social science

Thanks to everyone who braved the snarled traffic this morning to make the RA Roundtable meeting AND to the fine folks at Central Birmingham Public Library’s Southern History Department for hosting!

For those interested in rare books, documents, maps, and manuscripts, mark this Sunday, December 15th at 3pm on your calendar.  There will be a guest lecturer in BPL’s auditorium to talk about one of the Rare Book Room’s most prized possessions, the royal first edition of the Atlas Maior published by Johann Blaeu in 1662.

During our most recent meeting, the topic was all things social science.  I brought 2 handouts featuring Lit Hub and Publishers Weekly’s top 2019 social science books.  Those titles will be featured at the bottom of the post after our participants’ selections.

Don’t forget to register for the ALLA Public Library Division midwinter conference taking place on Friday, January 31, 2020 at the Homewood Library.  Register at https://bit.ly/2RFnuwJ.

The next Reader’s Advisory Roundtable meeting will be February 12, 2020 at the Homewood Library and the topic up for discussion is urban fiction. 

In attendance today:

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library
Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History
Jon, Avondale
Lynn, Central BPL
Michelle, Irondale
Maura, Trussville

The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good by Elizabeth Cline

(amazon) From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love.

Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it.

Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams.

The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World by John Halpern

(amazon) From a psychiatrist on the frontlines of addiction medicine and an expert on the history of drug use, comes the "authoritative, engaging, and accessible" (Booklist) history of the flower that helped to build -- and now threatens -- modern society.

Opioid addiction is fast becoming the most deadly crisis in American history. In 2018, it claimed nearly fifty thousand lives -- more than gunshots and car crashes combined, and almost as many Americans as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. But even as the overdose crisis ravages our nation -- straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it -- few understand how it came to be.

Opium tells the "fascinating" (Lit Hub) and at times harrowing tale of how we arrived at today's crisis, "mak[ing] timely and startling connections among painkillers, politics, finance, and society" (Laurence Bergreen). The story begins with the discovery of poppy artifacts in ancient Mesopotamia, and goes on to explore how Greek physicians and obscure chemists discovered opium's effects and refined its power, how colonial empires marketed it around the world, and eventually how international drug companies developed a range of powerful synthetic opioids that led to an epidemic of addiction.

Throughout, Dr. John Halpern and David Blistein reveal the fascinating role that opium has played in building our modern world, from trade networks to medical protocols to drug enforcement policies. Most importantly, they disentangle how crucial misjudgments, patterns of greed, and racial stereotypes served to transform one of nature's most effective painkillers into a source of unspeakable pain -- and how, using the insights of history, state-of-the-art science, and a compassionate approach to the illness of addiction, we can overcome today's overdose epidemic.

This urgent and masterfully woven narrative tells an epic story of how one beautiful flower became the fascination of leaders, tycoons, and nations through the centuries and in their hands exposed the fragility of our civilization.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

One for a Man, Two for a Horse: A Pictorial History, Grave and Comic, of Patent Medicines by Gerald Carson

(from the book jacket) Recalling in words and pictures the fads, follies and foibles of self-doctoring in grandpa's day. Hundreds of rare, old pictures, posters, photographs, almanacs and advertisements.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Patients, Her Therapist, and Life's Essential Questions by Lori Gottlieb

(amazon) One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is rev­olutionary in its candor, offering a deeply per­sonal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly reveal­ing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.

Michelle, Irondale

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre

(amazon) The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.

Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?

Michelle, Irondale

Alabama Rivers: A Celebration & Challenge by William Deutsch

(alabamariversbook.org) This book invites you to travel down rivers and through time to encounter the rich human history and natural wonders that have defined Alabama. Along the way, you will celebrate an array of magnificent rivers filled with unique plants and animals, shaped over the ages by a remarkably diverse geology. You will appreciate how rivers have served people from the first Paleo-Indian settlements to the present. Accept the challenge to restore and protect our rivers for their economic, cultural, and ecological benefits, but most of all because it is the right thing to do.

Jon, Avondale

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

(amazon) As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.

McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them.

Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.

Jon, Avondale

The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

(amazon) Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and rising economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era.

More relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were is a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal

Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate

(amazon) From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.

The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.

Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.

Lynn, Central BPL

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

(amazon) FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal.

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well.

Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear--and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence--the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Maura, Trussville

HANDOUTS FROM THE MEETING

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOKS 2019

Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration by Emily Bazelon

Combining personal narratives with legal and political history, Bazelon writes a necessary overview of America’s criminal justice system and the unchecked power of prosecutors.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

In this engaging read, Cullen tells the stories of the students who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and launched March for Our Lives. A human portrayal of the ongoing toll of school shootings and the demand for change.

A Good Provider is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century by Jason DeParle

DeParle puts a human touch on international migration by profiling three generations f a Manila family, as his subjects work in hospitals, hotels, and cruise ships, in search of stable wages. An unforgettable story of sacrifice and separation.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

In this hard-hitting expose, Farrow sheds light on systems of power and abuse, and how both have shaped our current media and political landscape where people on the margins are often ignored or silenced.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe turns a dark subject into a riveting page-turner, blending threads of espionage, murder mystery, and political history as he tells the story of the conflict known as the Troubles.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

National Book Award winner Kendi uses his own journey as a focal point for self-examination, exploring not only the history of racism and racist ideas past and present, but also how we can challenge ourselves to develop a more equitable society.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard

Leonard writes an extensive, far-reaching history of the privately-owned Koch Industries, including how the company has influenced environmental and public policy, often through deceitful and dishonest practices.

Beneath the Tamarind Tree: A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram by Isha Sesay

The powerful work movingly relays how the kidnapping of 276 girls from Chibok, Nigeria, in 2014 continues to impact families who have yet to be reunited.

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

With this searing investigation into domestic violence in America, Snyder uses personal recollections in order to show how families cope when they lose someone to intimate partner violence, and the lasting effects on children.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

Blending history, reporting, and memoir, Ojibwe historian Treuer creates a sweeping account of Native North America, before and after Wounded Knee, showing how tribes persevered despite oppression and persecution.

LIT HUB’S FALL 2019 NONFICTION PREVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West

With her signature mix of incisive wit and sharp culture criticism, West’s new book promises to untangle the systems of power that have allowed American culture to disempower women and people of color while propping up misogyny, racism, and other forces that propelled our current president to the White House.

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson

Lauren Michele Jackson is one of those critics who has her eyes on everything from digital jukeboxes and memes to contemporary pop music and black aesthetics. In her book debut, a mélange of scholarly critique and narrative prose, Jackson takes on cultural appropriation. Her argument isn’t simply that a white woman wearing cornrows is poor form, to use one example; the issue is the way in which mainstream visibility is inextricably joined with racial inequality, in this case white profit at the expense of black cultural gatekeepers.

For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank

Liz Plank looks for alternative ways to be a man in a society that is paying new attention to abuses perpetuated by men, but still punishes those who fail to live up to a “traditional” version of masculinity. In our recent history, she writes, “We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn’t update what it means to be a man.” This book offers a one kind of blueprint for how to do exactly that.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

We haven’t seen a book from Gladwell since 2013’s David and Goliath. Gladwell’s eclectic, pop psychological approach aims for new heights as he turns his attention to strangers: How can we bridge the gap between ourselves and people we don’t know? It’s the question that is perhaps at the root of the present partisan alienation felt keenly in the US, and Gladwell proposes answers in case studies: Sandra Bland, Bernie Madoff, Sylvia Plath, Amanda Knox, and more—people who most of us will only ever know based on the stories other people have told about them.

Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today by Curtis White

The idea of “counterculture” doesn’t need to be confined to the social movements of the 60s and 70s, Curtis White argues in this book, which calls for a revitalized counterculture—one that actually challenges who is in power today.

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein brought down an empire of abuse and brought forth a worldwide chorus of voices calling for those in power to believe women. With She Said, the tell the story of how that reporting reached the public, and the process that followed, as their initial reporting spurred dozens of other investigations of violence, sexual harassment, and abuses of power.

Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State by Nick Neely

Two-hundred -and-fifty years ago, a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portola traveled along the coast of what is now California. Walking 650 miles on foot, Nick Neely retraces those steps over the course of 12 weeks, along the way discussing the history of indigenous cultures, colonization, and industry that formed California’s identity.

The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally by Carlos A. Ball

The role of corporate conglomerates in queer culture has long been a point of controversy, from the overt—including companies who advertise rainbow logos while donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians—to more complex conversations about who actually benefits and who is harmed when capitalist logic and corporate power come to bear on the LGBTQ community. Carlos A. Ball argues in favor of using that power for social reform (to the extent such a thing is possible), and in the process looks at the history that brought us here.

