Skip to main content

April 17, 2020 - May 1, 2020

Here are reading recommendations with your comments and a rating of 1 to 5 stars for the contest period of April 17 - May 1.

Andy Warhol

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Attribution

Andy Warhol

April 16, 2020

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book releasing in the next few months that we would like to get on your radar now. Read more about it, and enter our Spring Preview Contest by Friday, April 17th at 11:59am ET for a chance to win one of five copies of HE STARTED IT by Samantha Downing, which releases on July 28th. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

Margarita Montimore, author of Oona Out of Order

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn 19, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens 32 years in the future in her 51-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. Hopping through decades, pop culture fads and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever changing on the outside.

Elizabeth Wetmore, author of Valentine

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field --- an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.

Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins --- aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony --- and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Editorial Content for Becoming Mrs. Lewis

Teaser

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, BECOMING MRS. LEWIS is above all a love story --- a love of literature and ideas, and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

Promo

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, BECOMING MRS. LEWIS is above all a love story --- a love of literature and ideas, and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

About the Book

In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.

When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis --- known as Jack --- she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and --- against all odds --- finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.  

In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice --- and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had. 

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, BECOMING MRS. LEWIS is above all a love story --- a love of literature and ideas, and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

Editorial Content for I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir

Teaser

When Esther Safran Foer’s mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation --- that Esther's father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust --- Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived.

Promo

When Esther Safran Foer’s mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation --- that Esther's father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust --- Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived.

About the Book

Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching.

So when Esther’s mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation --- that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust --- Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn.

I WANT YOU TO KNOW WE'RE STILL HERE is the poignant and deeply moving story not only of Esther’s journey but of four generations living in the shadow of the Holocaust. They are four generations of survivors, storytellers and memory keepers, determined not just to keep the past alive but to imbue the present with life and more life.

Editorial Content for My Dark Vanessa

Teaser

Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, MY DARK VANESSA is a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

Promo

Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, MY DARK VANESSA is a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

About the Book

Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, MY DARK VANESSA is a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

2000. Bright, ambitious and yearning for adulthood, 15-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful 42-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager --- and who professed to worship only her --- may be far different from what she has always believed?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, MY DARK VANESSA juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of THE GIRLS and the creeping intensity of ROOM, MY DARK VANESSA is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

Editorial Content for The Night Watchman

Teaser

Based on the extraordinary life of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather --- who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. --- this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Promo

Based on the extraordinary life of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather --- who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. --- this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

About the Book

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather --- who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. --- this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit and intelligence, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.