The Most Popular Book Genre In Each State https://flip.it/wuMdQt
Tag: Fiction
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Archaeologist creates fantasy world filled with intrigue, romance and adventure
An archaeologist who has excavated a Bronze Age palace in Turkey, a medieval Abbey in England, and an Inca site in Chile, Sarah Hawley has created an extensive underground world where fairies abide.
But if you’re thinking Tinkerbell, who sweetly waves her magic wand, think again. The fairies in Hawley’s novel “Servant of Earth,” the first in a trilogy titled “The Shards of Magic,” are amazingly beautiful and as decadent as any French court in the 17th or 18th centuries. Given numerous love affairs, intrigues and pettiness, they’re ruled by a tyrant king who has a penchant for mayhem and murder.
Into this world stumbles Kenna, a human from a nearby village who lives with her single mother, keeps mostly to herself to avoid the jeers of others with one exception– Anya, a pretty villager who has befriended her. When Anya is chosen as one of the women who will travel to the land of the Fae, a perilous trip through bogs and deep dark woods, she accompanies her. But Anya disappears as they make their way, and it is Kenna who arrives at the fairy court, helped by the mysterious dagger she discovered in one of her forays in the forest.
The King orders her dead, but one of his underlings suggests a different fate. Why not make her a handmaiden to Lara, the daughter of Princess Oriana, head of the Earth House in the fairy kingdom?
It is clearly an insult to Princess and her daughter. A human as a handmaiden. But it is impossible to say no. And Kenna, who is very curious and kind, soon learns her way among the many houses and those that rule them. In doing so, she is able to help Lara, who, to become an immortal fairy, must undergo six rigorous and often deadly tasks along with others who are vying for the honor.
Hawley, who also taught archaeology, takes us into a fascinating subterranean world, one where the fairies live in luxurious surroundings, dine on the best food, and busy themselves with endless affairs, alliances and games as their lives unwind in front of them for eternity.
Kenna embarks upon a romantic liaison with one of the fairy princes, but she also befriends the serving women who have been cast out of the brothel where the king likes to spend much of his time. Each of the worlds she connects with pulls her deeper into the dangers of being discovered as a spy, someone who is siding with a brewing rebellion.
But she has a moral compass compelling her to go forward in aiding the revolt against the current regime. At the same time, she is helping Lara accomplish her tasks, though it’s forbidden to do so.
There is danger on all sides and Kenna becomes more and more unsure of who she can trust, including her fairy prince. Spoiler alert: He is no Prince Charming.
“Working as an archaeologist made me think about the details of this world and of the past, and that extends into fantasy worlds where you think about how people are dressing and what it looks like and the political structure and all of that,” said Hawley, explaining how she created the fairy kingdom and all the factions and their interactions. “But it’s also thinking about these characters, their identities, and the stories they tell themselves about their past, because as much as I’m telling the mythology of this world, the characters see the mythology of their own world in a slightly different way.”
Hawley, who is the author of several other books, including “A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon” and “A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch,” brings a historic perspective to her tales of a fairy kingdom as well.
“There’s actually very dark stuff about how fairies behave,” she said, recounting a Celtic story about people who play fiddle music for the fairies for a single night, are rewarded with gold, and sent home. “Upon returning to their villages, they find that the gold has turned into leaves. And they realize that hundreds of years have passed since they’d been gone and everyone they love is dead, and then they immediately die.”
Luckily, if you like happy endings, “Servant of Earth” ends on a positive note, though one where we realize that Kenna has many more challenges ahead.
But she’s a tough, wily hero. And so, it’s just a matter of waiting for the next book in the trilogy to come out next year.
This article originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
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Trust Issues: A Mystery That Asks Who You Going to Trust?
“a tense, well-plotted mystery with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged . . .”
“Something strange happened when Hazel and Kagan showed up. Ava had begun hearing her father’s voice so clearly that it sounds like he’s crawled inside her head. This isn’t the first time in her life she’s been haunted by his negative commentary. It followed her on the bus when she first escaped and lingered for a few weeks after she settled into life with Sam again. When she was in prison she’d hear her father’s voice late into the night, chastising her for thinking she could outrun her destiny and for being stupid enough to get caught.”