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson

From England to the American South, Kristen Richardson follows the long history of a bizarre social custom as an efficient way to present young women for marriage. Her experience with the topic is personal—after refusing to take part in her own debutante ball, she began researching their history. “I had been taught these dances since I was in the fifth grade, and clearly this event was meant to be some sort of culmination of that training,” she wrote for Rookie. “But I still didn’t understand why we were there, or what this ritual was about.” Her book promises some answers to that.

Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions by Wole Soyinka

At times anecdotal, describing encounters with muses and deities, and at times political and theoretical, Beyond Aesthetics steps behind the curtain of art collection. In exploring these like that of identity, tradition, and originality, Soyinka reveals how curators and collectors alike hold the power to aleter or even suppress Africa’s artistic traditions. A propoenent of collecting as a meqans of reclaiming tradition, Soyinka makes a passionate case for understanding and ingaging with Africa’s rich cultural history.

biographical fiction

The next RART meeting will be Wednesday, December 11th at 9am in the Southern History department of the main Birmingham Public Library downtown and the topic up for discussion will be all things social science/psychology!

Today, we met to talk about a subject both near and dear to my heart, biographical fiction! Wikipedia describes this genre thus: “The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional account of a contemporary or historical person's life. This kind of novel concentrates on the experiences a person had during his lifetime, the people they met and the incidents which occurred.”

Holley W, Emmet O'Neal

Riana M, Pinson

Kayla K, Pinson

Samuel R, Springville Road

Mary Anne E, BPL Southern History

Jon N, Avondale

Michelle H, Irondale

The Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz

(amazon) Running from her father’s brutal legacy, Joseph Stalin’s daughter defects to the United States during the turbulence of the 1960s. For fans of We Were the Lucky Ones and A Gentleman in Moscow, this sweeping historical novel and unexpected love story is inspired by the remarkable life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.

“The Red Daughter does exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn more.”—The New York Times Book Review

In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America.

She is a contradictory celebrity: charismatic and headstrong, lonely and haunted, excited and alienated by her adopted country’s radically different society. Persuading herself that all she yearns for is a simple American life, she attempts to settle into a suburban existence in Princeton, New Jersey. But one day an invitation from the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright arrives, and Svetlana impulsively joins her cultlike community at Taliesin West. When this dream ends in disillusionment, Svetlana reaches out to Peter, the one person who understands how the chains of her past still hold her prisoner. Their relationship changes and deepens, moving from America to England to the Soviet Union and back again, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, and Svetlana’s and Peter’s private lives are no longer their own.

Novelist John Burnham Schwartz’s father was in fact the young lawyer who escorted Svetlana Alliluyeva to the United States. Drawing upon private papers and years of extensive research, Schwartz imaginatively re-creates the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong, in the powerful, evocative prose that has made him an acclaimed author of literary and historical fiction.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library

Those Who Love by Irving Stone

(Kirkus Reviews) The most often encountered pictures of our Second President and his First Lady may leave the impression of a stodgy, podgy, perfectly decent, devoted pair. They were. But, in the biographical novel form, especially in the hands of Irving Stone, no historical figure is going to be allowed to drop into bed in uxorious boredom or kiss with absent-minded contentment. The mind may reel at the idea of John Adams as ""a hurricane"" of passion but Abigail says so here. At least Irving Stone says she thought so. And, after a courtship of ""bruising kisses...Every remote corner of her was magnificently aware, from the recess of her brain to the tactile tingling of her toes...""; they got married and Hurricane Adams ""swept her out to sea"" every night. 

This sort of pumping prose may spell critical disaster, but the author and the publisher probably care only that when it gets on the bestseller list that it be spelled right. American Revolutionary history and early political life moves forward with a degree of respect for the facts and a general tampering with actual truth through the mass produced dialogue. There are those who have always maintained that taken together or separately, the Adams family were admirable, upstanding, long living, letter writing, diary keeping bores. However, a biographical novelist, when history palls, can always swack off a bruising kiss or spice up the chat. It's a good joke gift for historians and the general public, God Bless 'em, may not even notice the cliches.

Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman

(amazon) A glorious novel of the controversial Richard III---a monarch betrayed in life by his allies and betrayed in death by history

In this beautifully rendered modern classic, Sharon Kay Penman redeems Richard III---vilified as the bitter, twisted, scheming hunchback who murdered his nephews, the princes in the Tower---from his maligned place in history with a dazzling combination of research and storytelling.

