July
Staff Pick Reads
Linda Frenzel, MSLS
Camden Library Director
Linda's Picks:
It's been seven years since Chelsea Martin embarked on her yearlong postcollege European adventure. Since then, she's lost her mother to cancer and watched her sister marry twice, while Chelsea's thrown herself inWhen her introverted mathematician father announces he's getting remarried, Chelsea is forced to acknowledge that her life stopped after her mother died and that the last time she can remember being happy, in love, or enjoying her life was on her year abroad. Inspired to retrace her steps—to find Colin in Ireland, Jean Claude in France, and Marcelino in Italy—Chelsea hopes that one of these three men who stole her heart so many years ago can help her find it again.
From the start of her journey nothing goes as planned, but as Chelsea reconnects with her old self, she also finds love in the very last place she expected. to work, becoming one of the most talented fundraisers for the American Cancer Coalition, and with the exception of one annoyingly competent coworker, Jason Knightley, her status as most successful moneymaker is unquestioned.
Erin's Picks:
From the author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of courage and unlikely friendship during World War II -- Now a New York Times bestsller!
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents in the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous tunnels beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.
Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it’s a girl hiding.
A multigenerational family saga set in World War II Japan and contemporary rural Texas. Churchill’s debut unfolds in parallel the stories of an immigrant Japanese woman and her American granddaughter. Mineko’s story begins in Kadoma, a district of Osaka, in the summer of 1936, when the little girl discovers a beautiful abandoned estate on a hill, its entrance presided over by a stone turtle, with a pond full of live turtles out back. Over the years, this becomes her special place, a refuge for the athletic, bright young woman who’s gotten none of the beauty her mother and sister share. When she meets an upper-class boy named Akio, it’s at this “turtle house” where she teaches him to swim, and where they fall in love, though his future holds an arranged marriage and, even more threatening, the wartime draft. In parallel chapters set in Curtain, Texas, in 1999, we see Mineko as “Grandminnie,” relating her stories into a tape recorder for her 25-year-old granddaughter, Lia, who’s back home after abruptly quitting her first job out of architecture school under mysterious circumstances.
Clare Goodman knows how to write suspenseful novels! You will follow protagonist Clare through these haunting pages to uncover the true secret of the Widows House.
Another "did the husband do it?" classic novel. Kate White is extraordinary with the "whodunnits" of domestic life tied with murders.
B.A Paris is among the best of psychological thrillers. Navigate with Amelie through the twisted pages and how reality just doesn't seem to add up.
Debbie's Picks:
