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Summaries for Titles H-R
H is for Hawk (nonfiction), Helen Macdonald - Macdonald has a life-long fascination with birds of prey, especially the goshawk, a large wild bird which is the hardest to train. The book tells of her efforts to train her goshawk while working through her grief over the loss of her father. A complex, but ultimately satisfying piece of work. (2015)
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The Hate U Give (YA fiction), Angie Thomas – “Sixteen year old Starr deals with living in between two worlds; her disadvantaged neighborhood and her upper-class, suburban prep school. When Starr witnesses a crime committed by a police officer, her testimony could overturn her community and jeopardize her life.” (2017)
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Hello Beautiful (fiction), Ann Napolitano – “Hello Beautiful features reserved William, who's hamstrung by his upbringing in a household shadowed by tragedy but lucky enough to have found effervescent Julia and gained her sisters' seal of approval-until trouble from his past threatens the relationship” (2023)
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Hidden Figures (nonfiction), Margot Lee Shetterly - The true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. (2016)
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Hillbilly Elegy (nonfiction), J.D. Vance - From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class through the author’s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. (2016)
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Homegoing (fiction), Yaa Gyasi - “Ghana, eighteenth century: two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman while the other will be captured in a raid on her village and sold into slavery. Follow the paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations.” (2016)
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Honor (fiction), Thrity N. Umrigar – “Umrigar revisits a tumultuous India through the stories of two Indian women living in different worlds. Indian-born, U.S.-raised journalist, Smita, abandons her vacation to take over a colleague’s news story: A Hindu woman named Meena is suing her brothers for killing her new husband because he was Muslim. Smita's family had its own tragic reasons for leaving India when she was a young teenager, and she remains haunted by memories that unfold here.” (2022)
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Hotel Du Lac (fiction), Anita Brookner – "Instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at Hotel Du Lac with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize and established Brookner’s international reputation for framing the eternal question "Why love?" (1984)
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Hour of the Witch (fiction), Chris Bohjalian - Mary causes a stir in her Puritanical community when she files for divorce from her abusive husband. A twisting, tightly plotted novel of historical suspense, Hour of the Witch is a timely and terrifying story of socially sanctioned brutality and the original American witch hunt in Boston, 1662. (2021)
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The House of Eve (fiction), Sadeqa Johnson - “1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright” (2023)
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House of Sand and Fog (fiction), Andre Dubus – “Ethics, logic, and love collide in a surprising and tragic tale. Dubus tells his tale from the viewpoints of the two main adversaries, Colonel Behrani and Kathy. To both of them, the house represents something more than just a place to live. For the colonel, it is a foot in the door of the American dream; for Kathy, a reminder of a kinder, gentler past. In prose that is simple yet evocative, House of Sand and Fog builds to its inevitable denouement, one that is painfully dark but unfailingly honest.” (1999)
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How Much of These Hills is Gold: A Novel (fiction), C Pam Zhang – Two orphaned siblings set out to properly bury their father and search for a place to call home during The Gold Rush. Long listed for the 2020 Booker Prize, this novel explores race, immigration, gender, and how memories define a family. (2020)
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How to Stop Time (fiction), Matt Haig – Born in 1581 France, Tom Hazard has a condition where he only ages one year every 15 years. Having lived through history, Tom struggles to cope with the pain of his memories and his inability to form lasting relationships. While trying to blend in, he searches modern day London for his daughter, who shares his unique genes. (2018)
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How We Fight for Our Lives (nonfiction), Saaed Jones – Through a series of lyrical vignettes, award-winning poet and BuzzFeed cohost Saaed Jones shapes a larger examination of race and queerness, strength and vulnerability, and love and grief. (2019)
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I’ll be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (nonfiction), Michelle McNamara – “Now a six-part documentary series on HBO, a masterful, true crime account of the Golden State Killer from a gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.” (2018)
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Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (biography), Rebecca Skloot – This is a story of faith, science and journalism. It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance as well as racism and poverty. (2010)
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The Immortalists (fiction), Chloe Benjamin – The four Gold siblings visit a fortune teller who claims to predict the day of their death. Are their life choices their own, or based on a pre-determined destiny? (2018)