Born into the treacherous courts of fifteenth-century England, in the midst of what history has called The War of the Roses, Richard was raised in the shadow of his charismatic brother, King Edward IV. Loyal to his friends and passionately in love with the one woman who was denied him, Richard emerges as a gifted man far more sinned against than sinning.

This magnificent retelling of his life is filled with all of the sights and sounds of battle, the customs and lore of the fifteenth century, the rigors of court politics, and the passions and prejudices of royalty.

Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

White Houses by Amy Bloom

(amazon) For readers of The Paris Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue comes a “sensuous, captivating account of a forbidden affair between two women” (People)—Eleanor Roosevelt and “first friend” Lorena Hickok.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Financial Times • San Francisco Chronicle • New York Public Library • Refinery29 • Real Simple

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, “Hick,” as she’s known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. 

She moves into the White House, where her status as “first friend” is an open secret, as are FDR’s own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick’s bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.

From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan’s Washington Square, Amy Bloom’s new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity.

Samuel, Springville Road

American Princess by Stephanie Marie Thornton

(amazon) Alice may be the president's daughter, but she's nobody's darling. As bold as her signature color Alice Blue, the gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing First Daughter discovers that the only way for a woman to stand out in Washington is to make waves—oceans of them. With the canny sophistication of the savviest politician on the Hill, Alice uses her celebrity to her advantage, testing the limits of her power and the seductive thrill of political entanglements.

But Washington, DC is rife with heartaches and betrayals, and when Alice falls hard for a smooth-talking congressman it will take everything this rebel has to emerge triumphant and claim her place as an American icon. As Alice soldiers through the devastation of two world wars and brazens out a cutting feud with her famous Roosevelt cousins, it's no wonder everyone in the capital refers to her as the Other Washington Monument—and Alice intends to outlast them all.

Jon, Avondale

Varina by Charles Frazier

(amazon) Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history–culpable regardless of her intentions.

The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond, Virginia, and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.”

Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman’s tragic life, and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.

Jon, Avondale

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

(amazon) In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the battleground for America’s destiny.

Jon, Avondale

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

(amazon) A brilliant literary debut, inspired by a true story: the final days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in 1829.

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard.

Riveting and rich with lyricism, BURIAL RITES evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

Riana, Pinson

Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland

(amazon) Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the 20th century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, best-selling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings a woman once lost in the shadows into vivid color.

It's 1893, and at the Chicago World's Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows, which he hopes will honor his family business and earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women's division. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.

Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman, which ultimately force her to protest against the company she has worked so hard to cultivate. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces to a strict policy: he does not hire married women, and any who do marry while under his employ must resign immediately.

Eventually, like many women, Clara must decide what makes her happiest-the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart.

Michelle, Irondale

Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

(amazon) In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice. 

From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called “my whole world.” When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy. 

In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had. 

At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.

Michelle, Irondale

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

(amazon) Born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives on the Texas frontier hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Soon, with few job prospects, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally with his partner, Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore. In search of high-stakes poker, the couple hits the saloons of Dodge City. And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and a fearless lawman named Wyatt Earp begins— before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology—when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety.

Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell

(amazon) Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . . That was America in 1881.

All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26 when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three officers were wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt.

Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral would soon become central to American beliefs about the Old West.

Epitaph tells Wyatt’s real story, unearthing the Homeric tragedy buried under 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for forty-nine years and who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would become the epitaph her husband deserved.

Shadowlands by William Nicholson

(amazon) William Nicholson’s Tony nominated stage adaptation of his award-winning BBC teleplay relates the story of shy Oxford don and children’s author C.S. Lewis and American poet Joy Gresham. SHADOWLANDS shows how love, and the risk of loss, transformed this great man’s life.

Caroline, Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller

(amazon) In this novel authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before—Caroline Ingalls, "Ma" in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books.

In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and the warm bosom of her family, for a new life in Kansas Indian Territory. Packing what they can carry in their wagon, Caroline, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril.

The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone, sickness tended without the aid of doctors, and babies birthed without the accustomed hands of mothers or sisters. But Caroline’s new world is also full of tender joys. In adapting to this strange new place and transforming a rough log house built by Charles’ hands into a home, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses.

