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Summer Reading
The possibilities for summer reading are endless, from classics to chick lit, from thrillers to biographies. We've rounded up a few of our favorite new releases in several genres, offering summer diversions for readers of—almost—every taste. Take your pick.
Crafting a friendship
Summer has never struck me as a good time for knitting: all that wool around a sticky body in the heat and humidity doesn't sound comfortable. But I have no trouble reading about knitting in any weather, which means Beth Pattillo's The Sweetgum Knit Lit Society is perfect summer reading material. Here, Pattillo cleverly marries two subgenres of women's fiction—the book club novel and the knitting novel—and does it very well. Pattillo introduces appealing, small-town characters: the librarian Eugenie, a woman with a secret, whose reign over her library may be about to end; sisters Esther and Ruthie, who are involved in an unusual love triangle; Merry, a harried wife and mother harboring her own secret; and Camille, who's given up her chance at college and an independent life to take care of her dying mother. Their monthly Knit Lit Society meetings, held in the Sweetgum Christian Church, offer each a respite from their lives. Between meetings, everyone reads the same book while working on a knitting project inspired by that book. (A pattern for one such project is included at the end of the novel.) Their carefully structured group is thrown into some chaos by the arrival of prickly teenager Hannah, who desperately doesn't want to admit that she desperately needs help. The Sweetgum Knit Lit Society cries for a sequel—readers will long to know what will happen next for these people, all of whom have experienced serious changes by book's end.
By Beth Pattillo WaterBrook, $13.99 352 pages, ISBN 9781400073948
A star and his leading lady
As Superman, Christopher Reeve fought for "truth, justice and the American way." As a wheelchair-bound activist he was a symbol of hope for the disabled. Wife Dana, meanwhile, came to represent the faithful caregiver. They'd been married only three years when he was thrown from his horse during a 1995 equestrian competition. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, unable to breathe without a respirator, he told her, "Maybe we should let me go." She replied, "I'll be with you for the long haul. . . . You're still you." Christopher Andersen, dubbed a "celebritologist" by Entertainment Weekly, has written books of varying quality on subjects including Barbra Streisand, Madonna, JFK Jr., Bill and Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana. He sometimes goes for the jugular, but his latest, Somewhere in Heaven, goes for the heart, paying tribute to a couple who stuck it out for better and mostly for worse. Based in part on original interviews, Andersen's book chronicles the Reeves' courtship, marriage and the challenges (sexual, medical, financial and more) they faced after Christopher's accident. Dana, who never got to fully realize her potential as a singer-actress, emerges as an especially memorable leading lady. Tragically, less than a year after Christopher's unexpected death, non-smoker Dana was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Somewhere in Heaven is about love so deep it defies all obstacles. Have Kleenex handy.
By Christopher Andersen Hyperion, $23.95 256 pages, ISBN 9781401323028
Tempted by the lure of a lost love
No matter how settled one is, there is always a lingering memory or two of a love or a life gone by. Some choose to let the past stay in the past, others choose to remain friendly and still others can't make up their minds. Is it possible to stay friends with an ex? How does one move on to something platonic when something so passionate once existed? How does one move on, period? In her latest book, Love the One You're With, Emily Giffin catches her main character off-guard with these questions. Having just married Andy, the ultimate dreamboat, Ellen Dempsey (now Ellen Graham) is shaken by a chance encounter with her ex, Leo. Formerly a confident, glowing newlywed, Ellen is now reduced to the unsure, emotional wreck that she was during her relationship with Leo. Why can't she get past this casual meeting? Why can't anything be casual when it comes to Leo? Why does she feel so guilty? As Giffin's story takes readers back and forth between Ellen's frustrating memories of Leo and her storybook life with Andy, each detail highlights the severe contrasts of her past and present. One is filled with questions; the other is nothing but easy answers. Yet Ellen finds herself drawn more and more to the questions as her charmed married life moves forward with graceful (and sometimes irritating) ease. For which life is she truly meant? Giffin, author of the best-selling Baby Proof, delivers a solid follow-up featuring a believable character in a situation that every reader, single or married, will recognize. Love the One You're With is a delicious novel for anyone ever caught between what is right and what is irresistible.