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In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss (non-fiction), Amy Bloom – “Bloom takes us on a painful journey as her husband retires from his job, withdraws from life, and finally receives a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. She recalls both the love they experienced and the love it took to stand by him as he ended his life on his own terms.” (2022)
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Inside the O’Briens (fiction), Lisa Genova - Bestselling author and neuroscientist Lisa Genova writes a novel that does for Huntington’s disease what her debut novel Still Alice did for early onset Alzheimer’s disease. (2015) *
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The Invention of Wings (fiction), Sue Monk Kidd – Based on the life of Sarah Grimke, an early Abolitionist, Kidd follows the lives of Grimke and Handful, the ten-year-old slave given to her for her eleventh birthday, as they each strive for a life of their own in a time when this was unheard of. (2014)
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (fiction), V.E. Schwab – “Addie LaRue makes a Faustian bargain in 1716 France: she will live forever, significantly shaping the course of history and art, but will be forgotten by everyone she encounters. Three centuries later, in a little Paris bookstore, a young man remembers her name. This often startlingly raw story begs the questions: What is a soul? What does it mean to be remembered? And what prize is worth giving those things up for?” (2020)
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The Japanese Lover (fiction), Isabel Allende - A multigenerational epic of friendship and love; a bit of Same Time Next Year, a taste of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. (2016)
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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (nonfiction), Bryan Stevenson - Stevenson, then a 23-year-old Harvard law student, started an internship in Georgia; his first assignment was to deliver a message to a man living on death row. This led to his calling: representing the innocent, those inadequately defended, children, domestic abuse survivors, the mentally ill and prisoners. This fast-paced book reads like a John Grisham novel. (2015)
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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (nonfiction), David Grann - “A finalist for the 2017 National Book Award uncovering the horrific deaths that took place on the Osage Indian Reservation in the 1920s. Members of the Osage Indian Nation once enjoyed lives of prosperity thanks to oil found on their reservation. But between 1921 and 1926, the tribe was the target of a sequence of mysterious murders. When the FBI stepped in to investigate, they uncovered a shocking plot that left more than 24 people dead” (2017)
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The Kitchen House (fiction), Kathleen Grissom - Young, white Lavinia, orphaned during her passage from Ireland, arrives on the steps of a plantation’s kitchen house and is placed as an indentured servant under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate slave daughter. The novel unfolds in a story of class, race, dignity, deep-buried secrets, and familial bonds. (2010)
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Klara and the Sun (fiction), Kazuo Ishiguro – “Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?” (2021)
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The Kommandant’s Girl (fiction), Pam Jenoff – “Nineteen–year–old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into her native Poland. Within days Emma's husband, Jacob, is forced to disappear underground, leaving her imprisoned in a Jewish ghetto. But then, the Resistance smuggles her out and she takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile.” (2007)
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A Land Remembered (fiction), Patrick Smith – The story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt–poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. (1984) *
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The Leavers (fiction), Lisa Ko - When Deming Guo was 11, his Chinese immigrant mother, Polly, left for work at a nail salon and never returned. In alternating perspectives, this novel tells both of their stories. (2017)
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Lessons in Chemistry (fiction), Bonnie Garmus - "Meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show.” (2022)
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Life After Life (fiction), Jill McCorkle – This award–winning author takes the reader on a splendid journey through time and memory in these tales and adventures of the residents, staff and neighbors of the Pine Haven Retirement Center (from twelve–year–old Abby to eighty–five–year–old Sadie). (2013)
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Light Between Oceans (fiction), M.L. Stedman – When Tom Sherbourne, a lighthouse keeper, finds a baby who washed up in a rowboat, he and his young wife Isabel decide to raise the child as their own. The baby seems like a gift from God, yet years later, justice for one character will mean another’s tragic loss. (2012) *
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Light in the Ruins (fiction), Chris Bohjalian – In 1955 Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence Police Department, is assigned to a gruesome new case: a serial killer who is targeting the remaining members of the nearby Rosati family one by one. Soon she finds herself digging into secrets of days past. (2013)
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The Lincoln Highway (fiction), Amor Towles – “Filled with humor, misadventures, triumphs and sorrow, The Lincoln Highway follows Emmet Watson, his kid brother, Billy, and their friends Duchess and Woolly on an epic road trip from Nebraska to New York. This sprawling, cross-country saga takes place in just 10 days, with chapters narrated by a variety of characters.” (2021) *
