RECOMMENDED READS
The Housekeeper’s Secret: A Memoir, Sandra Schnakenburg
For fans of stranger than truth stories, Sandy Schnakenburg is uncovering rattling and unprecedented revelations in this powerful memoir of love, secrets, and survival.
When Lee Metoyer is hired to be the new housekeeper, she has no idea that she’s about to become the anchor to a family in an abusive patriarch’s home, setting a mystery in motion that will take decades to uncover. At the age of seventy-two, Lee falls ill and on her deathbed asks Sandy to write her story. The only problem is, Sandy doesn’t know the story.
Embarking on a quest to honor Lee’s final wishes, Sandy takes an emotional and thrilling journey, unveiling shocking truths not only about her beloved housekeeper but also her own upbringing. As she digs further, she learns that Lee came to her family’s sprawling estate in Barrington, IL, harboring a secret past. For decades, she’s been in hiding. But Lee is not the only one with secrets; Sandy’s quest forces her to grapple with her own family history as well, and to finally confront the effects of the psychological abuse she suffered as a child.
BUY HERE
NOT YOURS TO KEEP, Zelly Ruskin
Called a “sensational debut” by Rea Frey, this psychological thriller delves into themes of reproductive rights and healthcare, confronting the complexities that define family—or the risks that lose it all.
Billie Campbell, a Massachusetts adoption specialist grappling with fertility issues, dreams of adopting a baby, but not just any baby—her pregnant client’s baby. While her longing threatens to send her down a dark path, her husband, Tyler, is keeping secrets: he’s full of doubts about becoming a father, and he’s also trying to figure out who is sending him upsetting anonymous texts and photos. On the other side of town, Anne, a woman scarred by childhood abuse, obsesses with a second chance at becoming a family with the two people she regrets ever having let go of: the baby she gave up for adoption twenty years ago and the man of her dreams.
Their lives become entangled when the client’s newborn is abducted, and Billie becomes a prime suspect.
Amid the chaos unleashed by the abduction, Tyler uncovers a link between the person tormenting him and the abduction—but now Billie has disappeared too. The race to find both her and the baby is on; but will they find them before it’s too late?
BUY HERE
SON OF A BASQUE, Deborah Driggs
After the sudden death of his father, young Mark Vergara, the oldest son of immigrant parents, was thrust into the role of principal breadwinner, working hard in the beet fields of Colorado to support his family. After joining the Army Air Corps and flying dozens of combat missions, he bore the physical and emotional scars of his time in the service, yet he was satisfied he had fulfilled his father’s final wish that he do right by his family. From World War II to the Vietnam War, this tale of a military man who was also a devoted family man is based on the author’s own experiences as a proud son of immigrant parents, a distinguished soldier, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend.
BUY HERE
From a cognitive psychologist, a trusted voice among millennial women, a call to action for readers everywhere to enter their true self-care era that will nourish and sustain them.
Toxic self-care culture tells women that bubble baths and Botox are the route to happiness and fulfillment. Though these types of self-care can fill us up in the moment, they cannot provide long-lasting nourishment. They are empty calories—the potato chips of self-care. And from them, we can never get full. In the same way, we will not feel fulfilled by reaching for the empty calorie “self-care” trends that toxic, capitalistic self-care culture sells us. To fill our exhausted bodies and weary minds, to live fully and authentically, we need the kind of self-care that nourishes.
Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a call to action for women everywhere to reach instead for nourishing self-care. Though this may sound easy in theory, many women struggle to carry it out. We struggle because we have forgotten how to reach. Our training as little girls taught us that it is polite to be grateful for what we get. To say thank you but I’m full when offered second helpings. To accept the potato chips we are given because there are people on this planet who have none, so how dare we ask for more?
Through the narrative voice of a psychologist who is also an exhausted millennial mom trying to keep it all together, Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips explores courageous self-care in the areas of marriage, motherhood, family dynamics, friendships, career life, and mental health. The author’s personal stories range from the hilariously-yet-painfully relatable to the resonantly heart-rending. Each of these stories—the beautiful, the sparkling, the sad and the chaotic—teach women something about what it means to reach. What it means to stop settling for potato chips and to instead grasp for the things that truly fulfill. Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a mindset—a way of embracing and stepping into all of our divine, feminine power.
