Check out this list of great summer reads from The Reader's Loft .
Summer Island
Author: Kristin Hannah
Years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her marriage and left her daughters behind. She has since become a famous radio talk-show host and newspaper columnist beloved for her moral advice. Her youngest daughter, Ruby, is a struggling comedienne who uses her famous mother as fuel for her bitter, cynical humor.
When Nora is injured in an accident, Ruby returns home under the pretense of caring for a mother she hasn’t seen in a decade. However, Ruby has been offered a fortune to write a tell-all expose about her mother. As she explores her family’s past, Ruby must grow up and finally look at her mother and herself through the eyes of a woman.
Hannah’s poignant, funny and luminous novel about a mother and daughter explores the complex ties that bind them, the past that separates them and the healing that comes with forgiveness.
Hot House Flower (being made into a movie staring Julia Roberts, release date to be announced)
Author: Margot Berwin
Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief in this rollicking debut novel about plant magic, spiritual discovery, and romantic fever in the jungles of Mexico.
Shortly after her divorce, advertising executive Lila Nova purchases her first plant. It's a bird-of-paradise, and the seller is David Exley, a rugged "country-sexual" who seems to promise a paradise of his own making. Lila is immediately obsessed — with plants and with the man who sells them — but when David introduces her to the myth of the nine plants of desire, and when she meets a man named Armand who claims to own the nine plants, her obsession reaches unexpected heights: if she can possess all nine plants, the legend goes, her wildest dreams will be fulfilled.
Plant mythology, shamans and charlatans, mysterious spirit animals, orchid obsessives, scorpions, poisonous snakes, and handsome Huichols...they're all here in this tale of mystery, adventure, and heat — in every sense of the word.
The Cradle
Author: Patrick Somerville (local author)
Early one summer morning, Matthew Bishop kisses his still-sleeping wife Marissa, gets dressed and eases his truck through Milwaukee, bound for the highway. His wife, pregnant with their first child, has asked him to find the antique cradle taken years before by her mother Caroline when she abandoned Marissa, never to contact her daughter again. Soon to be a mother herself, Marissa now dreams of nothing else but bringing her baby home to the cradle she herself slept in.
As hours turn into days and Caroline's trail takes Matt from Wisconsin to Minnesota, Illinois, and beyond in search of the cradle, Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa's life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known.
Elegant and astonishing, Patrick Somerville tells the story of one man's journey into the heart of marriage, parenthood, and what it means to be a family.
After You
Author: Julie Buxbaum
It happened on a tree-lined street in Notting Hill to a woman who seemed to have the perfect life. Ellie Lerner's best friend, Lucy, was murdered in front of her young daughter. And, as best friends do, Ellie dropped everything-her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs to travel to London and pick up the pieces of Lucy's life. While Lucy's husband, Greg, copes with his grief by retreating into himself, eight-year-old Sophie has simply stopped speaking.
Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As the two spend hours exploring the novel’s winding passageways, its story of hurt, magic and healing blooms around them.
The complexities of a friendship, the unexplored doubts of a marriage and the redemptive power of literature. This is a novel that will resonate in the heart of anyone who’s had a best friend, a love lost, or a past full of regrets.
The Story Sisters
Author: Alice Hoffman
The Story Sisters, charts the lives of three sisters — Elv, Claire, and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone.
What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray?
How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others?
How deep can love go, and how far can it take you?
These are the questions this luminous novel asks.
At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Author: Katherine Howe
Connie Goodwin should be spending her summer doing research for her Ph.D. dissertation in American History. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she's compelled to help. It's not long before the time she's set aside for research is instead spent sorting through her grandmother's ancient possessions, discovering
Email This
Print This
View Story on a Single Page