Spoiled and entitled, Hazel Bailey and her brother Kagan Bailey have gone through the millions their mother, Janice, gave them after the death of their abusive father and, resentful that she won’t give them more, have cut off all contact with her. Still, despite their treatment of her, they’re outraged when they learn of their mother’s death and that Perry, their smarmy stepfather has inherited all of Janice’s considerable fortune,
When they learn that Janice was murdered, they’re sure that Perry is the culprit despite his unassailable alibi—he was on a plane at the time of her death. And so, the two, who don’t typically get along, team up together to discover all they can about Perry to prove he’s somehow responsible for her death. Surprisingly, Perry has no internet presence, except for a hazy half photo at a charity event he attended with Janice.
Though the siblings are self-centered, combative, and often compete for the same romantic interest, they also are resourceful and before long discover that Perry is a conman who seduces rich, older women who then disappear or die. Taking it one step further, they trace his daughter, Ava, who long ago separated herself from her father and ask her to join them in their search and revenge mission.
Like Kagan and Hazel, the seductive Ava has her own baggage. Trained from an early age by her father to con people, she’s spent time in prison and has been offered a straight-and-narrow lifestyle. But the idea of helping them regain their fortune and punish her father who murdered her mother and uncle is impossible to resist. And besides, as the siblings neglect to keep in mind, when you’re trained to be a conman or woman, old habits die hard— particularly when there’s a fortune to be had.
As the three chase Perry down the Eastern seaboard, coming up with an elaborate plan to fleece Perry out of the money he conned their mother out of and to keep him from marrying—and killing another wealthy woman—they fail to keep in mind that Perry mayhave a fatal plan to stop them as well.
Elizabeth Keenan and Greg Wands, authors of Trust Issues (Dutton 2025), have previously written three novels under the pen name E.G. Scott including The Woman Inside and The Rule of Three. Besides their books, which have been translated into a dozen languages, they created and co-host the podcast “Imposter House with Liz & Greg,” where they chat with authors and artists about creativity, self-doubt, and about featuring imposter characters in their stories.
In Trust Issues, they’ve written a tense, well-plotted mystery with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged as well as hopeful that Perry finally is outsmarted and has to pay for his sins.
This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.
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“City Under One Roof” by Iris Yamashita
Point Mettier, Alaska is no one’s idea of paradise. Its inhabitants—all 205 of them—live in the same high-rise apartment building and the only access to town is by a tunnel or the sea.
But Point Mettier is perfect for many of those who live there. It’s a chance to invent new names, identities, and lives. For some, it’s a safe harbor such as an escape from an abusive spouse. For others, the reasons for disappearing into the void of a place like Point Mettier are darker. And so when a severed hand and foot wash up on shore and Cara Kennedy, a police detective arrives from Anchorage, she finds the inhabitants to be aloof and evasive. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide.
“City Under One Roof” (Berkley) is the first novel written by Iris Yamashita, a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award for the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima.” The inspiration, she says, comes from a documentary about Whittier, Alaska she watched more than 20 years ago. At the time, Whittier only was accessible by boat or through a 2.5-mile long tunnel.
“Jumping off point for me was the tunnel,” says Yamashita, who has been working in Hollywood for 15 years developing material for both film and streaming, “I had the feeling I was going down into the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. Cara is like Alice, she too fell down the rabbit hole.”
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And there Cara meets a wide range of quirky characters including Lonnie, who has a moose she has rescued as a pet, and Amy, a teenager who delivers the Asian food her mother makes to the building’s residents.
Cara has her own burdens, her family died in a tragic, terrifying way. And working with local policeman, Joe Barkowski, stirs feelings she has thought were gone forever.
But even as their feelings for each other grow, the two have to contend with another crisis. A storm closes the tunnel and the residents of Point Mettier—and Cara—are trapped. But though help from the mainland is days away, mayhem is close by when a gang from further north arrives to terrorize the community and that’s when everyone’s secrets start to come out.
