Happy New Release Tuesday! If your Summer reading has hit a slump, we’re here to guide you through this week’s new arrivals. Check out a few of our favorites.
The Lost Queen of Crocker County, by Elizabeth Leiknes
Jane Willow left Iowa years ago to become a film critic in LA. But she can’t quite forget Iowa. And Crocker County, Iowa, certainly hasn’t forgotten her. After all, she was Corn Queen at the Corn Fest everyone remembers.
When a family tragedy happens, Jane is forced to drive back home to the rolling farmlands of her youth, the best friend she abandoned, and some memories she might prefer to forget.
This love letter to the Midwest is a feel-good novel about second chances, righting your mistakes, and going home again.
Indianapolis, by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic
The riveting and emotionally wrenching story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II, and the fifty-year fight to exonerate the captain after a wrongful court martial.
In the early morning of July 30, 1945, after delivering the components of the atomic bomb from California to the Pacific Islands, the USS Indianapolis (carrying about 1200 men) is struck by two Japanese torpedoes. 300 men go down with the ship. About 900 make it into the water alive. Only 316 survive.
For the first time, the full story of the USS Indianapolis is told here. After a decade of research and interviews with the living survivors, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic have written a fascinating account of the worst disaster in US Naval history.
From the Corner of the Oval, by Beck Dorey-Stein
This fun political memoir is one of our Buyer Picks for July. “It’s kind of like the beach read version of West Wing,” says our Biography buyer. “I picked it up and started reading, and couldn’t put the book down.”
This “compulsively readable” memoir follows author Beck Dorey-Stein in her unlikely journey to the Obama White House that began, believe it or not, with a Craigslist ad. In 2012 Dorey-Stein is scraping by working five part-time jobs when she (improbably) lands a job in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama’s stenographers. This is one of only a few positions in the White House that accompanies the president everywhere he goes. She quickly learns that office romances and office politics are a bit trickier in the world of actual politics. Don’t miss this fun book about a young woman who makes her way through heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and figuring out what really matters.
Willa of the Wood, by Robert Beatty
New in kids’ fiction is a the first in a beautiful new series from the author of the Serafina books. Willa is a young nightspirit of the Great Smoky Mountains. She’s brave, and full of the ancient powers of the forest. And she’s also her clan’s best thief. By night, she sneaks into homes to take what the day-folk won’t miss.
But then one day her curiosity leaves her injured and alone in the world of the day-folk. That’s when she learns that not everyone of the day-folk enemies are the same. And that maybe the Faeran society she was born into is not what she thought it was.