For more than eighty years, generations of readers have been enchanted by the adventures of the American frontier’s most famous child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books. Now, that familiar story is retold in this captivating tale of family, fidelity, hardship, love, and survival that vividly reimagines our past.

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

(amazon) On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. In this riveting debut novel, Sarah Schmidt reimagines the day of the infamous murders as an intimate story of a family devoid of love.

While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell―of a father with an explosive temper, a spiteful stepmother, and two spinster sisters desperate for their independence. As the police search for clues, Lizzie’s memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments.

Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelling.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

(amazon) It's 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.

Great authors who frequently focus on biographical fiction:

Melanie Benjamin

Tracy Chevalier

Michelle Moran

Irving Stone

Geraldine Brooks

Marie Benedict

Paula McLain

This Friday, October 11th, Harper Collins Library Love Fest is hosting a two-part Librarian Preview book buzz for the hottest 2020 titles and it's free to watch! Here's a link to more info: https://bit.ly/2MsTJer

cozy mysteries

Our next meeting is Wednesday, October 9^th at 9am and the topic up for discussion will be biographical fiction.

Thirteen in attendance:

Holley W., Emmet O’Neal Library
Mary Anne E., BPL Southern History
Susan M., Trussville Library
Maura D., Trussville Library
Michelle H., Irondale Library
Kelly L., Springville Road Library
Laura T., Homewood Library
Cristina C., Homewood Library
Mary E., Homewood Library
Riana M., Pinson Library
Jenn P., Five Points West Library
Tobin C., JCLC
Jason B., Trussville

Thanks to the fine folks at the Trussville Library for hosting and providing yummy refreshments during today’s discussion of cozy mysteries!

The Camelot Caper by Elizabeth Peters

(amazon) For Jessica Tregarth, an unexpected invitation to visit her grandfather in England is a wonderful surprise—an opportunity to open doors to a family past that has always been closed to her. But sinister acts greet her arrival. A stranger tries to steal her luggage and later accosts her in Salisbury Cathedral. Mysterious villains pursue her through Cornwall, their motives and intentions unknown. 

Jessica's only clue is an antique heirloom she possesses, an ancient ring that bears the Tregarth family crest. And her only ally is handsome gothic novelist David Randall—her self-proclaimed protector—who appears from seemingly out of nowhere to help her in her desperate attempt to solve a five-hundred-year-old puzzle. For something from out of the cloudy mists of Arthurian lore has come back to plague a frightened American abroad. And a remarkable truth about a fabled king and a medieval treasure could ultimately make Jess Tregarth very rich . . . or very dead.
Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters

(amazon) In a remote English manor house, modern admirersof the much-maligned King Richard III—one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary villains—are gathered for a grand weekend of dress-up and make-believe murder. But the fun ends when the masquerade turns more sinister . . . and deadly. Jacqueline Kirby, an American librarian on hand for the festivities, suddenly finds herself in the center of strange, dark doings . . . and racing to untangle a murderous puzzle before history repeats itself in exceptionally macabre ways.
Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

Aunt Dimity’s Death by Nancy Atherton

(amazon) Summoned from her latest dreadful temp job by her lawyers, Lori Shephard discovers that Aunt Dimity--her mother's favorite bedtime story heroine--was a real person who has left her millions and the challenge to solve an eerie mystery.
Michelle, Irondale

Murder on a Girl’s Night Out by Anne George

(amazon) Country Western is red hot these days, so overimpulsive Mary Alice thinks it makes perfect sense to buy the Skoot 'n' Boot bar -- since that's where the many-times-divorced "Sister" and her boyfriend du jour like to hang out anyway. Sensible retired schoolteacher Patricia Anne is inclined to disagree -- especially when they find a strangled and stabbed dead body dangling in the pub's wishing well. The sheriff has some questions for Mouse and her sister Sister, who were the last people, besides the murderer, of course, to see the ill-fated victim alive. And they had better come up with some answers soon -- because a killer with unfinished business has begun sending them some mighty threatening messages...
Michelle, Irondale

The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer

(amazon) When Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of detective Sherlock Holmes, discovers her mother has disappeared—on her 14th birthday nonetheless—she knows she alone can find her. Disguising herself as a grieving widow, Enola sets out to the heart of London to uncover her mother’s whereabouts—but not even the last name Holmes can prepare her for what awaits. Suddenly involved in the kidnapping of the young Marquess of Basilwether, Enola must escape murderous villains, free the spoiled Marquess, and perhaps hardest of all, elude her shrewd older brother—all while collecting clues to her mother’s disappearance!
Laura, Homewood

Searching for Lottie by Susan Ross

(amazon) A long-lost cousin, a mysterious locket, a visit to Nana Rose in Florida, a diary written in German, and a very special violin all lead twelve-year-old Charlie to the truth about her great-aunt Lottie in this intriguing, intergenerational mystery. 

