Ode to the Half-Broken
Suzanne Palmer
DAW/PRH
Palmer creates a post-apocalyptic world that is perhaps too recognizable. She peoples it with wonderfully real humans, robots and cyborgs who develop real feelings and find ways to confront their loneliness and the horrors that surround them.
I am hoping for a sequel.
If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.
Cave Mountain: a Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
Harper Collins Publishers
Benjamin Hale covers a great deal of ground - beginning with a missing child, segueing to a Christian cult murdering a different child and the lives of many of those involved in both occurrences. Hale manages to keep an open mind, while remaining a skeptic and allowing the people he's showing us to be themselves, in all their complexities. He writes beautifully of these people and the countryside, without ever making less of them than they so obviously are.
If you are very religious, or bothered by profanities, you may find this a bit difficult.
If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vintage/PRH
A medieval quest that is not for the grail but for memory. A moral decision of historical truth, vengeance, war and the possibility of forgiveness weighed against forgetting everything.
A question that unfortunately lingers.
If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.
by Xochitl Gonzalez
Flatiron Books/Macmillan
You don't need to have ever been to Brooklyn to enjoy this story of a group of friends having one last blast of a summer. Warm, funny and just a bit sad, beautifully told - a great, easy but thoughtful read.
If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.
by Ali Smith
Pantheon/PRH
Sisters who've been estranged, a loss which leads to too much imagination (can there be?), all of the horrors people inflict upon each other, ghosts and a horse that leads to a reconciliation. This is warm and sad and a reminder that war, 'though it's always been with us, has never been right.
I'm going to have to read everything she's written.
If you would like to know more about, or own this book, please check with your local independent bookstore or this great place: bookshop.org.