BUY HERE
Night Of The Hawk: Poems, Lauren Martin
When I have wandered long enough what am I still beholden to?
Ifá. Nature. Illness. Love. Loss. Misogyny. Aging. Africa. Our wounded planet. In this sweeping yet intensely personal collection, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabled—the different. Inspired by her life’s experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live apart—even as one yearns for connection.
But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiant—“Oh heat me and fill me / I rise above lines”—and full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular quest: to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning.
BUY HERE
DEAR BOBBY: MY GRIEF JOURNEY, Diane Papalia Zappa
In Dear Bobby, Diane Papalia Zappa describes the loss of her beloved husband after three short years of marriage. She talks about her own grieving process and outlines ways that can help others cope. The centerpiece of this book is a collection of several “Dear Bobby” letters that helped Diane process her grief and reestablish her relationship with her husband. She offers several writing prompts to encourage readers to begin their own writing journey. Diane also includes a helpful selection of resources—books about death, grief, and the afterlife; films with afterlife themes; and support groups for those who are grieving.
BUY HERE
CHARMED, Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
Charmed “addresses a range of difficult issues” and is “engaging…full of drama…a compelling love story with flawed characters and complex family dynamics.”
~Kirkus Reviews
Prisca Weld expected to become Mrs. Nick Fontaine before any of her friends walked down the aisle. Nick worked for her father’s lucrative construction business, and he and Prisca planned to start a family in her upscale Brooklyn neighborhood. But she’s heading into her late twenties, and she hasn’t achieved her most cherished goals.
Years ago, Nick abruptly abandoned Prisca and ran home to Las Vegas, leaving her with nothing but questions about what went wrong between them. Since then, she has struggled to forget him, and she hasn’t found anyone she can love as much as she loved Nick. All the best men seem to be out of reach—including Tim Aldrich, a family friend who has recently returned to New York after launching his career in California. Prisca has been drawn to Tim since they were kids, although she believes her attraction to him is as futile now as it was then.
But she still hopes to fulfill her dreams, and she also wishes she could resolve the endless conflict between her traditional father and her unconventional brother, whose childhood scars from his and Prisca’s parents’ contentious divorce are still fresh. Prisca has wounds of her own, and she tries to heal them while attempting to unravel old secrets that have been hidden for too long.
BUY HERE
The Starlets, Lee Kelly, Jennifer Thorne
One perfect island. Two rivals. A star-studded cast.
But underneath the glitter, disaster is brewing.
Summer, 1958. Vivienne Rhodes thinks she’s finally landed her break playing Helen of Troy in Apex Pictures’ big-budget epic, A Thousand Ships, an anticipated blockbuster meant to resurrect the failing studio. Naturally, she’s devastated when she arrives on the remote Italian island of Tavalli and finds herself cast as the secondary character, Cassandra—while her nemesis, the fiancé-stealing Lottie Lawrence, America’s supposed “sweetheart,” is playing the lead role instead.
The tension on set, though, turns deadly when the ladies discover that members of the crew are using the production as a front for something decidedly illegal—and that they are willing to kill to keep their dealings under wraps. When the two women find themselves on the run and holding key evidence, Vivienne and Lottie frantically agree to work together to deliver the proof to Interpol, hoping to protect both their lives and their careers.
Staying one step ahead of corrupt cops and looming mobsters, the archrivals flee across the seas. Their journey leads them into Monaco’s casinos, Grace Kelly’s palace, on a road trip through the Alps—even onto another film set, before a final showdown back on Tavalli, where the lives of the entire cast and crew hang in the balance. Vivienne and Lottie finally have the chance to be real heroines—to save the day, the film, maybe even each other—but only if they can first figure out how to share the spotlight.
BUY HERE
Cold War in a Hot Kitchen: A memoir of mid-century Melbourne, Margaret Ann Spence
The 1950s. Boring?
Hardly.
