Having been born in the late 1980s, I was fortunate to have missed the devastation and chaos that was the AIDs epidemic. A truly horrifying disease even today, it claimed the lives of countless people and sparked the need for social and medical change. Body Counts: A Memoir of Activism, Sex, and Survival is Sean Strub’s personal account of politics and […]

Stepping into his floating bookstore on a barge, The Literary Apothecary, you might not get the book you want, but you’ll get the one you need – even if you didn’t know it. Nina George’s international bestseller, The Little Paris Bookshop, now translated into English for the first time since its original 2013 German publication, is a story about grief, denial, love, heartbreak, friendship, […]

If you are planning on hiring a nanny to help you prepare for your soon-to-be born baby, this book might make you think twice! Samantha Hayes‘ novel, Until You’re Mine, is a psychological thriller about an expecting mother who lets a secretive new nanny into her family at a time when – by coincidence? – pregnant women are being attacked […]

As many women know, a good-fitting shoe can make all the difference – just ask Cinderella! The perfect shoe can support us, help us stand a bit taller, make a statement on our appearance, and even make us act a little crazy. Patricia Morrisroe shares moments from her life and the shoes that came with them in her touching memoir, 9½ […]

-Dary! Comedian, magician, actor, father, compulsive award show host… Neil Patrick Harris seems to do it all. And now you can, too (kinda… okay, not really) with the Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography! In this autobiography, you are Neil Patrick Harris. Your story begins in 1973 Albuquerque, New Mexico, where you meet your parents for the very first […]

The desire for happiness is universal: no matter what our differences are, we all want the same thing. Jim Ryan, a motivational coach and speaker, shares his message of living your best life in Simple Happiness: 52 Easy Ways to Lighten Up. Each chapter has a simple message that may seem obvious to many of us.  But even if we’ve all heard […]

At the bottom of Japan’s southern Fog Island Mountains is the small town of Komachi. Within the town there are several “storms” gathering.  Michelle Bailat-Jones’s Fog Island Mountains is about the initial grief one feels when confronted with devastating news. Jennifer Ikeda narrates Bailat-Jones’ novel in its moving audiobook version. Ikeda is an award-winning narrator of dozens of audiobooks and actor […]

“On our mountain only boys were born, and some of them turned into girls around the age of eleven. Then these boys had to turn into ugly girls who sometimes had to hide in holes in the ground.” (4) In the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, being a girl – especially a pretty one – is a dangerous thing.  For these […]

Bethany Griffins’s The Fall is a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Both tell of a doomed family, the Ushers, and a very creepy house. But while Poe’s tale, from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, focuses on sickly Roderick Usher, Griffin’s protagonist is Roderick’s twin sister, Madeline. The Fall is the story of […]

Throughout Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s Bittersweet, the protagonist is reading – or trying to read – John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the story of man’s fall from grace. While she may not succeed in finishing, the two stories are about the loss of innocence and the consequences we all face from our decisions, even those of our ancestors. Mabel Dagmar is a shy […]