Did you know: Summer reading logs and Reading Bingo sheets finish up at the end of August. There is still plenty of time for prizes and raffle tickets!
The following large print books were donated by Brenda Whittaker:
“The Mad Wife” by Maegan Church. Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife. Despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations, she keeps her husband happy, her household running, and her gelatin salads the talk of the neighborhood. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu's carefully crafted life begins to unravel when a new neighbor moves in.
“The Divorce” by Freida McFadden. Naomi was living the quintessential love story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, get married, buy a dream house, start a family… Then — he kicks her out, hires the city’s best divorce lawyers, drains their accounts, and takes up with a 20-something. It’s a brutal end to the story. Naomi should accept defeat: move into a dingy apartment, get back into the workforce, and piece together the shattered remains of her life. Except, why should she? Instead, Naomi fixates on her husband’s new girlfriend. What begins as cynical curiosity soon twists into obsession — and then into something far darker. As Naomi uncovers secrets she never imagined, she realizes her own life may be in danger.
“Never Lie” by Freida McFadden. Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan are searching for the house of their dreams. But when they visit the remote manor that once belonged to Dr. Adrienne Hale, a renowned psychiatrist who vanished without a trace four years earlier, a violent winter storm traps them at the estate with no escape until the blizzard ends. In search of a book to keep her entertained until the snow abates, Tricia finds a secret room that contains audio transcripts from every patient Dr. Hale ever interviewed. As Tricia listens to the cassette tapes, she learns about the terrifying chain of events leading up to Dr. Hale’s mysterious disappearance.
“The Crash” by Freida McFadden. Eight months pregnant and abandoned by her baby's father, Tegan embarks on a desperate journey to her brother's house during a storm, only to crash and find herself at the mercy of a remote couple with potentially sinister intentions.
New for all ages: “Welcome to AI: What is Artificial Intelligence and How Will it Change Our Lives?” by Mattheiu Dugal. While this is a junior non-fiction book, it’s full of important history and facts about how AI came to be and how it is shaping our lives. We encourage all ages to check it out! Find it on display in our new non-fiction section.
New Fiction:
“Country People” by Daniel Mason. Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father and only twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life. And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any folktale, and he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend which, he suspects, may not be just a legend after all.
“Dolly All the Time” by Annabel Monaghan. Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves back to Whitfield, Rhode Island with her son for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she comes across Stewart Whitfield, annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family, with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it’s in her nature to help. But Stewart’s arrangement ends up being more than they bargained for, because as public dinners and high-society benefits turn into sunset boat rides, Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful.
“Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It” by Brooke Averick. Phoebe Berman fears the one thing she wants the most: love. Thanks to an extremely unfortunate first kiss attempt, crippling intimacy anxiety has plagued her since she was a teen. Phoebe has so much going for her: a dream teaching job, a supportive and hilarious group of best friends, and all the romance novels a girl could want at her fingertips — but she can’t help but beat herself up over the one thing she can’t quite seem to figure out: intimacy.
“When You Loved Me” by Beatriz Williams. Local history insists that a legendary pirate buried his treasure somewhere beneath Windward, the decayed Cooper estate on Winthrop Island, but Lucy Cooper never trusted the fable that broke her family apart. When Lucy returns with her daughter to grieve her estranged father, she discovers catastrophe. The property is mired in debt she canʼt repay, and former object of her affection Ben Ressler has unexpectedly turned up on her doorstep. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive. As Lucy reconstructs her father’s final days, she uncovers his research on the frozen winter of 1717, when a desperately wounded pirate sought refuge on Winthrop Island. To Lucy, this history points the way to a different kind of treasure: how to heal from the fractures of the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a turn of events reveals that someone else on the island will do anything to claim the fabled plunder.
“Savage Son” by Jack Carr. Deep in the wilds of Siberia, a woman is on the run, pursued by a man harboring secrets — a man intent on killing her. A traitorous CIA officer has found refuge with the Russian mafia with designs on ensuring a certain former Navy SEAL sniper is put in the ground. Half a world away, James Reece is recovering from brain surgery in the Montana wilderness, slowly putting his life back together with the help of investigative journalist Katie Buranek and his longtime friend and SEAL teammate Raife Hastings. Unbeknownst to them, the Russian mafia has set their sights on Reece in a deadly game of cat and mouse.
“Bedlam” by Jennifer Higgie. A young man of great artistic promise, Richard Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two travel through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd’s already fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, which is attributed to sunstroke. But in Dadd’s imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem Hospital, also known as Bedlam. This is a poetic portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.