An influx of European refugees, stirrings of feminism, and the threat of a third world war were remaking Australia. As the Cold War chilled, inside a Melbourne house a young girl was caught in the crossfire of domestic conflict amid the clashing political and social values of her autocratic grandmother, her self-denying mother, and her glamorous aunt; three women who presented very different models of womanhood.
BUY HERE
Beyond Blood: How Being a Foster Brother Shattered My World and Rebuilt It, Michelle Snyder, Ben Snyder
When five-year-old Ben’s family decided to become a registered foster home, they knew it would be a tough but rewarding road ahead of them. What they may not have fully anticipated was the judgment coming at them from so many directions. Ben and his younger sister and parents were the picture of a biological nuclear family. Many in their circle insisted that bringing foster children into Ben and Annabelle’s lives would significantly harm their childhood. But these assumptions, which followed the family throughout their journey, couldn’t have been further from the truth.
In Beyond Blood, written by mother-son duo Michelle and Ben Snyder, Jr., you will get an inside look at what it really means for a family to open their home and their hearts to children who are facing unthinkable hardships. The descriptive and engaging narrative, penned from the perspective of young Ben as he grew up in that household, explores the broad range of emotions and experiences that come along with becoming a foster family. It’s true—the Snyders made many sacrifices by taking in kids who faced profound difficulties physically, emotionally, and mentally as a result of their life experiences. But those challenges were unmatched by the boundless growth and love the family gained by stepping into the unknown.
Crafting a soul-stirring mosaic of darkness and light, crushing pain and unrelenting hope, Beyond Blood captures all the pieces—from the jagged and ugly to the soft and pretty—that make up humanity. Ultimately, it’s a life-giving, restorative, healing book that will prompt you to consider making a radical change to put others first. You may think you’re average, but you are capable of extraordinary things if you open your heart to those in need. And that’s what Beyond Blood is all about.
BUY HERE
Murder without a Duck: A Simpato Mystery, Book 1, Claudia H. Long
Gossip, secrets, intrigue, and cannabis cookies-selling nuns? Welcome to Simpato, California where mysteries unfold and ducks roam free.
Sal, a recently divorced and temporarily suspended lawyer relocates to the small town of Simpato in Northern California to her parents’ old home, vacant since their deaths. Looking for privacy, a reprieve from her life, and a fresh start, instead she’s quickly immersed into the small-town gossip mill of characters who all know more about her than she does of them. When a murder happens minutes from the spot where she is hiking, Sal finds herself dangerously plunged into the epicenter of the town’s long-held hometown secrets.
Wine, gossip, intrigue, and cannabis-cookie-selling-nuns thrive in abundance in Simpato, California, along with plenty of awful duck puns! All Sal has to do is survive.
BUY HERE
THE LAST AGENT, Sharon Maas
As the bombs rained down on Paris, my family fled before the Nazis could take us. I never thought I’d see my beloved home again. But I’ve come back to fight for the people I love. And now, I’m the last agent standing. The freedom of the world rests on my shoulders.
Paris, 1940. As Nazi soldiers march down the Champs Elysees, Noor’s heart is shattered. Her family is forced to flee their home to the safety of England, and as Noor watches the French coast disappear in the distance, she vows to do everything she can to stop Germany from devouring her beloved country.
Training as a wireless operative in England, Noor’s perfect French makes her the ideal candidate for undercover work in her beloved Paris, and she is soon assigned to an illustrious spy network led by a mysterious man named Prosper.
Day after day, Noor walks the treacherous streets of Paris looking for safe places to broadcast messages to London. But Nazi officers lurk around every corner, and Noor’s heart thunders in her chest as she evades detection, tightly clutching the briefcase containing her radio equipment. She knows it would take just one stop and search for her life to be over.
With each passing day her mission becomes more lethal as, one by one, her fellow agents are captured. Someone is betraying them, but who? And when Noor becomes the last agent in the network, can she keep the links with England alive, to help win the war?
BUY HERE
THOUGHT SNOB, Paula Swope
Are you tired of living a mediocre life? Do you want to find a way to rid yourself of guilt and inner turmoil? Does your soul tell you that you’re destined for greatness, but your mind is telling you that’s impossible?