Yamashita has always loved writing and for a while, it was a hobby. She has a degree in mechanical engineering and says her “Asian parents always told her ‘you can’t make a living as a writer.’”
“And so I worked at my day job until I had a contract in my hand and then I quit,” she says. “Now I’m working on my next book.”
This story originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
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Disturbing the Bones
It’s an archaeological dig so finding human remains shouldn’t be a surprise, but Dr. Molly Moore immediately recognizes that the skeleton they’ve unearthed is much more recent than what you’d find on a site dating back 12,000 years. Indeed, the body is that of a young Black reporter who disappeared just decades ago when covering the racial unrest in Cairo, Illinois.
The loss of his mother has left a large void in the life of Chicago Police Detective Randal Jenkins, and he travels back to Cairo, where he lived as a young boy, to learn more about the case. But it soon becomes clear that this is more than just the murder of an investigative reporter during a tumultuous time. Moore finds herself pressured by her long-time mentor and supporter, retired military general and contractor William Alexander to complete the dig and minimize her discovery. As Moore and Jenkins, each with their own family issues to deal with, work at discovering answers they realize that the General is trying to disrupt the process of a disarmament agreement being developed at a global peace summit taking place in Chicago. The stakes are so high that not only are their lives in jeopardy, but the world may be hurling towards a nuclear disaster.
Disturbing the Bones (Melville House 2024) is the first joint effort by director and screenwriter Andrew Davis, a native of Chicago’s southside and Jeff Biggers, an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist, playwright, and monologist.
In writing the book, Biggers, whose work has appeared in American and foreign newspapers and magazines as well as numerous anthologies, relied upon his knowledge of archaeology, the environment, culture, and history as well as his abilities as a researcher. He is the author of such books as Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland and The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America.
“I’ve been around a lot of archaeological digs,” he said in a joint conversation with Davis and this writer.
It’s also a timely story in that there’s a presidential election going on as Jenkins and Moore race to solve the mystery.
“It’s the only novel with a woman running for the presidency but in the book she’s from Chicago,” says Davis, noting that, as in the book, he sees this election as a turning point in our history. “The story is a blending of art and action, and it asks provocative questions which I think any good book should do.”
Any enjoyable book should, as it tells a story, also open another world for us. The authors do that here as we learn about archaeology, what happens on a dig, and the social upheaval the country went through during the Civil Rights movement. It also explores the psychology of Jenkins and Moore whose personal lives affect their profession and the decisions they make.
This was the first collaboration between Biggers and Davis, but it won’t be their last. The two are also working on a screenplay for the book. Davis has an extensive background in this area, having worked on a myriad of films such as “Holes”, “Under Siege”, “Code of Silence”, “A Perfect Murder”, and “The Guardian.” Known for directing intellectual thrillers, his film “The Fugitive,” was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Biggers, who served as the Climate Narrative Playwright-in-Residence at Indiana University Northwest several times and lived in Miller Beach during his time there, enjoyed the collaborative process.
“I’ve written a lot of books on my own,” he says, “but this was, in ways, the best of both worlds as we went back and forth and exchanged ideas and shared thoughts.”
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Article: The Most Borrowed Books in New York City Libraries in 2024
The Most Borrowed Books in New York City Libraries in 2024 https://flip.it/M0gnHE
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Castle Gormenghast: Revisiting Gothic Fantasy
A crumbling castle, an eccentric and slightly mad family, and intricate plotting in a Medival fantasy series about a remote earldom is the perfect antidote to stressful holidays.
Need to escape into a different world after talking politics over the Thanksgiving table–or even harder, avoiding talking politics across the Thanksgiving table? Then it’s time to visit Gormenghast, the ancestral home of the ancient Groan family who lived in a wild and isolated landscape. Written by author and artist Mervyn Peake, the books in the series are Titus Groan, published in 1947, Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959). Peake died while writing Titus Awakes, the fourth book. His widow, artist Maeve Gilmore, completed the book sometime in the 1970s but the manuscript wasn’t discovered and published until 2011.
