THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

  Georgina is visiting her widowed father in England to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday, decades after he fought in WWII.  She is astonished when he asks her to accompany him back to Trieste in Northern Italy.  He has always refused to set foot in Europe again.  What changed?  And why now? Captain James Drummond survived the battlefields of North Africa and Italy. Instead of his anticipated return home to wife and a four-year-old daughter whom he had yet to meet, he was assigned to the grim task of military occupation in Trieste. On a summer patrol in 1945 in the disputed hills above Trieste, he encountered a group of Yugoslav partisans, bathing. When he glimpsed a woman emerging from the pool, water cascading from her body, a new conflict emerged with no clear lines, one he must navigate alone. The war-weary captain was faced with heart wrenching choices. Meanwhile, Georgina confronts her own demons – a stale marriage, a secret affair, and her father’s n...

  FAN CLUB (Atria) by Erin Mayer is a raucous psychological thriller. A disillusioned millennial joins a cliquey fan club, only to discover that the group is bound together by something darker than devotion. Day after day our narrator searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women's lifestyle website - entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by international pop-star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana's every move. When a colleague notices her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy, candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister se...

  Bestselling author and physician, Ian K. Smith may be best known for his health and fitness advice and books. Last year he stormed onto the crime novel scene with a new series featuring a Black Chicago private investigator, PI Ashe Cayne. Now he's back with the sequel WOLF POINT (Thomas&Mercer). Bestselling author, Harlan Coben calls, Smith's protagonist PI Ashe Cayne "a perfect hero for our times." Smith's story is ripped from the headlines. A local story in Chicago in 2009 reported a man was discovered at Wolf Point, an isolated stretch of Chicago's waterfront. Police ruled it a suicide, but many locals think it was murder and there's more to the story. PI Cayne delves deep into the underbelly of a city rotting with corruption. Dr. Ian Smith is the author of the #1  New York Times  bestselling books,  SHRED: THE REVOLUTIONARY DIET , and  SUPER SHRED: The Big Results Diet , and  BLAST THE SUGAR OUT.  Dr. Smith’s highly anticipated newest book,...

Award-winning author, Jacqueline Friedland's novel, HE GETS THAT FROM ME (SparkPress) once again lets us know that we are not in control of what happens in our lives. Maybe a little, but certainly not in total control.  HE GETS THAT FROM ME is about a woman named Maggie, the mother of a toddler, she has a live-in boyfriend and works at a check out counter. She dreams of going to college to becoming a teacher but she can't imagine ever having enough money.  When she sees an ad about becoming a surrogate, and the amount of money she can make, she thinks this may be her ticket to college. Soon she is carrying a twins for Chip and Donovan. Once they are delivered she believes she's on track to getting enough money to go to college, get her degree and fulfill her dream. Ten years later she gets a call from the fertility clinic about a DNA test. From there, let's just say it gets really interesting and complicated, but I'm not telling you anymore.  Jennifer Friedland is k...

  "He could name this brain silence, one of the basic survival reactions to threat, the one that comes after fight and flight, there to protect the prey from the hunter by freezing all movement. He could see the explanation on the page, exactly as it had been when he had first read it, an oil smudge from someone else's food beside it in the margin." In Justine Hardy's novel, DUST, Kate   is a woman who chooses to work in Pakistan. She creates a second family for herself, far from the cherished warmth of her parents in rural Suffolk, their surrounding soft landscape in stark contrast to the raw land and humanscape of a remote corner of the northwest Himalayas. Kate then disappears and the worlds of genteel English countryside and harsh Gilgit collide in the search for a lost aid worker. "It's to keep the devil away, a sort of vaccination against disaster and hell, ' she said. Every time she said something like that, he felt like the new boy all over again....

  Aging - it's something all of us can't escape. But the way we experience it is different for men and women. Men can go grey, lose their hair, add a pounch and that's normal and acceptable without any question. It's perfectly fine for men to date a woman their daughter's age. But for women, it's different and anyone who says it isn't, doesn't live in the real world. Women grow up being told to do everything possible to be pretty for a man and go to war against the aging process. Billions of dollars are racked up in the beauty business selling creams and serums that promise youth and of course, there's also plastic surgery. Author Susan Bacoyanis book, LOVE.COM   is a rom-com targeted at women of a "certain age," women who are invisible in our youth obsessive society. Once a woman hits 40, the clock starts ticking, by 50 or 60 the world thinks you're past it... past love, past sex, past a career and you're heading down a black hole,...