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The Line Becomes a River (nonfiction), Francisco Cantú – After years of grueling experience as a US Border Patrol agent, Cantú leaves the stress behind for civilian life. When a friend is caught in the middle of crisis trying to cross from Mexico back into the US, Cantú is compelled to help him. This novel examines the violence along the Mexican border from a personal perspective and gives a face to the immigration crisis on both sides. (2018)
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Little Fires Everywhere (fiction), Celeste Ng Smith – A suburban family becomes entwined with their artist tenant and teenage daughter. An examination of the complexities of identity, how relationships are formed and tested, and the fluidity of motherhood. (2017)
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Live by Night (fiction), Dennis Lehane – This Prohibition–era tale of Joe Coughlin’s rise to criminal power is packed with guns, booze and babes as it roars from Boston to Tampa to Cuba. How Coughlin changes his personality, yet retains his humanity, is beautifully described by Lehane. (2012)
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A Long Petal of the Sea: A Novel (historical fiction), Isabel Allende – “This epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home.” (2020)
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Loving Frank (fiction), Nancy Horan – “Horan's Loving Frank describes Frank Lloyd Wright's passionate affair with a woman named Mamah Cheney. Both of them left their families to be together, creating a Chicago scandal that eventually ended in inexplicable violence.” (2007)
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Mad Honey (fiction) Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan - “This collaboration between two best-selling authors seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require. A riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves” (2022) *
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The Maid (fiction) Nita Prose - Molly is a likable, neurodivergent narrator in this outstanding debut. The character-rich mystery ends with several twists that will appeal to fans of Eleanor Oliphant and other sympathetic heroines. (2021)
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Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (fiction), Helen Simonson – A charming contemporary English comedy of manners which touches on the clash between two cultures, the greed of materialism, family behavior, and the tension between fathers and sons. (2010)
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Making Rounds with Oscar (nonfiction), David Dosa – The story of a doctor who at first doesn't always listen, of the patients he serves, of their caregivers, and, most importantly, of a cat who teaches by example, embracing moments of life from which so many of us shy away. (2010)
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A Man Called Ove (fiction), Fredrik Backman - Ove, the grumpiest man in the world, trundles from his well-ordered solitary world into one of unkempt cats, unlikely friendships and a community’s unexpected reassessment of the one person they thought they had all figured out. A thoughtful and charming read. (2015) *
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The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (fiction), Kim Edwards – This is the story of a man who gives away his newborn baby daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, to one of the nurses. The nurse raises the child, the mother believes she has died, the father is consumed with guilt. His deception becomes the defining moment of the main characters' lives, and the baby’s absence corrodes her birth family's core over the course of the next 25 years. (2005)
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The Memory Police: A Novel (fiction), Yoko Ogawa (Stephen Snyder, translator). – “On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. The island’s inhabitants live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten, with only a few people with the power to recall the lost objects.” (1994)
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Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society (fiction), Amy Hill Hearth – Set in Naples, Florida, in the early 1960s, the cast of characters includes a postmistress, a librarian, a convicted murderer, a northern transplant, a lone African–American girl, and a lonely gay man. Serious topics innocently addressed. (2012)
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Molokai (fiction), Alan Brennert – “Kalama, a spirited seven–year–old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far–off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. When a rose–colored mark of leprosy appears on her skin, she is taken from her home and family, and sent to live her life on Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Molokai.” (2003)
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Mom & Me & Mom (biography), Maya Angelou – In an open and honest look at a difficult relationship, Angelou’s autobiography tells of her childhood without her mother, her reunion with her, and their love for one another. (2013)
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Moonglow (fiction), Michael Chabon - From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York’s Wallkill prison, the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. (2016)