Charlie, a budding violinist, decides to research the life of her great-aunt and namesake for her middle school ancestry project. Everyone in Charlie's family believes Great-Aunt Charlotte (called Lottie), a violin prodigy, died at the hands of the Nazis, but the more Charlie uncovers about her long-lost relative, the more muddied Great-Aunt Lottie's story becomes. Could it be that Lottie somehow survived the war by hiding in Hungary? Could she even still be alive today? 

In Searching for Lottie, Susan Ross has written a highly personal work of historical fiction that is closely inspired by her own family history, exploring the ongoing effects of the Holocaust on families today. Includes a letter from the author describing the research that shaped this story.

Cristina, Homewood

The Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay

(amazon) Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story.

Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth -- and the part he played in it.

As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.
Cristina, Homewood

Murder in G Major by Alexia Gordon

(amazon) With few other options, African-American classical musician Gethsemane Brown accepts a less-than-ideal position turning a group of rowdy schoolboys into an award-winning orchestra. Stranded without luggage or money in the Irish countryside, she figures any job is better than none. The perk? Housesitting a lovely cliffside cottage. The catch? The ghost of the cottage's murdered owner haunts the place. Falsely accused of killing his wife (and himself), he begs Gethsemane to clear his name so he can rest in peace.

Gethsemane's reluctant investigation provokes a dormant killer and she soon finds herself in grave danger. As Gethsemane races to prevent a deadly encore, will she uncover the truth or star in her own farewell performance?
Riana, Pinson

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

(amazon) "Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe, declared the parson, brandishing a carving knife above a joint of roast beef, would be doing the world at large a favor!"

It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. And one which was to come back and haunt the clergyman just a few hours later when the Colonel is found shot dead in the clergyman's study. But as Miss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seems to have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.

Riana, Pinson

Cloche & Dagger by Jenn McKinlay

(amazon) Not only is Scarlett Parker’s love life in the loo—as her British cousin Vivian Tremont would say—it’s also gone viral with an embarrassing video. So when Viv suggests Scarlett leave Florida to lay low in London, she hops on the next plane across the pond. Viv is the proprietor of Mims’s Whims, a ladies’ hat shop on Portobello Road bequeathed to both cousins by their beloved grandmother, and she wants Scarlett to finally join her in the millinery business.

But a few surprises await Scarlett in London. First, she is met at the airport not by Viv, but by her handsome business manager, Harrison Wentworth. Second, Viv—who has some whims of her own—seems to be missing. No one is too concerned about the unpredictable Viv until one of her posh clients is found dead wearing the cloche hat Viv made for her—and nothing else. Is Scarlett’s cousin in trouble? Or is she in hiding?
Maura, Trussville

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

(amazon) Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family — and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared. 
Maura, Trussville

Death by Accident by Bill Crider

(amazon) Texas Sheriff Dan Rhodes' cases usually concern the bad boys of rural Blacklin County, or the slightly wacky citizens who are causing trouble that tends to be funny rather than criminal. But although at first the dead man floating in the old swimming pool at the edge of town seems to have been an accident victim — a staggering drunk tumbling into the water — Rhodes and his small but colorful staff soon uncover murder. 

It's the second strange death in two weeks (the other was that of John West, killed when he blew up carrying a gasoline can across a field). But where was the Cherokee wagon John was carrying the gas to? And why is his widow so jaunty? West was a solid citizen; Pep Yeldell, the swimming pool decedent, was a man with many enemies. In his quiet way, Rhodes goes about looking for a connection and a killer — a quest that takes Rhodes, no athlete now in spite of his wife's efforts to keep him on a diet of little meat and lots of greens, up a tree and puts him at the mercy of a vicious killer.
Kelly, Springville Road

The Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson

(amazon) Matthew Corbin suffers from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He hasn't been to school in weeks. His hands are cracked and bleeding from cleaning. He refuses to leave his bedroom. To pass the time, he observes his neighbors from his bedroom window, making mundane notes about their habits as they bustle about the cul-de-sac. 

