If you have been following along with me for a while, you know that I can't pass up a Little Free Library. I have grabbed some books lately that I can't get to get my hands on. Let's take a look at my most recent finds!
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans: Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.
The Beauty of Breaking by Michele Harper: Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.
In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.
The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.
The Orphans of Mersea House by Marty Wingate: England, 1957. Olive Kersey’s only love never returned from World War II, and now, she’s alone and penniless. Then, the last person she ever expected to see again returns to Southwold. Olive’s childhood friend, Margery Paxton, arrives to claim her inheritance: Mersea House, a stately old home she plans to turn into the town’s only lodging. Olive’s life takes a sunny turn when Margery hires her to run the establishment. But Mersea House holds its own mysteries—and its own dangers.
First, rumors begin to fly when two enigmatic lodgers move in: Hugh Hodson, manager of the town cinema, and Mrs. Abigail Claypool, a recluse and war widow. And then, the completely unexpected: Margery is informed she has a new ward, eleven-year-old Juniper Wyckes, the orphaned daughter of Margery’s first love. Mrs. Lucie Pagett, Children’s Officer at the local authority, informs Margery that Juniper was severely stricken with polio as a child, and makes clear that she could be taken away if her welfare is in jeopardy.
But the past is never far behind for the inhabitants of Mersea House, and looming secrets may destroy these friendships they've created.
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center: Love may be blind. But what if . . . what you see isn't what you get?
It’s all starting to come together for struggling artist Sadie Montgomery. She was just named a finalist in the national portrait competition of her dreams. But when she winds up with a rare, but real, condition where human faces look like jumbled puzzle pieces . . . it is, to say the least, not good.
With only a few weeks to paint the best portrait of her entire life, Sadie will do anything to reverse her condition and get back to work, but it’s anyone’s guess when (or even if) that'll happen.
Enter her dog’s charming veterinarian (who may or may not be Sadie’s daydream fiancé), and her bowling-jacket-wearing, Vespa-riding neighbor (who she can’t seem to stay away from)―both vying for her attention and adding to the chaos.
It’s a lot, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Because the truth is, seeing the world differently has its upsides. And love has an undeniable way of giving us courage. And the best way of looking is always, always with the heart.
