Patch Reads: Check Out These Titles

Recommendations from the staff.

It’s an emotional roller coaster ride this week with our book selections.  We bring to you stories of stories of love, life, grief, and family.  We hope you will stop in to the library to check one out today. Happy Reading!

• Beautiful Ruins: a Novel By Jess Walter, June 2012, 337 pages.  

This novel begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.  We then jump years ahead when the elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.  What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. If you are a fan of character driven fiction with an inspiring setting, you will enjoy this book.

• The Infinite Tides: a Novel By Christian Kiefer, June 2012, 393 pages.

Mathematical genius Keith Corcoran has finally fulfilled his lifelong ambition of becoming an astronaut with his arrival aboard the International Space Station.  He has dedicated his whole life to this moment. Then, while on a spacewalk, his 16-year-old, mathematically gifted daughter is killed in a car accident back on earth. He loses his wife, who leaves him and clears out their home, after the fact. This lyrical debut novel beautifully portrays Keith’s grief and the process of coming to terms with what he has lost.  Fans of Cormac McCarthy and T.C. Boyle will find this book rewarding.

• The Meryl Streep Movie Club By Mia March, June 2012, 325 pages.

In the bestselling tradition of The Friday Night Knitting Club and The Jane Austen Book Club, three women find unexpected answers, happiness, and one another, with Meryl Streep movies as their inspiration.

Two sisters and the cousin they grew up with after a tragedy are summoned home to their family matriarch's inn on the coast of Maine for a shocking announcement. Suddenly, Isabel, June and Kat are sharing the attic bedroom—and barely speaking. But when innkeeper Lolly asks them to join her and the guests in the parlor for weekly Movie Night—it's Meryl Streep month—they find themselves sharing secrets, talking long into the night , and questioning everything they thought they knew about life, love, and one another. You will laugh and cry when you read this touching new novel.

Reviews brought to you each week by librarians Jennifer Niederhausen, Dona Stein and Heather Timko, Adult Services Division