Reading Recommendations: Proposed page-turners
Looking for a good read to while away the final days of spring? Northwest Shoals Community College library director Lori Skinner has these titles to recommend:
“Wrecker”
By Carl Hiaasen
The titular teenage character in this young adult novel calls himself Wrecker because his ancestor salvaged shipwrecks for a living. Does that mean destiny is playing a role when he discovers a speedboat that has run aground on a sand flat? Who knows, but Wrecker is definitely drawn into a multilayered mystery that spirals out of control as he attempts to finish school via Zoom while avoiding pooping iguanas, graver robbers and the guys from the boat. Filled with Hiaasen’s trademark tropical feel and Key West history, this is a fun choice to kick off summer.
“Sociopath: A Memoir”
by Patric Gagne
“Sociopath: A Memoir” by Patric Gagne, Ph.D., has been highly anticipated as a fascinatingly unique memoir that reveals the author’s struggle to understand her own sociopath disorder and strive to lead a fulfilled life. At a young age, Dr. Gagne understood that there was something about her that caused others to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected that it had to do with how she felt – nothing. After receiving her diagnosis in college, she finds hope when she discovers that if she is capable of love, she must be able to challenge the view of sociopaths as monsters.
“Just for the Summer”
By Abby Jimenez
If you are looking for a witty, slow-burn rom-com, be sure to check out “Just for the Summer” by Abby Jimenez. This Good Morning America Book Club Pick has two main characters with the same problem: When they date, and break up, with someone, their ex goes on to find their soul mate in the very next person they date. When Emma and Justin discover that each other has the same problem, they decide their curses will cancel each other’s out. So, they decide to date each other over the summer and break up so they can discover their own soul mates. However, they each begin to catch feeling when real life intrudes over the course of the summer.
“How to Solve Your Own Murder”
By Kristen Perrin
For fans of “Knives Out” and “The Thursday Murder Club,” Kristen Perrin’s “How to Solve Your Own Murder” is a great choice for an engaging read. In 1965 Frances Adams is at a fair in the English countryside when a fortune-teller predicts that one day Frances will be murdered. Frances spends her whole life trying to solve her future murder by compiling a dossier on every person who crosses her path. When she is murdered nearly 60 years later, her niece Annie arrives to the reading of her will and gets drawn into the mystery of her aunt’s death. As she discovers everyone has a motive to kill Aunt Frances, she finds herself closer to inheriting her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.
“The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War”
By Erik Larson
Erik Larson returns with another highly anticipated book. Larson offers a gripping account of the time period between Lincoln’s election and the shelling of Fort Sumter. Drawing on diaries, secret communications, slave ledgers and plantation records, this account focuses on Major Robert Anderson, Edmund Ruffin, Mary Boykin Chesnut, President Abraham Lincoln and William Seward. Described as a political horror story, Larson reminds us “we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.”
