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Week of February 6, 2012

In DREAMS OF JOY, Lisa See returns to the story of sisters Pearl and May from SHANGHAI GIRLS, and Pearl’s strong-willed 19-year-old daughter Joy, who runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father.

In Helen Schulman THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE, 15-year-old Jake Bergamot receives --- and then forwards to a friend --- a sexually explicit video that an eighth-grade admirer sent to him. The video goes viral within hours, and the scandal that ensues threatens to shatter his family and his world.

Restoration by Olaf Olafsson

Having grown up in an exclusive circle of wealthy British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice Orsini shocks everyone when she marries the son of a minor Italian landowner and begins restoring San Martino, a crumbling villa in Tuscany, to its former glory. But after years of hard work, filling the acres with orchards, livestock, and farmhands, Alice's growing restlessness pulls her into the heady social swirl of wartime Rome and a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences.