In 1986, Sadie Green, 11, visits a children’s hospital where her sister is being treated for cancer. There, she befriends another patient, a 12-year-old Korean Jewish boy named Sam Masur, who has a badly injured foot, and the two bond over their love for video games. Over 600 hospital visits later, they have a fight and don’t speak again for six years when they reconnect while attending college in Boston. The pair, with help from their friend Marx, form a company designing video games. Before even graduating, they have created their first blockbuster video game, Ichigo. Spanning three decades and various locations, including Cambridge and Venice Beach, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and […]
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The Whalebone Theatre
“For a fortunate few, war allows us to rise in ways that would otherwise be impossible. We can bring the very best of us to bear.”― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre Cristabel Seagrave loses her mother during childbirth, and her father, Jasper, who remarries when she is four, passes away shortly thereafter. This leaves Cristabel in the care of her disinterested stepmother, Rosalind, who later marries Jasper’s aviation-obsessed brother, Willoughby. One stormy night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel near Devon. By law, the whale belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel, along with her half-sister Flossie, cousin Digby, kitchen maid Maudie Kitcat, and […]
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The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post
Once upon a time, about 100 years ago, a 27-year-old woman was the wealthiest woman in the nation. In The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post, bestselling author Allison Pataki has crafted an intimate portrait of a woman who lived and loved on a grand scale, yet proves that money cannot buy happiness. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s journey began gluing cereal boxes in her father’s barn near Battle Creek, Michigan and learning the business from the man who, at the turn of the 20th century, made a fortune by producing healthy and quick foods like Grape-Nuts. When her parents divorced, Marjorie was rudderless. Then in 1914, C. W. Post died by suicide and his […]
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January 2023 Picks and Pans
I don’t know what I’d do without books. They keep me company when I am lonely, they fill long quiet nights of insomnia, they bring me to locales all over the world, and introduce me to extraordinary people. For those of you who love books, too, here are the ones I read in January. With suspense, thrillers, mysteries, devotionals, historical fiction, classics, and contemporary fiction, there’s something here for every taste. Enjoy! Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection By Kate Bowler, Jessica Richie “Blessed are you who realize there is simply not enough—time, money, resources. Blessed are you who are tired of pretending that raw effort […]
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Good Enough
“Blessed are you who realize there is simply not enough—time, money, resources. Blessed are you who are tired of pretending that raw effort is the secret to perfection. It’s not. And you know that now. Blessed are you who need a gentle reminder that even now, even today, God is here, and somehow, that is good enough,”—Kate Bowler and Jessica Richier, Good Enough. In their illuminating book Good Enough, authors Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie present a series of insightful spiritual reflections designed to guide readers through the intricate maze of modern life. A New York Times bestseller, it shatters the persistent myth of relentless self-improvement, instead framing life as […]
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Jacqueline in Paris
Ann Mah’s novel is a portrayal of Jacqueline Bouvier’s transformative year abroad in postwar Paris. As a junior at Vassar College, Bouvier spent the year 1949/1950 studying at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris. The journey begins with Bouvier boarding an ocean liner, embarking on an experience that will change her life. As the only Vassar student, she finds herself with a group of lively Smith students with whom she will later study. This voyage marks the start of Jackie’s immersion into an exhilarating world brimming with champagne, châteaux, theater, art, jazz clubs, and quaint cafés. She lives with a host family, headed by Comtesse de […]
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The Bullet That Missed
The Bullet that Missed, the third book in the Thursday Murder Club series, is deserving of its nomination for Best Mystery & Thriller in the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards. Set in Coopers Chase, an English retirement community as lively as a frat house, four sharp-as-tacks septuagenarians—Elizabeth, Ibrahim, Ron, and Joyce—spend their golden years solving crimes that leave the local police scratching their heads. In this installment, our geriatric sleuths delve into the decade-old disappearance of a TV journalist, Bethany Waites, who vanished while sniffing around a money-laundering scheme. It’s not long before our heroes find themselves tangled in a web of two murders separated by a decade. To thicken […]
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The Night Ship
“As is the way with souls confined, tempers fray and flare, ill-spoken words fester, coincidences become intrigues. Minds seethe with resentment and revenge like the worms in the water barrels. As the ship spoils, so does the air between the people.”― Jess Kidd, The Night Ship. 1629: nine-year-old Mayken leaves the Netherlands with her nursemaid to join the merchant father she’s never met across the globe in the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia, one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken begins a secret, second life as the cabin boy Obbe, befriending a soldier, a sailor, a kitchen boy, and the ship’s barber-surgeon while trying […]
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All Her Little Secrets
“Every lie you tell, every secret you keep, is a fragile little thing that must be protected and accounted for…”—Wanda M. Morris, All Her Little Secrets Ellice Littlejohn has been hoarding a cache of secrets from her friends and coworkers. Not only did she grow up poor and Black in rural Georgia, she had with an alcoholic mother and a sexually abusive stepfather and her kid brother is an ex-con. She’ll do anything to stay out of the spotlight. Now she has it all: an Ivy League law degree, a well-paying job as a corporate attorney in midtown Atlanta, great friends, and a long-term affair with a rich executive—her White boss, […]
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Haven
What, then, consoles us in this human society full of calamities, but the unfeigned faith and mutual love of true and good friends?—Augustine, City of God, AD 426. Emma Donoghue’s (ROOM) latest novel is set in seventh-century Ireland in Cluain Mhic Nóis, a monastery in County Offaly on the River Shannon. A scholar and priest named Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind and found an isolated monastery. With two monks, young Trian and elderly Cormac, he sets out on a pilgrimage in a small boat with only faith to guide them. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find a steep, craggy […]
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