According to its Wikipedia citation, “The series has been included in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels and 100 Must Read Fantasy Novels as one of the greatest fantasy works of the twentieth century. Literary critic Harold Bloom has praised the series as the best fantasy novels of the 20th century and one of the greatest sequences in modern world literature.”
Available on Amazon, find a cozy corner to escape contemporary 21st post-election American angst and whisk yourself away to Castle Gormenghast.
The books are also available on Kindle and Audible.
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Where Are You, Echo Blue?
“In those years, the hardest of my childhood, Echo felt like a kindred spirit. I memorized her lines in Slugger 8. I practiced her stance on the field in the mirror. I cut out snapshots from Teen Beat magazine. I bought four copies of her cover issue of Sassy, the one where she wore a red cropped T-shirt with big lips smacked across her flat chest. I made a collage, carefully glued images of her together, draped it with a heart garland, and hung it over my bed. My favorite was a photo of Echo and her also-actor dad, Jamie Blue, leaving a restaurant, his arm slung over her shoulders, protecting her, the way I wished my father did.”
From Where Are You, Echo Blue? by Haley Krischer (Penguin Random House).
Goldie Klein, a writer for Manhattan Eye, has it bad when it comes to Echo Blue, the famous child actress. The obsession that worried her parents when she was growing up still has a hold on her even now. And when she learns that Echo, who was scheduled to appear on MTV’s New Year’s Eve Y2K special, one that will help her regain her foothold on stardom, hasn’t shown, Goldie knows it has to be more than just a relapse and stint in rehab. Echo has really disappeared.
Currently, Goldie is writing the kind of stories she hates and that her father, an overly critical professor loves, including her most recent article on boxing. But Goldie’s aspirations are to cover subjects much hipper and more compelling. And she sees Echo’s vanishing as just the ticket. She manages to talk her editor into sending her to Los Angeles to track down the missing star. But it’s going to be difficult. Even those close to Echo have no idea where she is, and they’re upset that Goldie is looking for her.
But in her adoration of the Echo, Goldie has spun a mythology in her own mind. She saw Echo as the only friend she had during her early teens. The boy-crazy girls in her class intimidated her with their talk about sex while Goldie was still playing with dolls. She tried to connect but it just didn’t happen despite the best efforts of her mother who planned slumber parties to help her make friends. And so, Goldie further immersed herself into Echo’s world—or the world she thought Echo inhabited.
But Echo’s life was also difficult. Her mother, a washed-up television actress, is a depressive who has locked herself away in their house. To escape that environment, Echo opted to live with her movie star father who was always away on location hoping to become an Academy-award winning actor and never had time to talk on the phone, changed girlfriends monthly and really wasn’t that concerned with his daughter’s well-being. Echo had handlers that raised her and like Goldie she was terribly lonely with just one friend. Stardom couldn’t make up for not having the type of normal life most teenagers have.
Goldie manipulates herself into the lives of people who know Goldie, including Jamie Blue. Accompanying an actor to his house, she eats a marijuana-laced cookie at the door and becomes completely stoned.
“Don’t you know not to eat cookies at a stranger’s house without asking what’s in them?” her editor asks incredulously when Goldie calls to tell her as if that’s a basic fact everyone should know. And though Goldie wants to leave, her editor tells her that she’d better get in the hot tub with Jamie, even though he’s likely to be naked.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Goldie begins to get the idea of what Echo’s life was like as she continues to hunt for the missing star. The story cuts back and forth between 2000 and the 1990s, capturing the era precisely and what life was like for Echo as she became an Oscar-winning child star. In her pursuit of her story, Goldie realizes that it’s time to chart a new course in her own life.
This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.
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“The Wildes” by Louis Bayard Book Signing
On Thursday, Oct. 3rd at 6:30 PM, Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye and Jackie and Me, will be in conversation with novelist Lori Rader-Day at The Book Stall. They will discuss Bayard’s new novel, The Wildes, a profoundly empathetic story about Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance and their two sons in the aftermath of the famous playwright’s imprisonment, told against Victorian England and World War I.
