Geraldine Brooks Historical Fiction 2008/ 372 pages Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book is a historical fiction novel about a book conservator named Dr. Hanna Heath and her intensive research on the history of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah, rediscovered in 1894 in Sarajevo. Hannah says that she doesn’t restore books, she conserves them. We follow…
Kristin Hannah Historical Fiction 2015 | 760 pages Isabelle Rossignol is ten years younger than her sister Vianne Mauriac.. From the time she was quite young, she was rebellious, reckless, resolute, brave, impetuous, strong, passionate. A foil to her older sister. But it was the 1940s and Germany had just occupied France. Unabashedly and with…
Patrick Ryan Fiction 2025 | 464 pages Cal and Becky Jenkins and Felix and Margaret Salt, along with their sons Skip and Tom, tell a profound story from the 1940s through the late 20th century. Richly written, with extraordinary character development, we follow these families against a backdrop of WWII and the Vietnam War. Home…
Thomas Kohnstamm Fiction 2025 | 388 pages My local library has a wonderful program called A Novel Idea. Each year since 2004 the library has chosen a book for us to read as a community. The author comes to speak, and there are workshops that highlight salient aspects of the book. It’s the largest community…
Christopher Moore Fiction 2002 | 444 pages When Jesus wants his teacher Gaspar to develop a form of self-defense that is not violent and uses no weapons, together they built a practice called Jew-do (the “o” is long,) This event gives you a sense of the satire that Christopher Moore employs n his novel, Lamb. …
Stef Penney Fiction 2006 | 371 pages I was looking for a book set in the north Canada provinces and territories. The one is set in the Northwest Territories. (It is a long story WHY I was looking for a book set in the Territories, but if you want a list of books set…
Rebecca Yarros | Fiction 2019, 424 pages The average reading level of The New York Times bestsellers has trended downward over the past 60 years, with most books from 1960 to 2014 falling into the seventh-grade level, and roughly 97% of 2014 bestsellers reading below a 7.2 grade level. Since 2000, only two books on…
Sarah Winman Fiction 2017 | 462 pages We begin during WWII, 1944, on the battlegrounds of Tuscany. As allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. He has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian,…
Marie Bostwick Fiction 2025/ 372 pages The Oxford Dictionary defines “troublesome” as “causing difficulty or annoyance.” I don’t think The Book Club for Troublesome Women’ quite lives up to its title. Four women form a book club in 1963 and choose Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as their first book to read. Homemakers all, we know…
Megan Miranda Fiction 2025/ 338 pages (The first part of this review is borrowed from Jayme on Goodreads. An excellent summary … I can do no better!) “Wyatt college is nestled in a picturesque small town in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. But, it has an ugly history – a HAZING tradition called “The Howling”, which…