Plot summary (with spoilers): The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg tells the story of a handful of 58-year-olds who are preparing to attend their 40th high school reunion. Each one is attending for a different reason, which we learn about as the point-of-view shifts from character to character. We discover what the [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): What Happened to Anna K is an updated retelling of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As such, anyone who has read the original already knows how the major plot points play out: Anna, bored with her loveless marriage to a wealthy, older man, has an affair with a younger one. She leaves her [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Tom Wingo is an unhappily married, out-of-work high school English teacher/football coach living in his native South Carolina. One day he finds out that wife Sally has been cheating on him — but he can’t deal with that crisis properly because he has to go off to New York City to [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): The Historian starts out in Amsterdam in 1972, where an unnamed teenaged Narrator finds a strange book in her father Paul’s study. The book is obviously old, and printed on vellum. It has no words on its pages, but does contain an elaborate woodcut of a dragon in the middle. When [...]
Lee Fiora is a freshman at Ault, a prestigious boarding school located an hour away from Massachusetts. Unlike 98% of her classmates who are the scions of wealthy and powerful families, Lee is a scholarship student from South Bend whose father is a mattress salesman and whose mother is a teacher. Though nobody talks about [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): One bleak, wintry day in a rural area of New Hampshire, 12-year-old Nicole “Nicky” Dillon and her father Robert go for their daily snowshoeing trek out in the woods behind their isolated home. This particular trek will prove life-changing, however, as the two come across a newborn baby girl wrapped in [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Liam Pennywell is a 60-year-old teacher who has been forced to retire early when the mediocre private school he works at decides to combine their two fifth-grade classes into one. Liam looks upon the event philosophically–which makes sense since his degree is in philosophy. How he ended up teaching history to [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Set in Mississippi in the early 1960′s, The Help is told from three alternating viewpoints. One narrator is Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a progressive young college grad from an upper middle-class white family who dreams of being a writer. Another narrator is Aibileen, a middle-aged black woman who has been a maid [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Claireece “Precious” Jones is a functionally illiterate 16-year-old girl who is still in junior high school. Though not a good student, Precious finds school to be a refuge of sorts, as whatever she goes through there feels like paradise compared to the physical, verbal, and sexual abuse doled out by mother [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel that takes place in 1946, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Thirty-something Juliet Ashton is a promising author whose first book was a minor success, and who is now being pressured by publisher (and good friend) Sidney [...]