RECOMMENDED READS

DANGEROUS PLAY, Elise Hart Kipness

From the author of Lights Out comes sports reporter Kate Green’s next harrowing story, where a famous former teammate is found murdered, and the only way to close the case is to open up old wounds.

After a tumultuous murder case that almost cost more than her job, sports reporter Kate Green is back on assignment covering women’s Olympic soccer. Between her experience with athletic stardom and days playing with Savannah Baker, head coach of the USA team, Kate is sure to get the story that will reestablish her career.

She just didn’t expect that story to involve murder.

When famous jewelry designer Alexa Kane is found dead in the locker room, Kate’s promising future screeches to a halt as her past resurfaces. Alexa played with Kate and Savannah on the U.S. Youth National Team, but there was no reason for her to be at the stadium now.

Kate’s investigation puts her in close contact with her estranged father, an NYPD detective who has his own past to answer for. As their secrets collide, Kate will have to decide which ones to keep—and which ones to reveal to stop the killer.

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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.

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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.

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RIVER OF DOLLS AND OTHER STORIES,  Suzanne Kamata

These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in ‘Day Pass,’ a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head.

In ‘Blue Murder,’ a Japanese farmer troubled by the crows eating his pears becomes besotted with a kingfisher. The narrator of ‘Down the Mountain,’ a descendant of the Heike clan, recounts the tragic life and death of her beloved sister as she urges her own daughter to leave their secluded mountain village and go out into the world, and in the title story, ‘River of Dolls,’ a Japanese woman struggles with infertility. Ranging from dirty to magical realism, the stories collected here are often infused with humor, while exposing universal truths.

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TWICE THE FAMILY, Julie Ryan McGue

Growing up as an adoptee and identical twin, Julie McGue will take you on her journey for identity and individuality, searching for answers through tragedy and adversity.

In this coming-of-age memoir, set in Chicago’s western suburbs between the 1960s and ’80s, adopted twins Julie and Jenny provide their parents with an instant family. Their sisterly bond holds tight as the two strive for identity, individuality, and belonging. But as Julie’s parents continue adding children to the family, some painful and tragic experiences test family values, parental relationships, and sibling bonds.

Faced with these hurdles, Julie questions everything—who she is, how she fits in, her adoption circumstances, her faith, and her idea of family. But the life her parents have constructed is not one she wants for herself—and as she matures, she recognizes how the experiences that formed her have provided her a road map for the person and mother she wants to be.

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Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra, Ericka Kim Verba

Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967) is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song “Gracias a la vida” has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. In this remarkable biography, Ericka Verba traces Parra’s radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Drawing on decades of research, Verba paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra’s life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra was an exceptionally complex and talented woman who exposed social injustice in Latin America to the world through her powerful and poignant songwriting. This examination of her creative, political, and personal life, flaws and all, illuminates the depth and agency of Parra’s journey as she invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.

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LUNCH TALES: SUELLEN, Lucille Guarino

“A tender love story sprinkled with a bit of angst. Slip it into your beach bag and enjoy.” –Linda Rosen, author of The Emerald Necklace

Old scars. New love?

Suellen Atkins’ trust fund has given her everything except love. As the youngest attorney in a major law firm, her life is filled with reckless spending and meaningless flings. But when she dumps her latest wild guy, he doesn’t leave quietly.

Unable to shake the feeling she’s being watched, Suellen runs into an old classmate at a colleague’s farewell. Adam Isaacson is one of the good guys — and that might be more scary than her stalker ex. With the echoes of her parents’ tumultuous marriage still ringing in her ears, Suellen can’t imagine anything this promising.

When a shock medical diagnosis complicates things, her proclivity for self-sabotage goes into overdrive. As life turns upside down, her lunch friends at the law firm become a lifeline in the storm. But even they, with all their good intentions and well-meaning advice, can’t save Suellen from herself. Nor can the man who’s fallen in love with her. Only she can do that.

