Reading - Harmony

Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst

How far will a mother go to save her family? The Hammond family is living in DC, where everything seems to be going just fine, until it becomes clear that the oldest daughter, Tilly, is developing abnormally--a mix of off-the-charts genius and social incompetence. Once Tilly--whose condition is deemed undiagnosable--is kicked out of the last school in the area, her mother Alexandra is out of ideas.

The family turns to Camp Harmony and the wisdom of child behavior guru Scott Bean for a solution. But what they discover in the woods of New Hampshire will push them to the very limit. Told from the alternating perspectives of both Alexandra and her younger daughter Iris (the book's Nick Carraway), this is a unputdownable story about the strength of love, the bonds of family, and how you survive the unthinkable.

Reading - The 65-Storey Treehouse

The 65-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths

A Junior Fiction

Andy and Terry live in a 65-Story Treehouse. (It used to be 52 stories, but they keep expanding.) It has a pet-grooming salon, a birthday room where it's always your birthday (even when it's not), a room full of exploding eyeballs, a lollipop shop, a quicksand pit, an ant farm, and a time machine...which is going to be really, really useful now, since Terry messed up (again) and the treehouse just FAILED it's safety inspection.
Join Andy and Terry on a whirlwind trip through time as they try to stop the treehouse from being demolished!

Reading - The Chocolate Falcon Fraud

The Chocolate Falcon Fraud by Joanna Carl

The Warner Pier tourism board is kicking off its Tough Guys and Private Eyes film festival with The Maltese Falcon, and Lee Woodyard and her aunt Nettie are preparing a delicious chocolat noir tie-in at TenHuis Chocolade. What Lee isn’t prepared for is a face from the past: Jeff Godfrey, her former stepson. The last time Jeff showed up in town, he wound up being accused of murder. He says he’s in Warner Pier only to see Bogart on the big screen. Honest.

Then Jeff goes missing, the Falcon theme is haunting everyone, and a body falls at Lee’s feet when she opens the front door—just like in the movie. Now Lee is under deadline to rewrite the ending of a cunning killer’s increasingly convincing murder plot....

Reading - Homegoing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

It begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.

Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.