By Emily Giffin St. Martin's, $24.95 352 pages, ISBN 9780312348670
Thor's super man returns
Remember what happened when those Danish cartoonists drew caricatures of the Islamic prophet? Just imagine what could happen when an American novelist, New York Times best-selling author Brad Thor, does roughly the same in The Last Patriot. Ex-Navy SEAL turned Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath (who Thor fans will recall from The First Commandment), is enjoying a little R&R in gay Paree with his slightly damaged but healing girlfriend, Tracy Hastings (herself a Naval Explosive Ordinance Disposal tech) when things turn, well, not so gay. After a bungled car bomb blast and a narrow escape with an Islamic scholar in tow, the bodies begin to stack up like cordwood. Why all the fuss? Seems that an addendum to the Koran, allegedly written by the prophet himself, makes an unexpected—and to a group of jihadists, entirely unwelcome—appearance. If allowed to become public, it could "stop militant Islam dead in its tracks." Tough times demand a tough hero, and they don't come any grittier than Thor's. Facing down a recalcitrant target who stands between him and the French pokey, Harvath employs Jack Bauer-like tactics to persuade his captive that confession is good for the soul. With not just a license to kill, but a license to wound, disrupt, maim and explode, Harvath is, virtually single-handedly, more than a match for any who would seek to overthrow our republic by means of force or violence. The only things he's missing are a cape and vulnerability to Kryptonite. Fans of "24" and other high-adrenaline escapist fare will find Thor's latest cinematic page-turner a must-pack for this summer's vacation.
By Brad Thor Atria, $26 356 pages, ISBN 9781416543831
Read it in a magazine
Ah, the frothy fun and occasional heartbreak of a slightly snarky, narcissistic sob story. Who doesn't like that? Especially when mixed with lulling surf, a comfy lounge chair and a long, cool drink nestled nearby. If this recipe for relaxation holds appeal, then be sure to slip Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me about Love, Sex, and Starting Over into your beach tote. Author Cathy Alter, with a neurotically humorous flair for enumerating her foibles (think Bridget Jones), sets out to improve her junky, less-than-wholesome lifestyle by turning to the pages of slick consumer magazines for guidance. Alter, a 37-year-old freelance writer churning out "painfully dry sales and marketing material" by day, is recently divorced and living life on the edge. She engages in risky "cubicle" sex with a playboy co-worker, fuels herself on pepperoni and Cherry Coke and compulsively overspends so that she's "reduced to paying for my morning coffee with fists of pennies." Enter O, Marie Claire, Elle, Cosmo and the rest of the SWF 20s-to-30s demographic glossies to the rescue. For 12 months, Alter vows to follow, to the letter, these magazines' dictums on cooking, diet, exercise, entertaining, sex and the path to true love. Her writing is witty and raunchy, and her attempts at change are often (comically) tragic. She sticks to her self-help guns, eventually realizing that "you can't solve life's mysteries with the right pair of shoes or the perfect shade of lipstick. . . . But at least I tried."
By Cathy Alter Atria, $24 336 pages, ISBN 9780743288408
Art through the ages
Wherever you stand in the argument about purloining art in order to preserve it, this evenhanded novel probably won't help define your position. Still, you will have had a particularly good adventure spanning two notable eras in the world's cultural history: one, circa 400 BCE, when the standards for the next 2,300 years of art were being set in marble, and the other, the early 19th century, a time when those works faced either obliteration or forcible relocation to a foreign land. Stealing Athena, by Karen Essex, best-selling author of Leonardo's Swans, represents a grade of fiction several waves above your typical beach book. There's sex, to be sure, but far more interesting are the lives of the two women whose stories alternate in this novel. Mary Nesbit was the wife of Lord Elgin, whose name will always be associated with the magnificent friezes, statues and other artifacts he begged, borrowed and bought, at the expense of his own reputation and his wife's happiness. Aspasia, mistress of Pericles of Athens, knew the sculptor Phidias, Socrates and other standouts, while, like Mary, facing the complicated, sometimes dangerous, problems of self-definition in times that were monumentally hard on women. As always, the Greek marbles that Lord Elgin removed from the Acropolis (and other places) tend to steal the show. Time has not calmed the argument over their final resting place, which indeed has intensified as a new museum prepares to open in Athens next year. Still, this fictional treatment, both exotic and down to earth, supplies an entertaining research engine into the whole issue and its background. Stealing Athena is one beach read that the sands of time will only enhance.