  WIVING (Arcade) by Cailtin Myer is a  literary memoir of one woman's journey from wife to warrior, in the vein of breakout hits like Cheryl Strayed's  Wild  and Jeannette Walls's  The Glass Castle .    At thirty-six years old, Caitlin Myer is ready to start a family with her husband. She has left behind the restrictive confines of her Mormon upbringing and early sexual trauma and believes she is now living her happily ever after . . . when her body betrays her. In a single week, she suffers the twin losses of a hysterectomy and the death of her mother, and she is jolted into a terrible awakening that forces her to reckon with her past—and future.   This is the story of one woman’s lifelong combat with a culture—her “escape” from religion at age twenty, only to find herself similarly entrapped in the gender conventions of the secular culture at large, conventions that teach girls and women to shape themselves to please men, to become good wi...

  Eden Appiah-Kubi's debut novel, THE BENNET WOMEN (MontlakeRomance) is a post modern spin on the classic,  Pride and Prejudice . Love is a goal, marriage is a distant option and self-discovery is a sure thing.  THE BENNET WOMEN is set on a college campus in which "the Elizabeth" is a Black Engineering student and "the Darcy" is an Asian-American C-list actor. EJ, the black engineering student is best friends with Jamie, a newly out trans woman studying French and theatre and Tessa a Filipina astronomy major with guy problems. The three live in the all-women's dorm, Bennet House, on the campus of the prestigious New England Longbourn University. THE BENNET WOMEN is rich in diversity, inclusiveness, sisterhood and feminism. It focuses on relationships, problems, splits and eventually making positive life choices. I appreciated the multiculturalism. At first I thought putting the diverse characters together felt forced and a bit cliche, but then I recalled how...

  Most of the country, and world watched the nine minute video of a white Minneapolis police officer killing an African-American man named, George Floyd. No one could turn away from this tape or hide it from the public. Protests soon broke out around the world after Floyd's murder, and a number of non-fiction books about racial injustice, the marginalization of minorities and race relations were published. Non-fiction provides numbers and statistics, but the novel, WE ARE NOT LIKE THEM (Atria) really touches our hearts and gives readers a better understanding of this injustice. Co-authors Christine Pride is white and Jo Piazza is Black and they were able to offer different perspectives and viewpoints while writing their novel. They share the statistic at the opening of the novel that nearly ninety-percent of people say they don't have a close friend of another race or ethnicity.  Jen is the white daughter of a drug addict and Riley is black. They've both been brought up u...

  Bestselling Author, Melissa Payne's new novel, THE NIGHT OF MANY ENDINGS (LakeUnion) is an emotionally rich, feel-good novel about hope, second chances and seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It tackles some deep issues such as guilt, loneliness, homelessness, depression and addiction. That's a lot to take on, but the story is beautifully written and the ending feels optimistic.  Imagine a blizzard is moving in, you can't leave the place you are, in this case a library and you're stuck with strangers. It's a great premise for a novel and it's THE NIGHT OF MANY ENDINGS. There are five characters: librarian, Nora. troubled teen, Jasmine, widowed, Marlene, homeless Lewis and security guard, Vlado.  Nora's parents were killed in a freak accident when she was little and her brother, Mario blames himself. Mario has disappeared into a world of drugs and addiction and Nora has been searching for him. Unable to find her brother, Nora has developed a f...

  From bestselling author, Patty Callahan comes a story that'll make you believe (again) in fairy tales - ONCE UPON A WARDROBE (HarperMuse). Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford, and dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics. She prefers the dependability of facts—except for one: the younger brother she loves with all her heart doesn’t have long to live. When George becomes captivated by a copy of a brand-new book called  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  and begs her to find out where Narnia came from, there’s no way she can refuse. Despite her timidity about approaching the famous author, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with the Oxford don and his own brother, imploring them for answers. What she receives instead are more stories . . . stories of Jack Lewis’s life, which she takes home to George. Why won’t Mr. Lewis just tell her plainly what George wants to know? The answer will reveal to Megs many truths ...