Quick Lit September 2023 Archives

Terrace Story

by Hilary Leichter

From the publisher: "Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?"

Happiness Falls

by Angie Kim

This compulsively readable literary mystery begins when a father vanishes in a D.C. area park—and the only witness to his disappearance is his 14-year-old autistic son, who doesn’t speak and thus lacks the means to verbally communicate with his family about what happened. What begins as a missing persons case quickly develops into an even more ominous investigation. First-person narrator Mia, a college student at home in 2020 due to the pandemic, takes us deep inside the workings of her Korean-American family as she relays all that unfolds during the bewildering three days following her father’s disappearance. Kim incorporates elements of music, numerology, language therapy, and more into this riveting blend of family saga and ticking-clock procedural thriller. You’ll see this on my Best of the Year list.

Blue Hour

by Tiffany Clarke Harrison

From the publisher: "Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be."

Open Throat

by Henry Hoke

From the publisher: "A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call 'ellay.' As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?"

The Foundling

by Ann Leary

The story is set in 1927 at the (fictional) Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, a public institution that removes "unfit" women from society during their childbearing years to prevent them from birthing similarly "unfit" children. (Leary was inspired by her grandmother, who worked at such an institution for a time.) Our narrator is 18-year-old Mary Engle, who takes a job at Nettleton and quickly grows to idolize her boss, a physician, suffragist, community pillar, and unapologetic advocate of eugenics. Engle believes in Nettleton's mission, until she encounters a childhood friend who Mary knows to be bright and kind, and who claims she was wrongly institutionalized simply because her husband wanted to be rid of her. This realization ultimately prompts a crisis of conscience for Mary, but how can she question her powerful boss and the institution she's built? Stirring, timely, and highly listenable, as narrated by Laura Benanti.

Quick Lit September 2023

Terrace Story

Happiness Falls

Blue Hour

Open Throat

The Foundling

Buckle Up!

summer reading starts May 16th