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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards’s stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and to keep her birth a secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is an astonishing tale of redemptive love. BACKCOVER: “Edwards is a born novelist. . . . Rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection.” — Chicago Tribune “Unfolds from an absolutely gripping premise, drawing you deeply and irrevocably into the entangled lives of two families and the devastating secret that shaped them both. I loved this riveting story.” —Sue Monk Kidd “Anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.” — The Washington Post “Kim Edwards has written a novel so mesmerizing that I devoured it. . . . The Memory Keeper’s Daughter has it all.” —Sena Jeter Naslund “Kim Edwards has created a tale of regret and redemption, of honest emotion, of characters haunted by their past. This is simply a beautiful book.” —Jodi Picoult.
Price: $1.89
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The Virgin Suicides
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Revolutionary Road
The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy. Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk.
Price: $7.78
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Slightly Suburban (Red Dress Ink)
It seemed exciting at first, but after two and a half years in New York, Tracey has to admit her life…well, sucks. Sure, she makes a decent living as a copywriter, but Blaire Barnett Advertising is a cutthroat world that basically swallows her life. If she does manage to get home before nine, she's usually greeted by husband Jack's best bud, an almost—permanent fixture in their tiny, unaffordable apartment. Add the circus freaks stomping around upstairs, and Tracey decides it's time to move. After quitting her job, she and Jack take the plunge into the nearby suburbs of Westchester and quickly discover they're in way over their heads. Their fixer-upper is unfixable, the stay-at-home yoga moms are a bore and Tracey yearns for her old friends—she even misses work! So which life does she really want? Other than Jack's wife, who is she? If Tracey merely has to find her own Slightly Suburban niche, it had better be just around the corner, because there're no subways here!.
Price: $8.36
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Goodnight Nobody: A Novel
Goodnight Nobody is bestselling author Jennifer Weiner's attempt at writing a mystery, with a healthy dose of the author's chick lit sensibilities thrown in for good measure. While this Desperate Housewives meets Sex in the City murder mystery won't make readers shake in their Manolo Blahniks, it will provide the obligatory humor and compassion to which fans of Weiner's Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, and Little Earthquakes have grown accustomed. Kate Klein is a feisty, charmingly insecure Connecticut housewife who trades in a life of late-night karaoke sing-a-longs and West Village brunches with her best friend Janie for a world of mini-vans and Mommy and Me pilates classes. Life in Upchurch, Connecticut, heats up when Kate discovers picture-perfect wife and mother Kitty Cavanaugh dead on the pickled maple hardwood floor of her recently remodeled kitchen. A former chronicler of celebrity gossip, Kate takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of Kitty's murder and the disappearance of Lexi Hagen-Holdt, another Upchurch supermom. Along the way, the mysteries and disappointments in Kate's personal life begin to unravel, including her marriage to the kind-yet-uptight Ben, and her unresolved crush on Evan McKenna, a former neighbor with whom a one-night tryst ended in disaster. Thrown in for comic relief, and perhaps to show the depth of Weiner's talents as a writer, are Kate's twin boys and adorably sophisticated 5-year old daughter Sophie ("Sophie was sitting on the toilet, applying lipstick and waiting her turn..."). Goodnight Nobody is chock full of plot twists and turns which can be overwhelming and superfluous. However, Weiner's charm and grace are usually enough to rescue readers from these moments of confusion, and reaffirm our commitment to this endearing contemporary voice. --Gisele Toueg.
Price: $2.00
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Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design. There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day. Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is a lively, thorough, critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia-characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots-and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It is an indictment of the entire development community, including governments, for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is that rare book that also offers solutions. .
Price: $10.62
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Demons Are Forever: Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom (Book 3)
Exciting new escapades for the demon-hunting stay-at-home mom-from the USA Today bestselling author of Carpe Demon. It isn't easy when your daughter's figured out that her mom's a demon hunter-and wants to grow up to be just like her. Or when you suspect your dead husband used the forces of darkness to filch the body of another human. And your living husband isn't the man you married anymore either. Moreover, Kate's acquired a precious but deadly item that every demon within commuting distance wants. With husband woes playing havoc with her emotions, an ambitious teenage protÂŽgÂŽe at her heels, and hell to pay, this stay-at-home mom's putting in a lot of overtime..
Price: $4.25
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Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe. .
Price: $8.80
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The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook
How to Wrestle Free from an Alligator: 4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout. Though it's being marketed as a humorous title--after all, it's unlikely you'll be called upon to land a plane, jump from a motorcycle to a moving car, or win a swordfight--the information contained in The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook is all quite sound. Authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht consulted numerous experts in their fields (they're cited at the end of the book) to discover how to survive various and sundry awful events. Parachute doesn't open? Your best bet for survival is to hook your arms through the straps of a fellow jumper's chute--and even then you're likely to dislocate both shoulders and break both legs. Car sinking in water? Open the window immediately to equalize pressure, then open the car door and swim to the surface. Buried in an avalanche? Spit on the snow--it will tell you which direction is really up. Then dig as fast as you can. Each survival skill is explained in simple steps with helpful illustrations. Most stress the need to be prepared--both mentally and physically. For example, to escape from quicksand, you will need to lay a pole on the surface of the quicksand, flop on your back atop the pole, and pull your legs out one by one. No pole? No luck. "When walking in quicksand country, carry a stout pole--it will help you get out should you need to." Hopefully you'll never need to know how to build a fire without matches, perform a tracheotomy, or treat a bullet wound. But in the words of survival evasion resistance escape instructor "Mountain" Mel Deweese, "You never know." --Sunny Delaney.
Price: $0.95
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