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The Muralist (fiction), B.A. Shapiro - This fine-art detective story blends the early years of the abstract expressionist movement, the Roosevelts, institutionalized anti-Semitism that denied American visas to Jewish refugees, the relentless run-up to World War II, and the generational losses of the Holocaust. Mystery and historical fiction lovers will find this an inviting read. (2015)
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Next Year in Havana (fiction), Chanel Cleeton – A Cuban-American woman travels to Havana to scatter her grandmother’s ashes and experiences the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. Here she discovers the roots of her identity and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution. (2019)
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The Nickel Boys (fiction), Coleson Whitehead – Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children. The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist confronting racial prejudices and true-life atrocities. (2019)
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The Night Passage (mystery), Robert B. Parker – First in the Jesse Stone series. “After losing his job and marriage, thirty-five-year-old Jesse Stone is shocked to receive a job offer from a small town in Massachusetts. What is, on the surface, a quiet New England community quickly proves to be a crucible of political and moral corruption.” (2001)
Night Road (fiction), Kristin Hannah – For eighteen years, Jude Farraday has put her children’s needs above her own. After she and her family befriend a youthful stranger, decisions they make change the course of all of their lives. (2011) *
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Nomadland (nonfiction), Jessica Bruder – “Journalist Bruder expands her remarkable cover story for Harper's into a book about low-income Americans eking out a living while driving from locale to locale for seasonal employment. From the beginning of her immersion into a mostly invisible subculture, the author makes it clear that the nomads--many of them senior citizens--refuse to think of themselves as ‘homeless.’ But rather ‘houseless’" (2017)
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Norwegian By Night (fiction), Derek Miller – Sheldon Horowitz is a grumpy, guilt–driven 82–year old war vet who lives in New York and is recently widowed. His grand–daughter insists that he come to live with her and her Norwegian husband in Oslo. How will he adjust? And should he interfere when he hears a violent argument erupting from the upstairs flat where a woman and her son are clearly in terrible trouble? To his mind, Europe turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the Jews' plight in the Second World War; he is not going to make the same mistake. Instead, he makes another. (2012) *
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An Object of Beauty (fiction), Steve Martin - Lacey Yeager is an ambitious young art dealer who uses everything at her disposal to advance in the world of the high-end art trade in New York City. This book is about the absence of a moral compass, not just in the life of an adventuress but for an entire era. (2010) *
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The Old Man and the Sea (fiction), Ernest Hemingway - An apparently simple fable, this is the story of an old Cuban fisherman down on his luck, and his battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Symbolism abounds. (1952) *
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Only Child (fiction), Rhiannon Navin – A school shooting leaves six year old little brother, Zach, an only child. He sets out on a harrowing journey towards healing and forgiveness, determined to help the adults in his life rediscover their place in the world after tragedy strikes home. (2018)
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Ordinary Grace (fiction), William Kent Krueger–The narrator, Frank Drum, writes as a middle–age man looking back on a summer in 1961 when he was 13 and death, in five different instances, shook his family and their community. The first death is that of Frank’s sometime friend Bobby Cole. The proximate cause was a train, but the mystery is whether Bobby stood in front of that train, or was pushed or placed there. More deaths follow, one of which rips apart Frank’s family. This novel is one of redemptive grace and mercy, as well as unidentified corpses and unexplainable tragedy. (2013)
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Origin (fiction), Dan Brown – Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon attends a lecture that promises to forever change the course of religious history and science. Navigating secret history and extreme religion, he searches for the truth to the shocking discovery that answers fundamental questions of human existence. (2017)
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Orphan Train (fiction), Christina Baker Kline–Teenage Molly Ayers expected her Community Service project would have her clearing out an elderly woman’s attic. Instead, the recollections of the woman put Molly on an Orphan Train, one of many which for nearly a century took children from cities to the Midwest where they were adopted by farm families and made to work for them. (2013) *
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Pachinko (fiction), Min Jin Lee - Sunja, a Korean woman living in Japan during World War II, lives with the impact of racism as a "Zainichi," or non- Japanese. She has persevered through random misfortunes determined to shape her destiny. A family saga of epic proportions detailing strong, passionate characters through four generations. (2018)
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Palm Trees in the Snow (fiction), Luz Gabás – At once an epic family drama and a sweeping love story that spans both an ocean and a generation, Palm Trees in the Snow is an emotionally gripping and historically vivid tale of the secrets that can destroy a family and the bonds that endure. (2017) *
