THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

  In her first children's book, PANCAKE JAKE and WALLY WAFFLE (TorchflameBooks), Sharon O'Donnell serves up a delicious tale that gets parents and kids together to talk about diversity. A rare sighting of a Waffle boy sends young Pancake Jake on a quest in Breakfast Land: he wants to make friends with the Waffles who have long been the enemies of the Pancakes. With courage and kindness, Jake discovers a long-lost recipe that proves Pancakes and Waffles are actually made of the same ingredients. The charming illustrations and playful text make for a fun read that will encourage important conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. PANCAKE JAKE and WALLY WAFFLE's target audience is children 6 - 8, but the illustrations by Taimy Studio are delightful and will attract kids of all ages. Sharon J. O'Donnell is an award-winning newspaper columnist and the author of two humor books, Please Don't Let Me Be the Oldest Mom in the PTA and House of Testosterone -- One

  From  USA Today  bestselling author of  Flight of the Sparrow  Amy Belding Brown comes an evocative new novel about Emily Dickinson's longtime maid, Margaret Maher, whose bond with--and ultimate betrayal of--the poet ensured Dickinson's work would live on. Massachusetts, 1869 . Margaret Maher has never been one to settle down. At twenty-seven, she's never met a man who has tempted her enough to relinquish her independence to a matrimonial fate, and she hasn't stayed in one place for long since her family fled the potato famine a decade ago. When Maggie accepts a temporary position at the illustrious Dickinson family home in Amherst, it's only to save up enough for a ticket west to join her brothers in California. Maggie never imagines she will form a life-altering friendship with the eccentric, brilliant Miss Emily or that she'll stay at the Homestead for the next thirty years. In this richly drawn novel, Amy Belding Brown explores what it is to be an outsider

  It's summer and that can mean only one thing for readers of thrillers! A new Brad Parks novel. UNTHINKABLE (ThomasMercer) has an unlikely hero racing to the very last unexpected climatic ending. Nate Lovejoy is the stay-at-home dad of three-year-old Parker and eighteen-month-old Cate. He's a lawyer, but isn't practicing because his lawyer wife, Jenny is the household breadwinner. One morning while his wife is at work and the girls are at their grandparents, there's a knock on the backdoor of their Richmond, Virginia home. Nate opens it and a tranquilizer dart is stuck in his neck. When he wakes up, he's sure he's going to be killed because he saw the assailant's faces.  But his kidnappers, The Praesidium (TheProtectors) have an unthinkable agenda for Nate. They want him to kill his wife so she doesn't go forward with a class action suit of two-hundred-and-seventy-nine plaintiffs against a coal/electricity plant. Leader of The Praesidium, Vanslow DeGang

  "The enemy of my enemy is my sister." Layla Shawn always thought her estranged criminal father, Vic "Thundercloud" Doloro would be killed in a hail of bullets. In Beth Castrodale's novel, I MEAN YOU NO HARM (ImbrifexBooks),Vic serves ten years in an Ohio prison for a three state burglary ring he ran and when he gets out, he dies of heart disease.  Layla's mom died when Layla was young and her grandparents raised her. The cause of her mother's death was listed suicide but that's always been questionable. She has a picture her mother drew of a man years ago, and remembers being told stories about a man called "The Wolf" with dark vacant turned downed eyes and a widows peak.  Layla shows up for her father's funeral where she's greeted by her half sister, Bette with a hand shake, her father's sister's ex-wife, Marla and her son, Jake who has Downs Syndrome. Layla takes this opportunity to study all the men at the funeral and s

  Tina Martin is a type A salesperson, who is about at the end of her rope. In Lindsey Salatka's novel, FISH HEADS and DUCK SKIN (SheWritesPress), Tina wishes for nothing more than to get off the rat race which is her life. But with with an infant, toddler and unemployed husband, Daniel, making her  the breadwinner, that's highly unlikely. Until one night, a psychic tells Tina her life is about to completely change and she will be traveling far away. Her husband, after telling her psychics are nothing more than liars and chameleons, informs her he's been offered a two-year contract to work in Shanghai, China. But is she ready to walk away from her booming career, beautiful home, great friends and cuddly cat? Yes. She gives notice, they quit their life, take a fourteen hour, six-thousand and five hundred mile plane ride and begin their new lives. The Martin's believe they are ready for an amazing journey of self exploration. Shanghai is loud, dirty and completely "f

