Summer Reading Wrap Up and My Fall Picks

So in May I picked (20) books that I hoped to read this summer and, I was happy that as the summer progressed (13) of these books called my name.  As always tends to happen, I was distracted by several other new releases that seemed to appeal to me more and so (7) alternate books, that I really enjoyed completed my 20 Books of Summer Challenge.

1. The Shell Seekers; Rosamunde Pilcher 4.5/5 stars
2. The Summer Place; Jennifer Weiner
3. Tin Camp Road; Ellen Airgood - 2.5/5 stars
4. Life Ceremony; Sayaka Murata - 3/5 stars
5. The Club; Ellery Lloyd
6. The Lobotomist's Wife; Samantha Green Woodruff
7. Metropolis; B.A. Shapiro - 4.5/5 stars
8. The Book Woman's Daughter; Kim Richardson - 4/5 stars
9. Summer Love; Nancy Thayer - 2/5 stars
10. Vacationland; Meg Mitchell Moore  4.5/5 stars
11. The Lost Summers of Newport; Beatriz Williams
12. The Hotel Nantucket; Elin Hilderbrand - 4/5 stars
13. The House Across the Lake; Riley Sager - 3.5/5 stars
14. It All Comes Down to This; Therese Anne Fowler - 3/5 stars
15. Stay Awake; Megan Goldin
16. A Sister's Story; Donatella DiPetrantonio - 3.5/5 sr=tars
17. The Midcoast; Adam White - 4/5 stars
18. Godspeed; Nickolas Butler - 4.5/5 stars
19. Summer Guest; Justin Cronin
20. The It Girl; Ruth Ware 

Alternate Summer Reads not on original list

1. Love and Saffron; Kim Fay - 4.5/5
2. Lucy By the Sea; Elizabeth Strout - 5/5 stars
3. The Foundling; Ann Leary - 4/5 stars
4. Take My Hand; Dolen Perkins-valdez - 5/5 stars
5. Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders; Kathryn Miles - 4/5 stars
6. The Family Remains; Lisa Jewell - 4/5 stars
7. Happy-Go-Lucky; David Sedaris - 5/5 stars

Fall Reading Picks

There are several books which caught my eye as I looked forward to some new fall releases.  Here are my (5) top picks which release over the next few months that I hope to try. The first (2) appea;ed to me because they both feature senior protagonists, something we don't see that often in today's fiction.

We Spread; Iain Reid

Simon & Schuster - 2022

Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.”

Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny—with a growing sense of unrest and distrust—starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging, or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?

At once compassionate and uncanny, told in spare, hypnotic prose, Iain Reid’s genre-defying third novel explores questions of conformity, art, productivity, relationships, and what, ultimately, it means to grow old.

Killers of a Cerain Age; Deanna Raybourn

Penguin Random House - 2022

Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.

Demon Copperfield; Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Collins - 2022

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this 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. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he 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.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.

The Last Chairlift; John Irving

Simon & Schuster - 2022

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor.

Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees.

John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

Forsaken Country; Allen Eskens
Mullholland Books - 2022

Three fathers collide far beyond the reach or safety of the aw in this breathtaking thriller from the beloved author of The Stolen Hours and The Life We Bury and "one of our best crime writers at the top of his game" (William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author).

Max Rupert has left his position as a Minneapolis homicide detective to live in solitude. Mourning the tragic death of his wife, he's also racked by guilt—he alone knows what happened to her killer. But then the former local sheriff, Lyle Voight, arrives with a desperate plea: Lyle’s daughter Sandy and his six-year-old grandson Pip have disappeared. Lyle’s certain Sandy's ex-husband Reed is behind it, but the new sheriff is refusing to investigate. 

When Max reluctantly looks into their disappearance, he too becomes convinced something has gone very wrong. But the closer Max and Lyle get to finding proof, the more slippery Reed becomes, until he makes a break for the beautiful but formidable Boundary Waters wilderness with vulnerable Pip in tow.

Racing after the most dangerous kind of criminal—a desperate father—and with the ghosts of their own pasts never far behind, Max and Lyle go on the hunt within a treacherous landscape, determined to bring an evil man to justice, and to bring a terrified child home alive. 

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