Superior Reads

A PLACE FOR READERS AND WRITERS

Bonnie Garmus has created characters that mock convention. Elizabeth Zott defies authority, not on principal, but on practicality. She sees the world through safety goggles while her male counterparts just wish she’d put on the rose-colored glasses, form-fitting Donna-Reed dress, and sell the canned soup on Supper at Six. But everything in Elizabeth’s world boils down to science – including making her coffee at home with a Bunsen burner and turning her home kitchen into a lab. You’ll fall in love with her dog, Six-Thirty, one of the most astute and intelligent four-legged narrators in fiction today; Mad, her precocious daughter, who reads Nabokov at the age of five, and interrupts show and tell to ask her kindergarten teacher how she can join the Freedom Fighters in Nashville; and her friend and neighbor Harriet, whom after watching Elizabeth stand up to injustice, finds the courage to leave her alcoholic and abusive husband.

Lee Cole’s debut novel, GROUNDSKEEPING, is a coming-of-age story about two lovers trying to navigate social and cultural differences during a time of great upheaval in American politics. Twenty-eight-year-old Owen returns home to rural Kentucky after a failed launch in Colorado and gets a job as a groundskeeper at a local college in exchange for …

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In Stephen Harrigan’s big-hearted coming-of-age novel, LEOPARD IS LOOSE, five-year-old Grady’s tranquil world is upended when a leopard escapes from the nearby zoo. It’s 1952 and Grady and his 7-year-old brother Danny live with their widowed mother, Bethie, in a two-bedroom backyard apartment across a small patch of yard from her parents and siblings. For …

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I always like to end the year on a high note and Louise Erdrich’s THE SENTENCE was a fabulous way to wrap up my reading year. Compelling, propulsive, entertaining, and an important edition to Erdrich’s oeuvre, THE SENTENCE might just be my favorite book of 2021. If you love books, if you’ve ever been in …

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RayAnne is back in Sarah Stonich’s REELING; in this second volume of RayAnne’s adventures, the show is going on the road – all the way to New Zealand. As the host of public television’s first all-woman fishing talk show, RayAnne knows a thing or two about fishing. What she’s less knowledgeable about is relationships. The …

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Mary Casanova is the author of thirty-nine books — most of which have been written for young readers. Waterfall is her third adult novel set on Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota. Waterfall is the story of Trinity Baird who has recently returned to the family’s summer home after nearly two years at Oak Hills Asylum, …

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Kathleen West, author of MINOR DRAMAS AND OTHER CATASTROPHES is back with a rollick through teenage angst and twenty-first century parenting in ARE WE THERE YET? Alice Sullivan has it all – two perfect children, a handsome and successful husband, and a booming interior design business – until suddenly, she doesn’t. In a conflagration of …

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It’s hard to write about the Dust Bowl without tipping over into melodrama, and at times it felt as if the only thing moving the story forward was the next disaster. The relationships between the women in THE FOUR WINDS kept me invested. Elsa is a bit of a sad-sack, but her daughter Loreda is fierce and as she ages, she challenges Elsa to overcome her fears.

THE GREAT CIRCLE is a big book – not just because it is nearly 600 pages long – but because of the breadth of the subject matter – art, aviation, prohibition, noncomformity, war, isolation, connection – and the period it spans 1909-2014 – give or take a few decade gaps. There will be So. Much. To. Discuss. with your book group! Maggie Shipstead has a keen understanding of longing and what it means to be human.