The Fortunate Ones is a fathoms-deep exploration of love, loyalty, and the ties that bind, written masterfully from all angles. It‘s a laser-sharp look at the underbelly of power and privilege‘s repercussions as told through the power of story.

A wise, deep-probing exploration of the complexities of youth as seen through the eyes of narrator, Libby, who tells the story of her family dynamic on Valley Forge Mountain in rural Pennsylvania beginning with one fateful night with repercussions that last through the summer. Coming-of-age concerns such as loyalty, trust, loss, self-esteem, and a place to call home are sensitively depicted.

All I knew going into author Laura Kemp‘s highly praised Evening in the Yellow Wood is that I loved the title. It‘s phonetically pleasing, lyrical, and balanced. Give me a title that sings on a haunting book cover and you have my attention. Hand me a dilemma that yearns on the second page and I‘m thoroughly roped in.
In an au currant voice so accessible you think you know the narrator, Evening in the Yellow Wood exemplifies the term “page turner.

Author Michelle Cox begins her wildly popular mystery series in A Girl Like You with such page-turning, off-kilter charm, you won‘t be able to resist reading the whole series. The memorable Henrietta and Inspector Howard are likable, fully realized characters from disparate backgrounds who balance each other with perfect pitch in the midst of an edge-of-your-seat joyride.

Author Renea Winchester writes with a clear-sighted, compassionate eye about women in hard times. They are the blue-collar, Parker women, one haunted by her past; the other, her daughter, who plans to escape the poverty of her hometown, Bryson City, at any cost. With twists and turns that seem to come full-circle, Outbound Train is an engaging story, Southern to its core in setting and character, and captivating to its last page.

. Author Ellen Notbohm has penned a breathlessly epic, masterful story set in early 1900‘s Montana in language so lyrically elevated you‘ll enjoy every line. Issues of motherhood, sanity, and forging a life in a rich western setting!

Who among us hasn‘t said, “I could write a book about my mother!” We study our mothers throughout our lives trying to piece together the enigmatic variables that result in their particular formula. For many, it takes a lifetime, yet author Jo Giese has done just this in her delightful collection of first-person essays, Never Sit If You Can Dance, which, as you might suspect, is a line she learned from her mother! Heartwarming and delightful.

The Stolen Child is a sweeping story set on a cloistered, Irish island, which has nothing to recommend it save for its quays, its view, and its eponymous holy-well. This is a novel rife with character study that is quintessentially Irish, yet applicable far afield. In themes of motherhood, hope, desperation, and hopelessness, the characters take what little they have and wrestle it into making do. Loved it!

Centered on one fateful night during a weekend house party at a renovated, Irish cottage. It involves a small group of friends, a bottle of whiskey, and an Ouija board. Everything careens in spine-tingling plausibility from there, in a dynamic that begins in seemingly harmless fun, yet quickly turns off-kilter with unintended consequences that sneak up over the reader's shoulder with such disturbance that this book is best not read at night.

Girl on the Leeside is deep in character study. Most of what happens concerns the human predicament, no matter where it's set but that it's set in Ireland makes it wonderful. The story is centered on twenty-seven-year-old Siobhan Doyle's path to emotional maturity, out of her rural comfort zone into all that it takes to overcome her self-imposed limitations to brave the risk of furthering her life.

Author J.C. Sasser comes blazing in with both barrels to turn all notions of southern fiction on its ear. The characters in Gradle Bird conduct themselves with similar surprise—they don‘t walk through a door, they bust through it; they don‘t take a drag on a cigarette, they rip it. I absolutely loved this story. I won‘t cheapen Sasser‘s one of a kind voice by saying it‘s quirky, rather, it is refreshingly right on. You'll love it!

It takes a seasoned and gifted writer to emblematically take the harrowing premise of one family torn asunder by the institution of a real-life, black-market network and leave us with resounding outrage by crafting the story as a tale of personal injustice. In pitch-perfect language, Before We Were Yours is a search for identity told at its most beautiful.

Stark, vivid, real, and gritty, these are the words that spring to mind upon reflecting on An American Marriage. Author Tayari Jones takes the premise of an unjust, nightmarish turn of fate and unfurls a novel-length treatise on a budding marriage systematically derailed, when a year and a half into marriage, Roy is incarcerated for a crime he didn‘t commit.

What struck me most in reading My Exaggerated Life was the realization that there was no separating the man from his craft. It‘s Conroy‘s voice that does it. In these pages speaks a storyteller of the highest order telling an incredibly entertaining story, it just so happens to be culled from a series of events in his life.

Crescendo is a true story written in novel form, depicting the real-life story of a supernaturally gifted musician named Fred Allen, who comes from an impoverished family in an insignificant town in South Georgia and rises to the heights of greatness.
It's the kind of inspiring, triumphant story you‘ll want to share with others to remind them of the goodness in this world and will play the keys of your soul like a Steinway Grand piano.