When a toddler staying next door goes missing, it becomes apparent that Matthew was the last person to see him alive. Suddenly, Matthew finds himself at the center of a high-stakes mystery, and every one of his neighbors is a suspect. Matthew is the key to figuring out what happened and potentially saving a child's life... but is he able to do so if it means exposing his own secrets, and stepping out from the safety of his home?
Mary, Homewood

Super Sons by Ridley Pearson

(amazon) The polar ice caps have nearly melted away, causing devastation to coastal cities. Erratic, deadly weather forces everyone inland, tearing families apart. Earth is facing its greatest crisis--and Superman and Batman are nowhere to be found.

From New York Times bestselling author Ridley Pearson (Kingdom Keepers) and artist Ile Gonzalez comes the first book in an epic new series that follows the Super Sons of Superman and Batman as they struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world!
Mary, Homewood

Live and Let Chai by Bree Baker

(amazon) Life hasn't been so sweet for Everly Swan over the past couple of years, but now that she is back in her seaside hometown and the proud owner of a little iced tea shop and café right on the beach, things are finally starting to look up—until a curmudgeonly customer turns up dead on the boardwalk. With one of her hallmark glass tea jars lying right next to him and an autopsy that reports poison in his system, it doesn't look good for Everly or her brand new business.

As the townspeople of Charm, formerly so welcoming and homey, turn their back on Everly, she fights to dig up clues about who could have had it in for the former town councilman. With a maddeningly handsome detective discouraging her from uncovering leads and a series of anonymous attacks on Everly and her business, it will take everything she's got to keep this mystery from boiling over.

Jenn, Five Points West

And Then There Were Nun by Dakota Cassidy

(amazon) My name is Sister Trixie Lavender, and I’m an occasionally possessed excommunicated nun.Okay, that’s a lot to swallow at once. But it’s true I was booted from the convent after doing something unspeakable. Something I had no control over. Something that lives inside me to this day, exploding out like that chestburster in Alien when I least suspect it.But I have help. My amazing friend Coop—the demon who saved me from an ugly end—remains by my side, loyal and true. She was Hell’s best tattoo artist back in the day, and together with my designs, we’re opening Inkerbelle’s Tattoos and Piercings, right in the heart of Portland’s most darling district, Cobbler Cove.

Of course, our bid to fit in would be a little less rocky if I could help Coop assimilate with humans, keep a lid on our sassy talking owl, Livingston…oh, and if someone hadn’t killed our landlord on day one—in our shop.This mystery-loving, bumbling ex-nun and her trusty demon sidekick are on the case! If I don’t bumble my way right into my own demise first…This new cozy mystery series from USA Today bestselling cozy mystery author Dakota Cassidy is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat as Trixie and Coop hunt for a killer. 
Jenn, Five Points West

The Moor by Laurie King

(amazon) In the eerie wasteland of Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes summons his devoted wife and partner, Mary Russell, from her studies at Oxford to aid the investigation of a death and some disturbing phenomena of a decidedly supernatural origin. Through the mists of the moor there have been sightings of a spectral coach made of bones carrying a woman long-ago accused of murdering her husband--and of a hound with a single glowing eye. Returning to the scene of one of his most celebrated cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Russell investigate a mystery darker and more unforgiving than the moors themselves.
Holley, Emmet O’Neal

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

(amazon) It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”
Holley, Emmet O’Neal

Low Country Boil by Susan Boyer

(amazon) Private Investigator Liz Talbot is a modern Southern belle: she blesses hearts and takes names. She carries her Sig 9 in her Kate Spade handbag, and her golden retriever, Rhett, rides shotgun in her hybrid Escape. 

When her grandmother is murdered, Liz high-tails it back to her South Carolina island home to find the killer. 
She’s fit to be tied when her police-chief brother shuts her out of the investigation, so she opens her own. Then her long-dead best friend pops in and things really get complicated. 

When more folks start turning up dead in this small seaside town, Liz must use more than just her wits and charm to keep her family safe, chase down clues from the hereafter, and catch a psychopath before he catches her.
Jenn, Five Points West

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood

(amazon) Found running wild in the forest of Ashton Place, the Incorrigibles are no ordinary children: Alexander, age ten or thereabouts, keeps his siblings in line with gentle nips; Cassiopeia, perhaps four or five, has a bark that is (usually) worse than her bite; and Beowulf, age somewhere-in-the-middle, is alarmingly adept at chasing squirrels.

Luckily, Miss Penelope Lumley is no ordinary governess. Only fifteen years old and a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, Penelope embraces the challenge of her new position. Though she is eager to instruct the children in Latin verbs and the proper use of globes, first she must help them overcome their canine tendencies.

But mysteries abound at Ashton Place: Who are these three wild creatures, and how did they come to live in the vast forests of the estate? Why does Old Timothy, the coachman, lurk around every corner? Will Penelope be able to teach the Incorrigibles table manners and socially useful phrases in time for Lady Constance's holiday ball? And what on earth is a schottische?

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharon McCrumb

(amazon) For one fateful weekend, the annual science fiction and fantasy convention, Rubicon, has all but taken over a usually ordinary hotel. Now the halls are alive with Trekkies, tech nerds, and fantasy gamers in their Viking finery *all of them eager to hail their hero, bestselling fantasy author Appin Dungannon: a diminutive despot whose towering ego more than compensates for his 5' 1" height . . . and whose gleeful disdain for his fawning fans is legendary.

Hurling insults and furniture with equal abandon, the terrible, tiny author proceeds to alienate ersatz aliens and make-believe warriors at warp speed. But somewhere between the costume contest and the exhibition Dungeons & Dragons game, Dungannon gets done in. While die-hard fans of Dungannon's seemingly endless sword-and-sorcery series wonder how they'll go on and hucksters wonder how much they can get for the dead man's autograph, a hapless cop wonders, Who would want to kill Appin Dungannon? But the real question, as the harried convention organizers know, is Who wouldn't ?

A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn

(amazon) London, 1887. After burying her spinster aunt, orphaned Veronica Speedwell is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry—and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as with fending off admirers, Veronica intends to embark upon the journey of a lifetime.

But fate has other plans when Veronica thwarts her own attempted abduction with the help of an enigmatic German baron, who offers her sanctuary in the care of his friend Stoker, a reclusive and bad-tempered natural historian. But before the baron can reveal what he knows of the plot against her, he is found murdered—leaving Veronica and Stoker on the run from an elusive assailant as wary partners in search of the villainous truth.

Antiques Roadkill by Barbara Allan

(amazon) Determined to make a new start in her quaint hometown on the banks of the Mississippi, Brandy Borne never dreams she'll become the prime suspect in a murder case. . . 

Moving back in with her eccentric, larger-than-life mother, Brandy Borne finds small-town Serenity anything but serene. It seems an unscrupulous antiques dealer has swindled Vivian out of the family's heirlooms. But when he is found run over in a country lane, Brandy becomes Murder Suspect Number One--with her mother coming in a very close second. . . 

The list of other suspects is impressive--the victim's business seems to have been based on bilking seniors out of their possessions. And when the Borne "girls" uncover a few very unsavory Serenity secrets, they become targets for a murderer whose favorite hobby seems to be collecting victims. 

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

(amazon) "Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?" Dozens of children respond to this peculiar ad in the newspaper and are then put through a series of mind-bending tests, which readers take along with them. Only four children--two boys and two girls--succeed. Their challenge: to go on a secret mission that only the most intelligent and inventive children could complete. To accomplish it they will have to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where the only rule is that there are no rules. But what they'll find in the hidden underground tunnels of the school is more than your average school supplies. So, if you're gifted, creative, or happen to know Morse Code, they could probably use your help.

Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos by R.L. LaFevers

(amazon) Theodosia Throckmorton has her hands full at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London. Her father may be head curator, but it is Theo—and only Theo—who is able to see all the black magic and ancient curses that still cling to the artifacts in the museum.

When Theo’s mother returns from her latest archaeological dig bearing the Heart of Egypt—a legendary amulet belonging to an ancient tomb—Theo learns that it comes inscribed with a curse so black and vile that it threatens to crumble the British Empire from within and start a war too terrible to imagine. Intent on returning the malevolent artifact to its rightful place, Theo devises a daring plan to put things right. But even with the help of her younger brother, a wily street urchin, and the secret society known as the Brotherhood of the Chosen Keepers, it won’t be easy . . . she quickly finds herself pursued down dark alleys, across an ocean, through the bustling crowds of Cairo, and straight into the heart of an ancient mystery. Theo will have to call upon everything she’s ever learned in order to prevent the rising chaos from destroying her country—and herself!