In Thought Snob, author Paula Swope shows you how to create the life you truly deserve through the amazing power that dwells within you: your thoughts.
After years of trauma, abuse and endless struggle, Paula learned how to transform her life and now she’s sharing it with you in her trademark down-to-earth style, filled with humor, compassion and plenty of personal life stories. Through Paula’s extraordinary ‘Thought S.N.O.B.’ process, you’ll learn how to See New Objective Beliefs to help move you out of havoc and into happiness.
In addition to her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Paula is a Chopra-certified meditation instructor, Ayurveda specialist, and Total Well-Being Life Coach. Everything she did to escape scarcity and achieve abundance is embedded in each chapter. You’ll learn how to…
- Reverse Disempowering Subconscious Beliefs
- Be Respected, Loved, and Appreciated
- Attract What You Want
- Live a Longer, Healthier Life
- Eliminate Toxic People, Places, and Things
This book offers the highest quality coaching you could ever receive from the comfort of your own home. Within one month of using Paula’s techniques, you won’t recognize yourself because you’ll have gone from self-loathing to self-love, and the people who have treated you poorly will wish they hadn’t.
BUY HERE
Adventures on Land and Sea: Searching for Culinary Pleasures in Provence and along the Cote d’Azur, Carole Bumpus
Fans of Peter Mayle and Janine Marsh will enjoy this exploration of medieval villages, cultures, and recipes of France’s Provence. This travelogue is Book 4 in the author’s best-selling series, which has won the IPPY gold medal for Best Culinary Travel Series.
Join Carole Bumpus, her husband, Winston, and their friends in Book Four of Savoring the Olde Ways, her culinary-travel series. Following in the footsteps of writer Peter Mayle, Bumpus is on a quest to find the real Provençe. On three separate excursions—from Nice to Nîmes, Moustiers to Marseilles, and San Tropez to San Remy—and while sailing along the Côte d’Azur, she invites you to join her in uncovering the mysteries of Provençe. Are they hidden within their myths, festivals, or traditions? Is it possible they’re veiled in the sheer beauty of the land and sea? Could they be concealed in Roman arenas in Arles, Orange, or Glanum? Or, perhaps, within the ancient methods of traditional cooking or winemaking? Maybe they are hidden in plain sight among the locals who open their hearts, their bistros, and homes to strangers.
Yes, you may find it in chefs while cooking in ancient kitchens, in the smile of the shy barmaid who speaks no English, in the giggle of the Pizza Wagon baby, in the agreeable village baker, or in the patient waiter and harbor master—but you will most especially experience it through friends who fling open their doors to share their families’ recipes. Traveling alongside Bumpus, that is where you’ll discover the real Provençe.
BUY HERE
THE SILENT COUNT, E.A. Smiroldo
She’s determined to stop climate change before it’s too late…
Nuclear engineer Dara Bouldin’s life is a mess. She’s paying off her dad’s gambling debts, reeling from a broken engagement, and practically invisible at the energy research agency where she works. Meanwhile, her ex Jericho’s latest single is racing up the charts and her handsome new colleague Dmitri is friendly with everyone but her.
All around them, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters have become the norm. But Dara has an audacious plan to reverse climate change, if only someone would listen.
Little does she know, someone at the CIA has been paying attention. And when the public demands action, Dara gets the chance to turn her dream into reality, with the blessings of Congress and the President. Things are looking up.
That is until she discovers a secret that thrusts her into the center of a global conflict that could rewrite history, in dire ways she never intended. Things are going to change, big time. And the countdown has already begun.
Be careful what you wish for, Dara.
BUY HERE
Falling Star: Book Three in the Rise and Fall of Dani Truehart Series, Michele Kwasniewski
Minutes before her scheduled performance at the party for her third album, sixteen-year-old pop sensation Dani Truehart regains consciousness amid the smoking wreckage of a car accident, the crumbled body of a cyclist splayed on the ground. Moments after the accident, Dani’s manager, Jenner Redman, reaches the scene and his impulsive decision sets in motion a chain of events that will have catastrophic consequences for everyone in the starlet’s orbit.
