Start Your Summer Reading Early

With summer still over a month away -- it's never too early to be prepared with some page turners and other good books.

Here's what pages have been turning at Barrett Bookstore in the Noroton Heights Shopping Center:

-- "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" by Anthony Marra -- Barrett owner Sheila Daley loves it: "the language is beautiful, and the charectarizations really very engaging. It's a gut-wrenching story and grim, but what sort of makes it is the language."

(Editor's note: The New York Times just published a review of "Constellation" on Wednesday. Here's a link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/books/a-constellation-of-vital-phenomena-by-anthony-marra.html?ref... )

-- "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson -- "It's unlike anything that I've ever read, " said Robin Harvey, who works at the book store. "The story keeps reinventing itself , chapter by chapter." In one chapter a charectarizations may die, for instance, but in the next chapter, she hasn't died in exactly the same way. "You have to kind of go with it"

-- "The Woman Upstairs" by Claire Messud -- "A spinster becomes devoted to a family and sort of lives vicariously through them, " is Daley's one-line description.

-- "The Interestings" by Meg Wolitzer -- "a witty and compassionate page-turner about creativity," Harvey said.

-- "Reconstructing Amelia" by Kimberly McCreight -- "which is a great beach book," Harvey said. "It's a whodunit." A single mother is called to her daughter's school because the child is being suspended, then is told her daughter jumped off the building's roof. Then she gets a call saying the girl didn't jump. "It's a good summer page-turner."

And there's always room in your schedule for a good page-turner.