Winter Slump-Busting Booklist - December 2024

1) The marriage portrait

Author

O'Farrell, Maggie, 1972-

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"A novel set in Renaissance Italy, and centering on the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici"-- Provided by publisher. Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and to devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Moderna...

2) The fortunes of jaded women: a novel

Author

Huynh, Carolyn

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD

Summary

Click to view

"It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave her marriage for true love-so a fearsome Vietnamese witch cursed Oanh and her descendants so that they would never find love or happiness, and the Duong women would give birth to daughters, never sons. Oanh's current descendant Mai Nguyen knows this curse well. She's divorced, and after an explosive disagreement a decade ago, she's estranged from her younger sisters, Minh Pham (the middle and...

3) Claire of the sea light

Author

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, Playaway, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Summary

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"The interconnected secrets of a coastal Haitian town are revealed when one little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, goes missing."--Publisher information.

4) Matrix

Author

Groff, Lauren

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily...

5) Banyan Moon: a novel

Author

Thai, Thao

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"Three Vietnamese American women mourning the death of the family matriarch recount their lives and childhoods at a crumbling, gothic manor called Banyan House, where the secrets of her grandmother's past come to light"-- Provided by publisher. When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she's last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life:...

6) Family lore: a novel

Author

Acevedo, Elizabeth

Series

Thorndike Press large print top shelf
Good morning America book club

Notes

If you want to be transported!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"Sisters Matilde, Pastora, Camila, and Flor thought they knew each other well, until Flor-inspired by a documentary her daughter Ona made her watch-decides she wants a living wake, a party to bring her family and community together and celebrate the long life she's led, while she's still around to enjoy it. She's not ill, as far as anybody knows, but Flor does have a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. Has she foreseen her own...

7) Olga dies dreaming

Author

Gonzalez, Xochitl, 1977-

Notes

When You Want to Think!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots, all in the wake of Hurricane María. It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's...

8) Portrait of a thief: a novel

Author

Li, Grace D

Notes

When You Want to Think!

Summary

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"Ocean's Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums, about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity"-- Provided by publisher.

9) How not to drown in a glass of water

Author

Cruz, Angie

Series

Thorndike Press large print core

Notes

When You Want to Think!

Formats

Book, Large Print, eAudiobook

Summary

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"From the beloved author of Dominicana, a GMA Book Club Pick and Women's Prize Finalist, an electrifying and indelible new novel about a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story. Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market...

10) Fellowship point: a novel

Author

Dark, Alice Elliott

Series

Thorndike Press large print basic

Notes

When You Want to Think!

Formats

Book, Large Print

Summary

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The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy--to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic...

11) The bear and the nightingale

Author

Arden, Katherine

Series

Winternight Trilogy
Winternight Trilogy volume 1

Notes

When You Want to Stay Cozy by a Fire!

Formats

Book, Large Print, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Summary

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"At the edge of the Russian wilderness, Vasilisa spends the winter nights huddled near the fire with her siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. She loves the chilling story of Frost, the winter demon, who claims unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him and honor the spirits of house, yard, and forest that protect their homes from evil. After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred,...

12) The snow child: a novel

Author

Ivey, Eowyn

Notes

When You Want to Stay Cozy by a Fire!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Summary

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Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl,...

13) Little women

Author

Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888

Series

Little Women
Dalmatian Press great classics for children
Barnes and Noble classics
More Series...

Notes

When You Want to Stay Cozy by a Fire!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print, Playaway, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Picture Book

Summary

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For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...

14) The lost story: a novel

Author

Shaffer, Meg

Notes

When You Want to Stay Cozy by a Fire!

Formats

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Summary

Click to view

"Inspired by C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes - just in case - from the author of The Wishing Game. As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished in a West Virginia state park, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they'd gone or how they'd survived. Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming,...

15) Before the coffee gets cold: a novel

Author

Kawaguchi, Toshikazu, 1971-

Series

Before the coffee gets cold volume 1
Before the coffee gets cold

Notes

When You Want to Stay Cozy by a Fire!

Formats

Book, Large Print, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Summary

Click to view

In a small back alley in Tokyo at a century-old coffee shop rumored to offer patrons the chance to travel back in time, four customers reevaluate their formative life choices. In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers coffee-- and the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café...

16) Sea of Tranquility

Author

Mandel, Emily St. John, 1979-

Notes

When You Want Something Strange and Uncanny!

Formats

Book, Audiobook CD, Playaway, eAudiobook

Summary

Click to view

"The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and planets. Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at...

17) The daughter of Doctor Moreau: a novel

Author

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia

Notes

When You Want Something Strange and Uncanny!

Formats

Book, Playaway, eAudiobook

Summary

Click to view

"From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a dreamy reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico. Carlota Moreau: A young woman growing up on a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict and strife of the Yucatán peninsula. The only daughter of a researcher who is either a genius or a madman. Montgomery Laughton: A melancholic overseer with a tragic...

18) The hacienda

Author

Cañas, Isabel

Notes

When You Want Something Strange and Uncanny!

Formats

Book, eAudiobook

Summary

Click to view

"Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, dark secrets, and the woman pulled into their clutches... In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz's father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife's sudden demise, choosing instead to seize...

19) A house with good bones

Author

Kingfisher, T

Notes

When You Want Something Strange and Uncanny!

Formats

Book, Playaway, eAudiobook

Summary

Click to view

"T. Kingfisher's A House With Good Bones is a contemporary Southern Gothic from a master of modern horror that explores the deep, dark roots of family and in which grandma's ghost haunting your house may be the least of your worries. In this ordinary North Carolina suburb, family secrets are always in bloom. Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house....

20) The haunting of Alejandra: a novel

Author

Castro, V

Notes

When You Want Something Strange and Uncanny!

Summary

Click to view

"A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona as she unravels the dark secrets of her family history in this ravishing and provocative horror novel"-- Provided by publisher. Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her. Nor can...

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Winter Slump-Busting Booklist - December 2024