Later, when scandal threatens to destroy the dazzling career of the world’s most beloved pop star, Dani must choose between accepting responsibility for her disastrous choices, possibly destroying her fame and fortune, or sacrificing those who made her famous and everyone she loves to preserve the stardom she has spent her entire life working to achieve.
BUY HERE
The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique, Amanda Cachia
The Agency of Access examines how access can be employed as a methodology for curating art exhibitions using a multi-sensorial approach. Crip curator and art historian Amanda Cachia illustrates how bodies take in information and process stimuli, making the inequities in museums and galleries more transparent. She also argues that, as contemporary disabled artists move away from representations of disability, they create an art of access, or access aesthetics, through works that center translation, sensory expansion, touch, and movement for audiences and offer an experience of “being with” disability.
Showcasing artwork by contemporary disabled artists Corban Walker, Christine Sun Kim, and Carmen Papalia, among others, The Agency of Access inscribes contemporary disability art in the broad canon of contemporary art, where the artistic past is regarded differently.
Cachia is an outspoken advocate for artists living with sensory disabilities. She understands disabled artists’ experiences in both the world and the gallery. The artists she has curated make bold, astonishing, and compelling statements about interdependency, care, and the ways in which our environment affects disabled, ill, and immunocompromised bodies.
BUY HERE
THE IRISH GIRL, Ashley E. Sweeney
From multi-award-winning historical fiction author Ashley E. Sweeney comes a family saga about the Irish immigrant experience spanning New York, Chicago, and Colorado so compelling that, USA Today best-selling author Kelli Estes says, “I read this story in one sitting.”
Thirteen-year-old Mary Agnes Coyne, forced from her home in rural Ireland in 1886 after being accused of incest, endures a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic alone to an unknown life in America. From the tenements of New York to the rough alleys of Chicago, Mary Agnes suffers the bitter taste of prejudice for the crime of being poor and Irish.
After moving west to Colorado, Mary Agnes again faces hardships and grapples with heritage, religion, and matters of the heart. Will she ever find a home to call her own? Where?
BUY HERE
A Beginner’s Guide to Starting Over, Gabi Coatsworth
It’s time for widow Molly Stevenson to stand on her own two feet. With blind dates, a needy ghost, and her small‑town bookstore in trouble, she’s going to need all her inner strength to prevent another unhappy ending.
Forty‑something Molly can’t bear to remove her wedding band. Still grieving the death of her beloved husband, the last thing she needs is her sleazy landlord raising the rent to drive her bookshop out of business. Now, this mild‑mannered indie bookstore owner must find the inner strength to turn the page to a brand‑new chapter.
So she’s relieved when the ghost of her husband arrives claiming he’s there to help. But is he?
With a little nudge from beyond the grave, Molly hatches a plan to revitalize her boutique and keep the doors open. But with everyone, including her spectral spouse, insisting she start dating again, Molly isn’t sure what’s worse-the dates she meets online or the love of her life trying to find her a new man-who’s not quite as good as him. How will she find the courage to fight for herself?
BUY HERE
BITTERSWEET BROOKLYN, Thelma Adams
In turn-of-the century New York, a mobster rises—and his favorite sister struggles between loyalty and life itself. How far will she go when he commits murder?
After midnight, Thelma Lorber enters her brother Abie’s hangout under the Williamsburg Bridge, finding Jewish mobster Louis “Pretty” Amberg in a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor. She could flee. Instead, in the dark hours of that October 1935 night before the dawn of Murder, Inc., she remains beside the fierce, funny brother who has nurtured and protected her since childhood. There are many kinds of love a woman can feel for a man, but few compare to that of the baby sister for her older brother. For Thelma, a wild widow tethered to a young son, Abie is the center of her world. But that love is about to undo everything she holds dear…
Flipping the familiar script of The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, and The Godfather, Bittersweet Brooklyn explores the shattering impact of mob violence on the women expected to mop up the mess. Winding its way over decades, this haunting family saga plunges readers into a dangerous past—revealed through the perspective of a forgotten yet vibrant woman.
BUY HERE
Recent Comments