represents Nutt’s vision of the aftermath of the vaporized American dream. (The novel might be called dystopian if it ever looked up from Shaker’s navel.) With its slash-and-burn attitude toward standard syntax and constant stream of brilliant sentences, this is a singular, energetic work. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2019 | Details & Permalink