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Books for Our Summer Reads

Like many, we’re looking forward to our summer reads. With travel, vacation time, and expanded daylight hours, there are more opportunities to read beyond our usual go-tos. I love thrillers and suspense genres. But I also enjoy a little diversity by checking out new authors and different genres . Here’s 5 from my summer read list:

Cemetary Girl by David BellBooks for Our Summer Reads

As far as I can tell, this is Bell’s debut novel . The Amazon summary: Four years after Tom and Abby’s 12-year-old daughter vanishes, she is found alive but strangely calm. When the teen refuses to testify against the man connected to her disappearance, Tom decides to investigate the traumatizing case on his own. Nothing can prepare him for what he is about to discover.
Blurbs from well-known authors promise a compelling read.

 

Summer BooksA Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

Not generally one to read memoirs, fellow blogger Luanne Castle has me rethinking that ‘policy.’ She introduced us to this book a few months back. Check out her blog for her weekly summaries of diverse memoirs.
The Amazon Summary: When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed “Zippy” for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period–people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel’s straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.

 

A Dark and Twisted Side by Sharon BoltonSummer reads

This caught my eye when the reviewer in Entertainment Weekly stated she enjoyed it so much she was going to get the author’s previous books with the Flint character and ‘binge-read.’
An Amazon quote: “Award-winning author Sharon Bolton has once again crafted a tightly plotted, utterly unpredictable thriller around one of the most compelling characters in crime fiction today, intensely private London police officer Lacey Flint, whose penchant for keeping secrets is only matched by her determination to uncover those of others.”

 

Summer readsThe Belles of New England by William Moran
Subtitle: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove. Maybe not exactly light summer fare, but I’m excited about it because I’m working on a project and am currently obsessed with the textile mills in New England in the early 1900s, the immigrants who came to work in them, and the evolution of employee rights.
Amazon summary: The Belles of New England is a masterful, definitive, and eloquent look at the enormous cultural and economic impact on America of New England’s textile mills. The author, an award-winning CBS producer, traces the history of American textile manufacturing back to the ingenuity of Francis Cabot Lodge. The early mills were an experiment in benevolent enlightened social responsibility on the part of the wealthy owners, who belonged to many of Boston’s finest families. But the fledgling industry’s ever-increasing profits were inextricably bound to the issues of slavery, immigration, and workers’ rights.

 

Inner Circle by Brad MeltzerSummer reads

And, of course, I have to include one of my already favorite authors into the summer line-up. I’m pretty sure even if I didn’t already favor Brad Meltzer, this tease would have gotten my attention:
There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I love those stories. And since I work in the National Archives, I find those stories for a living.

Beecher White, a young archivist, spends his days working with the most important documents of the U.S. government. He has always been the keeper of other people’s stories, never a part of the story himself…

Until now.”     (Read more HERE)

 

Next Friday, M will reveal 5 from her summer reading list.

What’s on YOUR summer reading list?

0 Comments

  1. Zippy is such a wonderful book, and these others sound great–even the textile mills one :). Thanks for a wonderful summery list.

      1. Haha, yes, you are! Hint: Thursday’s review is about the memoir on grieving by a fellow WordPress blogger.

  2. You may like Tobias J. Samuels Rebecca’s Choice. Interesting story.

  3. Zippy is on my wanna-read list too! Just began The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton (fact-based fictionalized history). Next up: Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd. LOVE summertime reading!

  4. I’m definitely putting Cemetary Girl on my TBR list. Our book club read Zippy a few years ago, and I loved it so much I read She Got Up Off the Couch, which is a tribute to Kimmel’s mother. I loved it as much–maybe even more–than Zippy. I know you said you’re not really into memoirs, but a really enjoyable one I read recently was Glitter and Glue. Funny and poignant.
    Thanks for the recommendations!

    1. Thanks to Luanne, I’m finding memoirs more and more appealing! I’ll have to check out Glitter and Glue, Dee Dee – you and I seem to be on the same page with our reading tastes!

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