Best Indie Books Of Summer
Summer is in full swing–which means plenty of time to enjoy these exciting indie releases! Whether you find yourself jet setting or enjoying a relaxing staycation, these titles filled with intrigue and mystery will be sure to please!
The T Room by Victoria Lilienthal
After receiving a life-changing opportunity from her mentor and professional partner, Vera, a single mother of a savvy teenager, encounters a dark truth. What seemed like an exciting opportunity turned out to be a deal with the devil, and now she must deal with the consequences of her constant need for male validation. Left to work through the consequences of her actions, she receives help from her daughter, a client, and White Tara, the Tibetan Goddess of compassion. Together, they teach Vera the virtues of a sustainable path to self-authority.
Charles Booker is about to embark on a new adventure: marriage. Blinded by his desire to start a family, Charles manages to trick his bride, Caroline, into a pregnancy she didn’t want, sabotaging his own happiness before it even started. Caroline speaks up and makes a deal with Charles: after the baby is born, she’ll go and travel the world while he stays back and takes care of the baby. And so, a girl name Grace is born into a house divided by toxic resentment and suffocating love, making her struggle more and more with mental health as she grows older.
Long Shadows: A Novel by Abigail Cutter
Tom Smiley, a private in the Confederate army, is left with scars that last even into the afterlife. Filled with regrets and war memories, he is left to be a ghost, deserted in his childhood home unable to forget the bloody war and his role in the Confederate defense of slavery. That is, until Phoebe Hunter and her 21st-century family move in and make his home their own. Tom finds unexpected comfort and alliance with Phoebe, who is fascinated by his ghostly presence—leaving both to face the consequences of each other’s discovery.
Tomboy: A Jane Benjamin Novel by Shelley Blanton-Stroud
In 1939, on the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin has a dream of having it all. By day, she puts on a disguise and works as a tomboy cub reporter. At night, she’s at home struggling to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. It may seem like a dead end, but Jane has other plans. She dreams of becoming the San Francisco Prospect‘s first gossip columnist and making enough money to care for Elsie. While covering her hometown’s tennis phenom and cover girl Tommie O’Rourke, Jane witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of an apparent heart attack, and her plan is thrown off track. Now she must decide: should she write a social bombshell column, personally damaging her new friend Tommie’s persona and career? Or should she work to uncover the truth of Coach’s death and its connection to a larger conspiracy involving US participation in the coming war?
A Week of Warm Weather: A Novel by Lee Bukowski
By all appearances, Tessa Cordelia has a perfect life–a loving husband who’s just opened a dental practice, a beautiful baby girl, a big house in the suburbs, and a large, supportive family. But the truth? Her husband’s constant mistakes make her wonder if the secrets are worth the trouble, and she must decide whether to maintain her silence or reveal them all. He manipulates her into believing their happiness depends on the silence. Determined to maintain the lie that she’s living the perfect life, Tess lies to everyone she knows–except for CeCe, a new neighbor she has grown close to. But after confiding in her, Tessa learns that CeCe has an explosive secret of her own, and her world is further upended.
Hello, Goodbye: A Novel by Kate Stollenwerck
Fifteen-year-old Hailey Rogers believes her summer is ruined when she’s told she will be spending most of her summer helping her grandmother, Gigi, at her home across town. Knowing little about Gigi, she soon learns that Gigi’s life is full of surprises–and family secrets. What seemed to be a ruined summer might just be the best summer in Hailey’s life, until tragedy strikes. Lies are uncovered and Hailey’s life falls to pieces. She decides to take off on a road trip to solve the family mystery with the only person she can trust. In a forgotten Texas town, the past and the present collide–and Hailey is forced to choose what she truly values in life.
The Marriage Box by Corie Adjmi
In New Orleans in the 1970s, Casey Cohen, a sixteen-year-old Middle Eastern Jew, has her world turned upside down by her parents after she gets in trouble for hanging out with the wrong crowd. Until then she had been living a normal teenage life, but now her parents are deciding to return to their roots in the Orthodox Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. Within this new and foreign world, the Marriage Box is a real place, a pool deck designated for teenage girls to put themselves on display for potential husbands. Casey is uninterested in this unfamiliar culture–until she meets Michael. Looking for love and a place to belong, she marries him at eighteen, believing she can adjust to Syrian ways. Soon after she discovers that Michael doesn’t want her to go to college–he wants her to have a baby instead. Can Casey integrate these two opposing worlds, or will she have to leave one behind to find her way?
Make sure to pre-order this 2023 summer must read!
Paloma is dead. But before she was Paloma, she was a healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets. Sent to report on Paloma’s murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. There, Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men. Weaving two parallel narratives that mirror one another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as a storyteller and the writer as a healer and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of hope.
Sinkhole: A Novel by Davida Breier
Michelle Millers, a teenager from a tiny town in Florida, felt isolated and left behind. She found comfort in Sissy, a dynamic and wealthy classmate, and punk rocker Morrison. They seemed to be the perfect high school friend group until one of them ends up dead. After fifteen years in exile, Michelle returns to her hometown, and with her mother in the hospital, she’s forced to reckon with the broken relationships she left behind: with her family, with friends, and with herself. Forced to confront the life she turned her back on so long ago, she begins questioning what was truth and what was lies. Now, at a distance, she begins to see how dangerous Sissy truly was.
Vera Kelly: Lost and Found by Rosalie Knecht
It’s spring 1971 and Vera Kelly and her girlfriend, Max, leave their cozy Brooklyn apartment for an emergency visit to Max’s estranged family in Los Angeles. Max, who hasn’t seen her family since they threw her out at the age of twenty-one, prepares for the trip with equal parts dread and anger. Upon arriving, Vera is shocked by the size and extravagance of the Comstock estate. Tensions boil over at dinner when Max threatens her father’s new future wife. The next morning, when Vera wakes up, Max is gone.
Category: On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
