Our Summer Reading Series is halfway through. Just 12 days til it is officially summer, even though it feels like summer to me! Entertainment Weekly is being featured this week with their staff picks for summer reading!
"We don't know why, but there's something about the summer - whether it's relaxing with a book on the beach or toting around an engrossing read as we jet off on an adventure - that makes us fall in love with reading all over again." - Entertainment Weekly
Big Gay Wedding by Byron Lane - Two grooms. One mother of a problem.
Barnett Durang has a secret. No, not THAT secret. His widowed mother has long known he’s gay. The secret is Barnett is getting married. At his mother’s farm. In their small Louisiana town. She just doesn’t know it yet.
It’ll be an intimate affair. Just two hundred or so of the most fabulous folks Barnett is shipping in from the “heathen coasts,” as Mom likes to call them, turning her quiet rescue farm for misfit animals into a most unlikely wedding venue.
But there are forces, both within this modern new family and in the town itself, that really don’t want to see this handsome couple march down the aisle. It’ll be the biggest, gayest event in the town’s history if they can pull it off, and after a glitter-filled week, nothing will ever be the same. Big Gay Wedding is an uplifting book about the power of family and the unconditional love of a mother for her son.
Drowning by T.J. Newman - Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors—but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.
More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.
Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent—Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife—who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.
There’s not much time.
There’s even less air.
With devastating emotional power and heart-stopping suspense, Drowning is an unforgettable thriller about a family’s desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them—against impossible odds.
Follow the Sun by Liz Locke - For socialite Caroline Kimball, travel has become an escape—a way to run from her adult responsibilities while hiding her musical ambitions from her disapproving mother. When she meets handsome magazine photographer Jack “Tex” Fairchild beside a hotel pool in Acapulco, everything changes. His encouragement shows her she could have a life beyond that of a beautiful, bored heiress, and he convinces her that maybe her childish daydreams aren’t so impossible after all.
Realizing she no longer fits inside her golden cage, Caroline leaves it all behind and runs away with Tex to a small Spanish island, where she finally confronts the tragic death of her father. But when her mother's hidden secrets catch up to her, and a ghost from her past makes a surprising reappearance, Caroline will find herself torn between her whirlwind relationship with Tex, pursuing her music career, or saving her family from financial destitution.
Across the stunning beaches of Acapulco and down the powdered ski slopes of Gstaad, Follow the Sun will take readers from the turquoise waters of Formentera to the Sunset Strip, telling a captivating story about following your dreams to discover the person you were always meant to become.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs - For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements—books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.
All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna’s isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they’ll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .
In the great tradition of Ninth House, The Magicians, and Practical Magic, this is a suspenseful and richly atmospheric novel that draws readers into a vast world filled with mystery and magic, romance, and intrigue—and marks the debut of an extraordinary new voice in speculative fiction.
First Position by Melanie Hamrick - Five years into her career at the North American Ballet, Sylvie Carter has come a long way from the girl she once was—the young, driven ballerina who dutifully kept a list of rules for how to succeed. But as her star in the company rises, every rule gets broken and she becomes a version of herself she no longer recognizes. When a tumultuous, troubling relationship erupts into a devastating scandal for which she alone is blamed, she loses everything. Her reputation is destroyed, her best friend is now her fiercest rival, and the dream she’s worked for her entire life—becoming a prima ballerina—will never be realized. She vows not to ever make the same mistake again.
But when renowned dancer Alessandro Russo joins NAB as a guest artist for the season, Sylvie is magnetically drawn to him. Torn between fear and attraction, she finds herself mentally unraveling but also artistically blossoming as she taps into emotions she’d buried long ago. Caught in a bewildering spiral, she can either let the wounds of the past destroy her or find a way to be reborn.
