What Your Neighbors are Reading
Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Every family has a story. For some of us, our family of origin is a solid foundation that feeds our confidence and helps us navigate life’s challenges. For others, it’s a source of pain, hurt, and conflict that can feel like a lifelong burden. In this empowering guide, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers clear advice for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to breaking the cycle and moving forward.
Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan
Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it’s her job. But when her too-good-to work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage’s collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it’s picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive, Leo Vance, is cast as her ne’er do well husband Nora’s life will never be the same.
A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen
Ren Monroe has spent four years proving she’s one of the best wizards in her generation. But top marks at Balmerick University will mean nothing if she fails to get recruited into one of the major houses. Enter Theo Brood. If being rich were a sin, he’d already be halfway to hell. After a failed and disastrous party trick, fate has the two of them crossing paths at the public waxway portal the day before holidays—Theo’s punishment is to travel home with the scholarship kids. Which doesn’t sit well with any of them.
Burner by Mark Greaney
When you kick over a rock, you never know what's going to crawl out. Alex Velesky is about to discover that the hard way. He's stolen records from the Swiss bank that employs him, thinking that he'll uncover a criminal conspiracy. But he soon finds that he's tapped into the mother lode of corruption. Before he knows it, he's being hunted by everyone from the Russian mafia to the CIA. Court Gentry and his erstwhile lover, Zoya Zakharova, find themselves on opposites poles when it comes to Velesky. They both want him but for different reasons. That's a problem for tomorrow. Today they need to keep him and themselves alive. Right now, it's not looking good.
The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days by Kate Bowler
Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie offer creative, faith-based blessings that center gratitude and hope while acknowledging our real, messy lives. Formatted like a prayer book, The Lives We Actually Have is an oasis and a landing spot for weary souls, with blessings that focus on the full range of human moments: garbage days, lovely days, grief-stricken days, and even (especially) completely ordinary days. These heartfelt blessings are a chance to exhale when we feel everything from careworn to restless, devastated to bored. Let’s have a reminder that we don’t need to wait for perfect lives when we can bless the lives we actually have.
Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End by Bart Ehrman
You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, interpret it as a metaphorical expression of hope for those suffering now, or only recognize its highlights from pop culture, what you think Revelation reveals…is almost certainly wrong.
Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea by Dav Pilkey
Piggy has returned, and his newest plot is his most diabolical yet. WHAT other new villains are on the horizon? WHERE are they all coming from? And WHO will step forward to save the city when scoundrels sabotage our Supa Buddies? With themes of friendship and doing good, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea is packed with action and hilarity. Featuring "Chomp-O-Rama," a brand-new song, a monstrous Mighty Mite -- and so much more than ever before! IT'S HEROIC, IT'S EPIC!
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
tee says, "The first interaction we get between our main characters is Sam screaming across a crowded subway station, "Sadie! SADIE! SADIE MIRANDA GREEN! YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!" If that doesn't give you the perfect image of Sam and Sadie's relationship then I don't know what will. This gorgeous tale spans the course of thirty years and tells the story of two friends through awkward childhood and lonesome college years, through success and misfortune, through joy and heartbreak. It's sweet and goofy and so human. I adored it."
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory's purpose. To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be. The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother's past is coming to upend her fate. When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
From Kaley: "A prickly English folklorist travels to a small Scandinavian town to study the local faeries -- and also be driven mad by her irritating but handsome Irish colleague (who may or may not be human himself). This adventurous book is populated by socially awkward academics, changelings, brownies who can bake, ice kings, and a lovable cast of villagers. If you struggle to make small talk and should infinitely prefer a book (preferably a dissertation on obscure fairy-stories), you'll get on well with Emily Wilde."
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
