MADreads Reviews

It’s almost August! School is a mere month away, but there’s still some time to squeeze in the last of summer’s big titles. On to the top offerings for this month:

The news of the recent passing of Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri means a great loss to the mystery readers, as Camilleri was particularly known for his Inspector Montalbano series set in contemporary Sicily. Yet the late-blooming Camilleri (he wrote his first novel in his sixties) was remarkably prolific, writing close to a hundred novels in a variety of genres, notably historical fiction. Born in Sicily, Camilleri had a knack for mining the island’s rich history and culture.

I can't imagine any book topping this one for me in 2019. The snappy and shocking title is one of the reasons I love it so much. It's funny, smart, and helpful in a cuddly way, despite the whopper of a title. The authors Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark are the true crime comedy podcast stars of My Favorite Murder and their podcast provides background for the book. True crime is what brought Karen and Georgia together and how and why they have a fabulous book deal.

It is bedtime and little rabbit has much to do to get ready for bed, so he needs the reader’s help.  Toddlers tap, clap, fluff (a pillow), and even give rabbit a kiss to help him through his bedtime ritual.  This is just one of the Little Rabbit series that is sure to be popular with young readers. Other titles in this interactive board book series are Bathtime for Little Rabbit, and Poor Little Rabbit. 

Because he is awesome, that is why. 

Common is the coolest.

He is what's referred to in the hip hop world as a conscious artist. He embraces themes of love and struggle and sharing his own search for knowledge. Right on! He chooses projects that do more than make him famous, but his fame provides him with a platform to do more. He's also the first rapper to win an Emmy, Grammy and Oscar.

Author Bobby Hall, a.k.a. Logic, is one of my niece Abby's favorite artists and she recommended I read this book. So I did! My brief summary of the book is that the main character, a twenty-something man named Flynn, works at a grocery store. On a surface level, libraries and grocery stores are very similar. They have lots of stuff organized in specific ways and many people coming and going, using the space in a variety of ways. I was thinking about this as I was reading the novel. I was also thinking about the fact that Abby works in a grocery store, too.

Ask anyone about a notorious shipwreck, and they will more than likely respond with the Titanic disaster of 1912. Yet a mere three years later, another grand ocean liner met an equally disastrous fate, the repercussions of which would be felt far beyond those immediately involved. The Lusitania was the giant Cunard liner that many felt could not, would not fall victim to Germany’s submarine warfare against British shipping. It’s an intriguing story, and when told by Erik Larson in Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, it becomes an intensely personal, vivid tale.

I'm going to tell you that I have a very low threshold for scary things. So if I say that a book freaked me out you can take it with a grain of salt. That said, The Last Astronaut, which was a bit of Alien, a bit of The Martian and some Major Tom vibes thrown in, made me read with one eye closed for the latter half of the book as the creeping dread of the unknown grew.

I grew up loving the work of Janet and Allan Ahlberg, so I was thrilled when I discovered Fairy Tales for Mr. Barker – a picture book written and illustrated by their daughter, Jessica Ahlberg. This cumulative story follows Lucy and her dog, Mr. Barker, through a series of fairy tales.

I used to love to wander through a bookstore and feed my reading need (this on top of checking many stacks of books out of the library). But at some point I stopped buying all those print copies, partially for space reasons, partially because of the changing bookstore landscape and partially because I was reading more and more digitally. So what's my version of strolling through the bookstore aisles? Late in the evening I look for ebook deals online to see if there's anything that catches my fancy (this on top of the library books I check out electronically and read on Libby!).

This is recommended reading in tandem with A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson.

The last few years have been a real heyday for Asian American literature. There have been blockbuster film adaptations of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Celeste Ng’s unstoppable suburban drama Little Fires Everywhere, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer win for The Sympathizer, and critically lauded novels from Susan Choi (Trust Exercise) and Ling Ma (Severance), just to name a few.

July and August always feels a bit like a lull in the publishing calendar, as if the big book pushes of late May and June have exhausted publishers to the extent that they all pull up stakes and head out of town with bags bulging with books. But the upside of all those big May and June releases means midsummer is a great time for the so-called ‘midlist’ author to shine—those books that might not get the fanfare of a bestseller but are gems for the readers willing to seek them out. This July sees some particularly notable authors releasing titles that have strong appeal, but potentially with

In keeping with my new minted tradition (second posting like this, first one is here) I come to you with a report on how the Lakeview Mystery Book Group's recent discussions have gone.

It’s nearly (official) summer and with the warmer temps comes OverDrive’s Big Library Read. This year’s selection is L. P. Fergusson’s World War II-set drama A Dangerous Act of Kindness. When Widow Millie Sanger finds downed German pilot Lukas Schiller on her property, she tends to his injuries and shelters him to ensure he isn’t discovered by the authorities. It could be a disastrous decision: England is at war with Germany, and the discovery of an enemy combatant on her farm could mean death for both of them.

When describing this book to a friend, I summarized as the story of two women in Victorian England: Ruth, a seamstress who believes she can hurt and kill others through her sewing, and Dorothea, a member of the gentry who visits Ruth in prison, believing that phrenology (the study of the contours of the human skull to describe a person's personality) holds the clues to Ruth's innocence or guilt. It sounds a bit wacky, I'll admit, but the story is so much more complex than that.

A week or so ago I saw a trailer for a new tv show and as it flashed across the screen in quick shots (as trailers do) it seemed so familiar and I thought, is it? Could it be? Yes it was. Starz has a new show starting at the end of June about one of my favorite fantasy novels, The Rook. I read the book a while ago but I'm re-upping my review to tie it in in with the show to come.

This summer the Hawthorne Library will be hosting a Girls, Inc group who'll be participating in the Summer Reading Club and programming with crafts and activities at the library. To get them started on some great books for girls, Librarian Tracy Moore created a Girl Empowerment reading list with titles for all ages.