Summer of the Gypsy Moths

Summer of the Gypsy Moths
Author: Sara Pennypacker
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0062114514

From Clementine author Sara Pennypacker, this is a poignant middle-grade novel about two foster children who must find a way to work together in order to survive. Eleven-year-old Stella misses her (unreliable) mom, but she loves it at great-aunt Louise’s house. Louise lives on Cape Cod, where Stella hopes her mom will someday come and settle down. The only problem? Angel, the foster kid Louise has taken in. The two girls live together but there’s no way they’ll ever be friends. Then Louise suddenly passes away one morning—and Stella and Angel decide not to tell anyone. Now they have to depend on each other for survival. Now they are forced to trust each other with the biggest secret ever. With great empathy and humor, Sara Pennypacker tells the story of two very different girls who unexpectedly become each other’s true family.

Cutting Teeth

Cutting Teeth
Author: Julia Fierro
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-05-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466839228

One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow. Nicole, the hostess, struggles to keep her OCD behaviors unnoticed. Stay-at-home dad Rip grapples with the reality that his careerist wife will likely deny him a second child, forcing him to disrupt the life he loves. Allie, one half of a two-mom family, can't stop imagining ditching her wife and kids in favor of her art. Tiffany, comfortable with her amazing body but not so comfortable in the upper-middle class world the other characters were born into, flirts dangerously, and spars with her best friend Leigh, a blue blood secretly facing financial ruin and dependent on the magical Tibetan nanny everyone else covets. Throughout the weekend, conflicts intensify and painful truths surface. Friendships and alliances crack, forcing the house party to confront a new order.Cutting Teeth is about the complex dilemmas of early midlife—the vicissitudes of friendship, of romantic and familial love, and of sex. It's about class tension, status hunger, and the unease of being in possession of life's greatest bounty while still wondering, is this as good as it gets? And, perhaps most of all, Julia Fierro's warm and unpretentious debut explores the all-consuming love we feel for those we need most, and the sacrifice and compromise that underpins that love.

The Gypsy Moth Summer

The Gypsy Moth Summer
Author: Julia Fierro
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250087511

Returning to her family's grand estate off coastal Long Island, Leslie is confronted by a damaging gypsy moth invasion, prejudices toward her biracial family and her son's romance with a local drama queen, a situation that is overshadowed by a suspicious outbreak of deadly cancers.

Clothes for a Summer Hotel

Clothes for a Summer Hotel
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 100
Release: 1983
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811208710

This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

The Last Summer of Ada Bloom
Author: Martine Murray
Publisher: Text Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1925498719

• A beautiful and affecting story about the fragility of family relationships and about the pervading effects of secrets we keep, set in a small Victorian country town. • It is 1980, the year of John Lennon's assassination, and the Bloom family is beginning to unravel. Martha is lost in regret for her past, her husband Mike is yearning for a time when his wife wasn't always so distant, teenagers Tilly and Ben are both coming of age in their own unruly ways, and nine-year-old Ada is holding on to a childhood that is about to be lost to her. • Told from the perspectives of each family member, Martine Murray's impressive adult fiction debut is about a family growing up and growing apart, each of them longing for their own kind of freedom. • Lyrical, sophisticated and immensely captivating, The Last Summer of Ada Bloom is ultimately a story about relationships, what people withhold from each other, and what happens when secrets, present and past, come to light. • For fans of Holly Throsby's Goodwood, Peggy Frew's Hope Farm and Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread • Martine Murray is an award-winning children’s novelist and illustrator. She was born in Melbourne and now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria.

Snapper

Snapper
Author: Brian Kimberling
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307908062

A great, hilarious new voice in fiction: the poignant, all-too-human recollections of an affable bird researcher in the Indiana backwater as he goes through a disastrous yet heartening love affair with the place and its people. Nathan Lochmueller studies birds, earning just enough money to live on. He drives a glitter-festooned truck, the Gypsy Moth, and he is in love with Lola, a woman so free-spirited and mysterious she can break a man’s heart with a sigh or a shrug. Around them swirls a remarkable cast of characters: the proprietor of Fast Eddie’s Burgers & Beer, the genius behind “Thong Thursdays”; Uncle Dart, a Texan who brings his swagger to Indiana with profound and nearly devastating results; a snapping turtle with a taste for thumbs; a German shepherd who howls backup vocals; and the very charismatic state of Indiana itself. And at the center of it all is Nathan, creeping through the forest to observe the birds he loves and coming to terms with the accidental turns his life has taken. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

The Tree Shepherd's Daughter

The Tree Shepherd's Daughter
Author: Gillian Summers
Publisher: North Star Editions, Inc.
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-09-08
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0738717231

When her mother dies, fifteen-year-old Keelie Heartwood must leave California to live with her nomadic father at a renaissance festival. Playacting the Dark Ages is an L.A. girl’s worst nightmare. But then Keelie starts seeing fairies and uncovers her connection to a community of elves.

Astra

Astra
Author: Cedar Bowers
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 077101290X

What if you could see yourself as others see you? Astra is a beguiling debut novel that reveals the different faces of one woman, as seen through the eyes of ten people over a lifetime. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Winnipeg Free Press, and CBC Books. Born and raised on a remote British Columbia commune, Astra Brine has long struggled to find her way in the world, her life becoming a study of the thin line between dependence and love, need and desire. Over the years, as her path intersects with others—sometimes briefly, but always intensely—she will encounter people who, by turns, want to rescue, control, become, and escape her, revealing difficult yet shining truths about who they are and what they yearn for. There is the childhood playmate who comes to fear Astra’s unpredictable ways. The stranger who rescues her from homelessness, and then has to wrestle with his own demons. The mother who hires Astra as a live-in nanny even as her own marriage goes off the rails. The man who takes a leap of faith and marries her. Even as Astra herself remains the elusive yet compelling axis around which these narratives turn, her story reminds us of the profound impact that a woman can have on those around her, and the power struggles at play in all our relationships, no matter how intimate. A beautifully constructed and revelatory novel, Astra explores what we’re willing to give and receive from others, and how well we ever really know the people we love the most.