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Mortal End: An Opera of Cursed and Fated Vampires, Maddie Rose Andry

Dr. Phenice Jones has never quite been able to deal with the past. She’s picked up the pieces the best she can and built a life for herself as a psychiatrist in Eugene, Oregon, but it’s a quiet life. Lonely. The memories of her childhood insist that it’s safer that way.

Lately, though, things haven’t been so quiet. Phenice has been plagued by nightmares of a woman she doesn’t know, nightmares that have begun to crack her carefully crafted resolve. If that wasn’t enough, Phenice’s waking hours are plagued too—by a man she can’t want, a patient who seems to struggle with delusions and dangerous habits. She’ll do what she must to get her life back to normal, until she discovers that her life was never meant to be normal at all.

When Phenice learns what her fate is, she’s thrust into a world where destiny reigns and supernatural powers in charge call the shots. An ancient evil is afoot and, to destroy it, Phenice has to break a curse cast millennia before she was even born. As if her own past wasn’t enough of a burden, now Phenice must right the mistakes of someone else’s.

To save her mortal life, Phenice must overcome her pain and find a way to open her heart to what she truly wants—love, connection, purpose. But in a world full of vampires and demons, gods and goddesses, mortal life is an especially fragile thing . . . and if Phenice isn’t careful, it won’t be the only thing she loses.

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NEVER COME BACK, Cara Reinard

When my husband went missing I was desperate to get him home. Now I know his secrets, I wish he’d never come back…

I hate when Wyatt is away for work. The cold bed. Dinner alone. Comforting our little boy, telling him Daddy will be back to tuck him into bed again soon. But when Wyatt misses his flight and his cell is disconnected, panic takes over.

After seven sleepless nights, tossing and turning as I imagine the absolute worst, he walks back into our home. I breathe a sigh of relief. Until I realize that everything has changed.

I want to believe Wyatt’s explanations. The work trip. The “stolen” phone. But I see the strange, jagged scar across his side even though he tries to keep it hidden. And when I start digging, I uncover more than signs of an affair. It’s so, so much worse…

His secrets have become my nightmares, threatening my son and our unborn child in ways I couldn’t imagine. I can’t confront him. Not without exposing the lies I’ve buried for years. About who I really am and what I’ve done.

And it seems the past has caught up with us. Because one moment, I’m holding my son’s tiny hand as we walk around the mall. The next he is nowhere to be seen.

If my husband had never come back, would my son still be safe? And how are we meant to get him back when our deadliest secrets are yet to be uncovered?

This addictive and gripping thriller is perfect for fans of Minka Kent, Jeneva Rose, and Freida McFadden. You won’t be able to put this down!

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BECOMING MARIELLA, Janet Constantino

For fans of Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults and Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation comes a contemporary coming-of-age tale about a young Italian immigrant’s desperate journey to find her personal freedom.

It’s unprecedented, even in the twenty-first century, for a young Sicilian woman to defy the centuries-old mandate, “Family is everything!”—but twenty-two-year-old Mariella Russo is desperate to escape Sicily. She’s being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart—a young man from a prominent, powerful family—by her envious and erratic mother, who hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. Suddenly, Mariella’s lifelong home has become a claustrophobic island. In a bid for independence and an attempt to escape entrapment, she flees to San Francisco.

But Mariella’s bête noire—entrapment—follows her to San Francisco, where everyone wants more from her than she wants to give. Her American roommate, Leslie, turns out to be a gay man rather than the woman she imagined; her employer/lover is pressuring her to live with him; and her neurotic mother is haunting her, wreaking havoc and embarrassment. An urgent return trip to Sicily puts Mariella to the ultimate challenge: will she submit to tradition, or choose a life she wants for herself?

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SUMMONS TO BERLIN, Joanne Intrator

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BEFORE THE NEXT KILL, Kay A. Oliver

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DANCING WOMAN, Elaine Neil Orr

Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

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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.

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