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Peace Like a River (fiction), Lief Enger – To the list of great American child narrators that includes Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube" Land, an asthmatic 11–year–old boy. Rube recalls the events of his childhood in small–town Minnesota, circa 1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty. (2001)
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The Pecan Man (fiction), Cassie Dandridge Selleck - The Pecan Man is a work of Southern fiction whose first chapter was the First Place winner of the 2006 CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition in the Unpublished Novel category. In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief's son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man. In narrating her story, Ora discovers more truth about herself than she could ever have imagined. This novel has been described as To Kill a Mockingbird meets The Help. (2012)*
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The Perfume Thief (fiction), Timothy Schaffert – “Clementine, a reformed con artist, opens a perfume shop for the ladies of the cabarets in Nazi occupied Paris. She is convinced to do one last job of thievery and rebellion to find the diary of a Jewish perfumer before it reveals crucial information to the Nazis.” (2021)
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A Piece of the World (fiction), Christina Baker Kline - A story of friendship, passion and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting Christina’s World. (2017)
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Postmortem (mystery), Patricia Cornwell – A gruesome killer moves through Richmond, Virginia, leaving few clues behind. Newly-appointed Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Kay Scarpetta faces a maze of politics and sabotage in the biggest challenge of her life. First in a mystery series. (2017)
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Project Hail Mary (science fiction), Andy Weir – “Hugo Award Finalist and one of the Year’s Best Books. A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster on a desperate, last-chance mission and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish, except he doesn’t know this yet” (2023)
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The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (fiction), Katarina Bivald - Sara, a young Swedish woman, comes to visit her pen pal Amy in Broken Wheel, but Amy has just died. Sara uncovers Amy’s stash of books and decides to open a bookstore, sparking a renaissance in Broken Wheel as the residents come together to help the store become a success. This fish-out-of-water story will remind you why you’re a booklover. (2015)
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Rebecca (fiction), Daphne DuMaurier – This is the classic dark psychological tale of secrets and betrayal, dead loves and an estate called Manderly that is as much a presence as the people who inhabit it. (1938)
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Red at the Bone (fiction), Jacqueline Woodson. – Two urban families become permanently inter-twined and discover the roles that history and community play in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of families. (2019)*
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Remarkably Bright Creatures (fiction), Shelby Van Pelt – “Poet and short story writer Van Pelt has written an irresistibly wonderful, warm, funny, heartbreaking first novel, full of gentle people (and one octopus) bravely powering through their individual scars left by lives that have beaten them up but have not brought them down” (2022)
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The Revisioners (fiction), Margaret Wilkerson-Sexton. – The powerful tale of a New Orleans family’s escape from slavery, with tales of a “mind magic” that fixes the present, sees into the future and calls out from the past. In alternating chapters, two women who refuse to be bound by society share their frightening and inspiring stories of liberty, heritage, and sisterhood. (2019)*
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Room (fiction), Emma Donoghue–In many ways, Jack is a typical five-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way: he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. When their world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are extraordinary. (2010) *
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The Rosie Effect (fiction), Graeme Simsion – Don Tillman employs his unique research methods when he finds out his wife is pregnant, but soon finds himself in trouble. A hilarious and charming sequel picking up where The Rosie Project left off. (2014)
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The Rosie Project (fiction), Graeme Simsion - Don Tillman, a brilliant, socially inept professor of genetics, decides it’s time he found a wife. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Then he meets Rosie. (2013)
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Rough Sleepers (nonfiction), Tracy Kidder – “Drawing on five years' worth of reporting, Kidder vividly portrays life on the streets and in the program's health clinics, and sheds light on various legal and policy matters, though the focus is less on the institutional forces that contribute to chronic homelessness than on the individual lives it touches. Keenly observed and fluidly written, this is a compassionate report from the front lines of one of America's most intractable social problems” (2023)
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* Book Kits with asterisks are gifts from St Lucie County Book Clubs or individuals.
Annotations in quotation marks have been summarized from reviews found on Amazon.com.
For more information or to book your kit, please call 772–462–2190.