I always wanted a sister. Maybe that’s why I loved Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, a novel that dives deep into the complicated relationships among four sisters.
There is much sorrow and loss in this novel, and I admire how Napolitano creates powerful emotional resonance without crossing the line into sentimentality. If there’s a predominant theme, I would say it’s forgiveness. I shed tears of recognition—these characters’ loves and losses and their deceits and mistakes seem all too familiar even though their experiences may not be mine or yours. Napolitano’s characters resonate with love in all its messiness and complexity.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a poignant and engrossing family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?
“Hello Beautiful is exactly that: beautiful, perceptive, wistful. It’s a story of family and friendship, of how the people we are bound to can also set us free. I loved it.”—Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman…
The last time I rode a horse, I was twenty years old. I know little about horses or the racing culture, let alone its history. Yet I adored Geraldine Brooks’ Horse, which pairs a modern-day mystery surrounding a discarded painting of a legendary racehorse with a historical thread involving the world of racing in the pre-Civil War era.
I have loved all of Brooks’ historical novels, and as always, I admire the rich language and the attention to historical detail she seamlessly weaves into her stories. I love that she takes Horse a step further, portraying the devastating and far-reaching effects of slavery within the context of horse-racing history.
"Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling." -The New York Times Book Review
"Horse isn't just an animal story-it's a moving narrative about race and art." -TIME
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an…
I may have loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead for all the wrong reasons.
I loved it because it was a tough read to get through, but I couldn’t turn away from this story. I loved it for the discomfort and helplessness I felt as I followed the boy, Demon, in his downward spiral. I loved that it forced me to look at how poverty and hardship and addiction go hand in hand. I loved it for Kingsolver’s skills at making someone else’s devastation and heartbreak ring true.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
That Pinson Girl, set in the harsh landscape of rural north Mississippi during World War I, pits a white teenage mother and a biracial sharecropper against forces of hatred, betrayal, and violence.
Sixteen-year-old Leona Pinson gives birth to a son out of wedlock and refuses to name the child’s father. Luther Biggs, a biracial sharecropper, is Leona’s only ally against her brother, Raymond, who inhabits a world of nightriders, drunkenness, and violence. The secrets that bind these characters ultimately unravel, and Leona must save herself and her child. This dark historical novel with a strong female lead engages timeless issues of racism, sexism, and poverty.