By Karen Essex Doubleday, $22.95 400 pages, ISBN 9780385519717
Car and drivers
Noël Coward once said that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." Journalist Jeroen van Bergeijk, whose chronicle of an "auto-misadventure across the Sahara," piloting his used 190D from Amsterdam to Ouagadougou in My Mercedes Is Not for Sale, is Dutch. You do the math. Crazy-making is also often funny-making, and van B's musings on subjects like the state of African commerce ("Things in Africa come in two forms: broken or almost broken.") inform the armchair traveler about the real on-the-road experience in ways Baedeker and Lonely Planet never could. In a place where border delays may be measured in days rather than minutes, our explorer has learned to pass his idle time wisely: not only do we hear digressions, related in some detail, about the history of the Paris to Dakar Rally and the disastrous expeditions to map out the desert in advance of a never-completed Trans-Sahara Railway, we also meet every previous owner of his humble Mercedes and travel to the factory in Bremen where it was built two decades ago. Places like Mauritania, Togo, Burkina Faso and Benin will likely never rank with France, Mexico, The Bahamas or even China as a potential vacation destination. But thanks to a crazy Dutchman who boldly went where few men ever go, entertaining us every kilometer of the way, I'm dusting off the old passport and thinking . . . maybe a visit to Disneyland would be nice this summer.
By Jeroen van Bergeijk Broadway, $12.95 224 pages, ISBN 9780767928694
A family's troubled waters
Life on a boat sounds like a dream: sailing in and out of tropical locales, embracing the staggering vastness of the sea, seeing the world up-close and in living color. Then there's the reality: homesick kids, pirates, costly and time-consuming repairs, squabbling. Black Wave details John and Jean Silverwood's tumultuous, yet ultimately rewarding, experience on the Emerald Jane, their 55-foot catamaran. In a span of two years, the California couple and their four kids (ages three to 14 at the start), traveled from the Atlantic coast, into the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean. Then, near the end of the adventure, the boat hit a reef in French Polynesia, and was ravaged, pinning John under its mast in the process. With help hours away and John slipping toward death, the family sprung into action, pulling him from the wreckage and keeping him alive. "There is no time to rehearse; whoever you are in those moments is exactly who you are," John writes. "It is who your family is, too." Jean Silverwood complements the book's nautical action with substance. She throws readers into the frenzy of the wreck and details the highs and lows of life onboard, coming across as personable, vulnerable and concerned—in short, a real person and not an adrenaline junkie. Given the material, it's impossible for Black Wave to be boring; there's plenty to keep readers turning the pages a steady clip, making this an ideal beach (or boat) read.
By John and Jean Silverwood Random House, $25 240 pages, ISBN 9781400066551
Reviews by Kathleen Smith Are you craving a stay in an ocean hideaway this summer, even though you don't have plans for an actual trip to the shore? These new books, all set at the beach, might be the perfect getaway.
By Jane Green Viking, $24.95 352 pages, ISBN 9780670018857
By Maryann McFadden Hyperion, $22.95 336 pages, ISBN 9781401322700
By Nancy Thayer Ballantine, $24 320 pages, ISBN 9780345498182
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INSPIRATIONAL FICTION
BIOGRAPHY
CHICK LIT
THRILLER
MEMOIR
HISTORICAL FICTION
ROAD TRIP
ADVENTURE
Escape to the enchanting beaches of Nantucket Island with best-selling author Jane Green's latest novel, The Beach House. Nan, a spunky 65-year-old, has outgrown her beauty as well as the inhibitions of youth, and earned a reputation as the crazy woman of the island. When her seemingly endless finances dwindle, she is forced to rent rooms for the summer to keep her beloved home. To her surprise, Nan finds delight and comfort in the new faces of her adopted family and one very unexpected guest.
Originally self-published by real estate agent-turned-novelist Maryann McFadden, The Richest Season aims to reach any woman who has toyed with thoughts of leaving home for self-discovery. With the kids grown and her workaholic husband facing another transfer, Joanna decides to shed her corporate-wife image and leaves husband and home for stunning Pawley's Island, South Carolina. Living with an elderly widow and courted by a local fisherman, she anticipates the happiness that has always seemed to elude her—until her penitent husband arrives on the island.
Nancy Thayer's dramatic Moon Shell Beach proves there is magic to be found when years of estrangement are finally bridged. Bound by their love for a secret hideaway on Nantucket, Lexi and Clare had the closest of childhood friendships. But when Lexi returns to the island at age 30, recently divorced from her wealthy husband, Clare must find the courage to forgive her lost friend and open her life and home to the struggling woman.