Looking for a Good Book?

Ahhh yes it’s time for Summer Reading Club.  Most people think summer reading is for children and teens but adults have their very own Summer Reading Club at the library too. Looking for a good book to get started with? Here are the some of the best one’s I’ve read so far this year:

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman  

When Wendy White goes missing and is later found dead, people of Haeden, New York insist that she must have been taken by an outsider. Stacy Flynn, an outsider from the big city, isn’t buying it. In town to research a story on the environmental impact of the dairy owned by the town’s most prominent family, Flynn suspects that there is something going on with the men in town. She has been hoping to hit on a “big-picture story from a backwater nowhere,” and Wendy White’s disappearance and murder set her senses tingling. They go into overdrive when Alice Piper, the precocious daughter of idealists Claire and Gene, who quit their careers in medicine and left Manhattan for the opportunity to take a stab at living off the grid, does Something Big, something that Flynn knows her writing provoked. 

The Adults by Alison Espach

Coming of age in Greenwich CT, 14-year-old Emily witnesses  the breakdown of her family.  Her parents announce they are getting a divorce and that her father is moving to Prague, Emily discovers her father has been having an affair with the next door neighbor, Mrs. Resnick , Mr. Resnick kills himself in his backyard with Emily as the only witness, and Mrs. Resnick reveals that she is pregnant with Emily’s half-sibling. And in the middle of all this chaos, something important begins. Emily strikes up an intoxicating and illicit relationship with her twenty-four year old English teacher, known among his adoring female students as ‘Mr. Basketball’, a love affair that will stretch well into her twenties and form the emotional fulcrum for the larger tale of Emily’s coming of age. This is not something that I would normally choose to read but it was incredible; dark, weird, and very, very wonderful.

The Tiger by John Vaillant

Tigers do not usually eat people, but in late 1997 one in Russia started doing exactly that. Vladimir Markov is compelled by poverty into illegal hunting of tigers. Shooting a tiger transforms the two-legged predator into prey, who the tiger follows and annihilates with deliberate ferocity. Soon after consuming Markov, the tiger devours a young hunter and also nearly kills a tracker with Inspection Tiger, an outfit tasked with combating crimes involving tigers, which usually means disarming poachers but which now means pursuing an atypically vengeful killer cat. There are lots of interesting facts about tigers and their environment here as well as a great adventure story.

Half a Life by Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss was driving with his friends to a miniature golf course when a 16-year-old girl veered her bicycle across two lanes and into the path of his Oldsmobile. Celine Zilke's death that night changed eighteen-year old Strauss forever; he knew he would always be "the guy who killed a girl". He drifted through the remaining months of school trying to mourn for Celine and overcome his guilt, but could not escape building the foundation of his adult identity around their accident. Half a Life covers the next eighteen years of Strauss's life as he faces a lawsuit from the Zilkes and the oncoming pressures of adulthood.

What great reads have you found this year?