  July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circu

  The Bloody Heart Killer is strangling popular teenage boys in A.R. Torre's new novel, THE GOOD LIE (Thomas&Mercer). Six boys have been kidnapped and held hostage before being "discarded like trash." Scott Harden would have been number seven, but he somehow escapes and ends up alive outside his parent's mansion. Police arrest high-school teacher, Randall Thompson as a suspect for the murders. High profile attorney, Robert Kaven, considered one of LA's best, takes on the case pro bono. He believes Thompson is innocent. He hires Dr. Gwen Moore, an expert on killers to put together a psych profile of Thompson. But relationships between the players are too blurred for Moore's taste. Attorney Kaven's son was one of the BHK's victims and Kaven and Moore have begun a relationship. When one of her patients turns up dead in a murder-suicide, everything is turned upside down. Is Kaven hiding a secret? Could the victim who survived be involved? Maybe one of

  Jennifer Colby Kittler is a mother to eight-year-old, Cooper, wife to Russ, a lawyer and basically a know it all. That’s why she’s called by both family and friends “The Jenneral.” Jenn is hell bent on having another baby, whether or not her husband wants one. In JENN REINVENTED: The Sweet Water Circle Series by Grayson Avery, “The Jenneral” finally realizes after some blatant things smack her in the head, like her husband saying he may leave, that she may not have a marriage, let alone a baby. It’s at this point readers get to know the really aggressive, pig-headed Jenn. She’s hard to take as she goes through life like a tornado wanting everything to go her way. Lucky for Jenn, she finally listens to friends Shelly, Taylor and Kait, members of the Sweet Water Circle who assign her to go to yoga. They tell her its time to get bitter or better. It’s at The Shanti Center where Jenn meets Master Gyan. She resists the teachings of the center, which tell her she has no control over he

  I've read a plethora of novels set during WWII. Tracely Enerson Wood's new novel, THE WAR NURSE (SourceBooks) offers a story about WWI based on nurse, Miss Julia Stimson, whose true story was lost until now.  Superintendent nurse, Stimson has one month to recruit, train and create policies and procedures for sixty-five nurses to be stationed at the Red Cross base camp in Rouen, France. Stimson finds herself caring and protective of her girls who will be close to the front, sacrificing their time with no return date set. American Expeditionary Forces Base Hospital 21, is a former racetrack set up to care for five hundred, but soon they are facing thirteen hundred patients. The novel focuses on the bravery and courage these nurses showed. Reading about the gases that were used against our troops and its effects on humans was cringe worthy. Soldiers start coming into camp with a mysterious influenza-like disease causing coughing spasms. At first, those cases are dismissed as tro

  In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after? Like his bestselling novel  The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires,  Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers,  The Final Girl Support Group  pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ,  A Nightmare on Elm Street , and  Scream. Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.   But the thing about fin

  Sassy and snarky Jen Dixon is back again in Laurie Gelman's, YOGA PANT NATION (HenryHolt) -  the third novel in her "Class Mom" series. FYI: All her books can be read as standalones. Jen's a grandma! She finds herself sandwiched between her fifth grade son, Zach, her grown up daughters, Viv and Laura and her aging parents, Ron and Kay. There's a lot going on, which she has absolutely no control over and she's just a tad overwhelmed. She's entered her early fifties and is trying to figure out where she stands in this thing called life. I don't know about you, but I'm already exhausted! Jen has been mandated by the school PTA president to oversee and raise ten thousand dollars for the school's fundraiser, while she babysits her delicious two year-old granddaughter three times a week, and assists Zach navigate being bullied at school. In addition, she helps out with the family's three yoga centers and is determined to qualify as a spin instr

  I was so excited to learn that Kristin Contino has written another novel. THE LEGACY of US was written seven years ago, and I miss her storytelling. Her new novel, A HOUSE FULL of WINDSOR (WyattMacKenzie) has everything you could hope for in a novel, complex characters, family drama, some romance and a great story. This novel is also about a disorder that carries great stigma in our society.  Do you know what hoarding is? Perhaps you've watched an episode or two on "Hoarding: Buried Alive" on TLC. If not, hoarding is basically being unable to giveaway things that you don't need, finding yourself paralyzed by all the clutter and embarrassed to the point you stop letting friends and family into your home. In A HOUSE FULL of WINDSOR, Debbie has been divorced for twenty years and her children, Sarah, Anne and Will are completely embarrassed by her hoarding. They love her, but they want her to clean out her Pennsylvania home. Debbie went to college in London and has been