The best homemaker books

Lynerkim is an assassin; when, that is, he’s not tending to his many quirky interests—skin diseases, theosophy, boy bands, and so on. Against his better judgment, he accepts a new assignment, only to have events take a strange turn when he finds that he has become the real target. Meanwhile, as he tries to unravel the fiery death of his father, he is suddenly plagued by visions of a giant comet obliterating life on earth. The novella, Lynerkim’s Dance, also includes a collection of stories that touch on matters as diverse as spontaneous human combustion, dentists mysteriously disappearing from a town that appears on no maps, a former drug dealer searching for her long-lost home and missing dog, a murderer setting in motion The Plan.

Working mothers juggling life but never giving up hope on realizing their dreams.

This book is extra special to me since I wrote it! It hits the heart of women who are overcommitted taking care of everyone else and losing themselves. Cassie, who always wanted to be a writer, pens a bodice ripper novel. When the book becomes a breakout bestseller she realizes she can't let anyone—especially her family—know she wrote it. So she goes to book signings incognito. The romance novel is also embedded in the main story, both characters parallel each other.

When Harvey Beckett finds a dead body in her backroom on the morning of her bookstore’s grand opening, she just wants the whole situation to go away. But as the mystery unfolds, Harvey finds herself unable to stay out of the investigation, even when it’s potentially deadly. 

In the late twentieth century, nothing united union members, progressive students, Black and Chicano activists, Native Americans, feminists, and members of the LGBTQ+ community quite as well as Coors beer. They came together not in praise of the ice-cold beverage but rather to fight a common enemy: the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company. Wielding the boycott as their weapon of choice, activists targeted Coors for allegations of anti-unionism, discrimination, and conservative political ties. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, anti-Coors activists molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest.

I draw from a broad archive as well as oral history interviews with long-time boycotters to offer a compelling, grassroots view of anti-corporate organizing and the unlikely coalitions that formed in opposition to Coors. The story highlights the vibrancy of activism in the final decades of the twentieth century and the enduring legacy of that organizing for communities, consumer activists, and corporations today.

My book is a history of technology in America, from the medieval axe through to the internet. It is a social history because the emphasis is on the social role of technology—the way in which it interacts with other aspects of American life—rather than on the internal logic of mechanisms themselves. My purpose is to suggest that technology is a part of our general history, therefore I trace it through the transplanting of a medieval technology from Europe to a new setting, then replacing it with an industrial technology also borrowed from Europe, reforming all this again through the agency of science, and finally having to live with what the social critic Lewis Mumford called the “Pentagon of Power.”

When Brooke sets off on a trail in Yellowstone National Park to train for an upcoming marathon, she’s viciously attacked by a grizzly bear. One hundred forty years earlier, Anne accompanies her husband on a camping trip in the nation’s first national park and awakens one morning to find he’s been captured and hauled off by Nez Perce warriors. Both women, whose narratives ultimately converge, face a savage natural landscape and a complicated, male-dominated world. 

But both are bad ass. Alternating between contemporary and historical times, Bear Medicine is lush historical women’s fiction that revolves around survival, authenticity, and sacred friendship.

What’s more awkward than finding out you’re dating a vampire or a werewolf? Finding out you’re dating an Amish guy. That’s the dilemma facing Samantha Stonesong. After the acrimonious divorce of her parents, Sam thinks everything is finally going her way when she befriends Madison, who helps her get accepted into a clique of popular girls in her class: Hillary and the Sherpas. When Sam starts dating Zach, he seems too good to be true. But she begins to suspect he might be a player because he’s suspiciously guarded. However, the truth is that Zach was raised Amish. When Sam’s new friends find out she’s “dating Amish” and cyberbully her, Sam falls back into old self-destructive habits.

Kirkus Reviews calls the novel “funny and engrossing.”

Light duties. Large pay. No questions asked—or answered. After seeing a curious flyer, Freya takes a job caring for Elijah, the comatose son of the eccentric Vincetti family. She soon discovers that the Vincetti’s labyrinthine mansion hides a wealth of secrets, their corporate rivals have a nasty habit of being extravagantly executed, and Elijah is not the saint they portray him to be.

As well, Marilyn Monroe keeps showing up, unaware she’s very much deceased. And there’s something very strange about the story that Elijah’s brother Jack is writing… It has been said that comedies always end with weddings, tragedies with funerals. This story ends with both a bride and a body count.