It’s been quite a year and a summer of uncertainty.  But such is the life we’ve come to expect in the world of COVID-19.
The good news is I’ve been able to travel to California to see parents, children and grandchildren.  Also, I’ve been able to catch up on some of the books I put on reserve months ago and was able to pick up thanks to the library’s Curbside Pick up service.  Here are some of my favorites:

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler
In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son. Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door – an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter.

Told from multiple points of view, A Good Neighborhood asks big questions about life in America today―What does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don’t see eye to eye?―as it explores the effects of class, race, and heartrending star-crossed love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.  Get the tissues ready!

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
From the New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Eligible, a novel that imagines a deeply compelling what-might-have-been: What if Hillary Rodham hadn’t married Bill Clinton?

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.

In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road.

Weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.

The Vignes twin sisters grew up in a small, southern black community and ran away together to New Orleans at age sixteen.  After living together for a few years, they go their separate ways.  But the separation goes deeper than it appears as the two have completely different families, communities, and racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white. Despite their separation, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.

And on a lighter note, one of my all time favorite writers, Carl Hiassen, has a new book that will make you laugh out loud.
Squeeze Me by Carl Hiassen
Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me is set among the landed gentry of Palm Beach. A prominent high-society matron–who happens to be a fierce supporter of the President and founding member of the POTUSSIES–has gone missing at a swank gala. When the wealthy dowager Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons is later found dead in a concrete grave, panic and chaos erupt. The President immediately declares that Kiki Pew was the victim of rampaging immigrant hordes. This, as it turns out, is far from the truth. Meanwhile, a bizarre discovery in the middle of the road brings the First Lady’s motorcade to a grinding halt (followed by some grinding between the First Lady and a lovestruck Secret Service agent). Enter Angie Armstrong, wildlife wrangler extraordinaire, who arrives at her own conclusions after she is summoned to the posh island to deal with a mysterious and impolite influx of huge, hungry pythons . . .

Completely of the moment, full of vim and vigor, and as irreverent as can be, Squeeze Me is pure, unadulterated Hiaasen.

Reviews curtesy of Goodreads.

Have comments or favorite books you’d like to share?
email me at: srappaport@manhassetlibrary.org