This program is free, but registration is required. CLICK HERE to reserve your spot.
Benjamin Dyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer’s English, says, “It requires a novelist of great audacity to dare to attempt to bring Oscar Wilde back to life, and it requires a novelist of great skill, to say nothing of wit, to manage the feat persuasively. Happily, Louis Bayard is both of those novelists.
“As if that were not enough, The Wildes also presents us with a portrait of Oscar’s wife, Constance, that is little short of breathtaking in its vibrant depth, and a recounting of the heartbreaking tragedy of the Wildes that is eloquent and fully compassionate to all its characters, certainly to the Wildes’ sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and even to (almost astonishingly) that feckless instrument of destruction Lord Alfred Douglas. I read The Wildes in an improbable state of breathless suspense, so wonderfully well has Bayard presented us with real people pressing, often excruciatingly, toward fateful decisions. This is an intoxicatingly gorgeous novel.”
Louis Bayard is the critically acclaimed bestselling author of nine historical novels, including Jackie & Me and The Pale Blue Eye, which was adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale. His articles, reviews, and recaps have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Anthony, Agatha, and Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author of Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where she is co-chair of the mystery readers’ conference Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. She served as the national president of Sisters in Crime in 2020.
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Camino Ghosts by John Grisham
“what could be better than a cursed island, some supernatural happenings, and the righting of centuries of social wrongs?”
“It was a ship from Virginia, called Venus and it had around 400 slaves on board, packed like sardines,” bookstore owner Bruce Cable tells Mercer Mann, a writer who is looking for a new book subject. “Well, it left Africa with 400 but not all made it. Many died at sea. The conditions on board were unimaginable, to say the least. Venus finally went down about a mile to sea near Cumberland Island. Since the slaves were chained and shackled, almost all of them drowned. A few clung to the wreckage and washed ashore in the storm on Dark Island, as it became known. Or Dark Isle. It was unnamed in 1760. They were taken in by runaways from Georgia, and together they built a little community. Two hundred years went by, everybody died or moved away and now it is deserted.”
One of the many facets of John Grisham’s enthralling fiction is his ability to take complex social issues and weave them into the fabric of his novels so that they make for a compelling read.
In Camino Ghosts, the third book in the Camino series, he does it again with his compelling story of Lovely Jackson, an 80-year-old Black woman who is determined to save Dark Isle, the now deserted island once settled by both shipwrecked Africans kidnapped into slavery and escaped slaves. Lovely is the last of those who settled on the island, and she stopped living there when she was 15, only returning to tend to the cemetery where her ancestors are buried.
For years no one wanted the island, an inaccessible and unfriendly barrier island of impenetrable jungle, poisonous snakes, and prowling panthers. But Hurricane Leo has changed the island’s topography and rabid land developers with politicians in their pocket see Dark Isle as the place to build a sprawling casino and resort complex.
But Lovely is determined, believing she is the sole owner of Dark Isle and the protector of her ancestors’ history and graves. She also happens to be the only one who can lift the curse of her great, great, great grandmother, Nalla, a woman who was kidnapped from her village in Africa, taken away from her husband and only child, chained in the hold of a ship as it crossed the Atlantic, and raped repeatedly by the crew members. No white man who has stepped on the island has survived.
Camino Ghosts is the third in the series about bookstore owner Bruce Cable, who likes fine wine, good food, pretty women (he and his wife, an importer of French antiques, have an open marriage), and books. But he is more than a bon vivant and purveyor of tomes, he likes to intervene in the island’s business to produce the best outcomes and is extremely supportive of his writers. Good at pulling strings, he is the force uniting the factions fighting the development and is also helping his former lover, Mercer Mann, a bestselling author with writer’s block, find her next subject. And what could be better than a cursed island, some supernatural happenings, and the righting of centuries of social wrongs?
This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books and the Northwest Indiana Times.
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