Category: Uncategorized

Ray & Joan by Lisa Napoli is a fascinating new biography about Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s into a billion dollar franchise, and Joan Kroc, his wife who gave that fortune away.  Ray Kroc was a salesman, peddling milk shake machines when he met the two brothers who started McDonald’s in California.  He signed on to help sell

With so much delicious fiction hot off the presses, I am not sure what attracted me to Susan Quinn’s new biography of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and AP Reporter Lorena Hickock. It wasn’t their snazzy ensembles, it wasn’t the subtitle “The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady;”  maybe it was my love of the era they lived in…  I

Michael Connelly’s 21st Harry Bosch novel is out.  Some of my favorite series authors publish around this time, and I anxiously await the Tuesday their book hits the shelves.  I was early on the Library’s list for The Wrong Side of Goodbye, and zoomed through it this past weekend.  You might think after 21 novels about one detective the story

It has been a good season for new books.  It seems like I have had an overabundance of really good reads–lucky me!  The Guineveres is another one of those really good reads, though I must say, it is nothing like the novel I expected to read.  I thought four friends would get together and reminisce about their past together, from

  The Perfect Girl recently came out in paperback, and despite being a little outside my usual genre choice, ended up at the top of my weekend read pile.  Page turner doesn’t quite do it justice.  If you can read it at a Middle School Volleyball Tournament between your daughter’s games, sitting in bleachers, it must be addictively good.  Just

The long awaited third novel by Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette and writer for TV’s Arrested Development and Mad About You, is out!  Today Will Be Different is about Eleanor Flood, anxious writer, mother and wife, getting a grip.  It is hysterical and a little sad and very much on point, all at the same time. Eleanor

Maggie Hope is back on the pages with another mystery to solve during World War II.  I am so glad I discovered this mystery series a few years ago with Mr. Churchill’s Secretary.  I recommend them to all the historical fiction and mystery lovers in my life (which has come back to me-my aunt pre-orders a kindle version and has

Historical fiction lovers, meet Marthe de Florian, a poor girl who leaves home to become a seamstress during the Belle Epoch.  She takes a wealthy lover and becomes a Parisian courtesan, provided with a beautiful apartment and a monthly stipend which Marthe spends on beautiful clothing, art, and ceramics.  Later in their relationship, her lover Charles commissions a portrait of

Ann Patchett is no stranger to the New York Times Bestseller List, or our library’s hold shelf.  Debuting at #4 is her latest novel, Commonwealth.  Commonwealth is the story of a blended family, opening at one of the children’s christening parties with the start of an affair.  That affair combines 6 kids and shuttles them back and forth between Virginia

Continuing my streak of entertaining pleasure reads, an hour after I put down Amy Stewart’s latest mystery, I picked up Noah Hawley’s fifth novel, Before the Fall.  Before the Fall is a little bit of a genre stretch for me. I put it on hold when it was first published, and was just walking out of the library when I ran