Before you begin reviewing the books below,

I hope you know that I don’t read all the books I recommend.

Each quarter I review what is being published that is new in fiction, non fiction, young adults, and graphics.

I use to read everything but it became impossible to read 30 plus books every three months and keep up with work, family and life. The list is composed of the books I have read and the ones I want to read if I have the time.

Lastly, I have added a new feature to my seasonal book lists. Each quarter I will highlight one or two books that I have read (might not be recently published) and is a GREAT READ!

Thank you for all of your years of interest and support.

Tracy   aka “Busy Tracy”

Remember: Survive & Thrive!

Season Pick (An Oldie)

The Posionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.

The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband’s part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father’s intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories Amazon& Book Browse

Another excellent book by Kingsolver is Demon Copperhead ** Please see her new book in Fiction: Partita

Fiction

A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee

A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life. The Week,8/29/26 p22 & Amazon

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children―Bo, DH, and Mido―find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California―where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice―for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers―is a kind of prayer28

Cool Machine: Book 3 of Harlem Trilogy by Colson Whitehead

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind. 1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth. Amazon & BookBrowse

Dey by Edwidge Danticat

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami. When she hears gunfire while at a shopping mall, she takes shelter in a nearby restaurant, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners. Once she’s safely home, Magnolia keeps this traumatic event from everyone. But given her life back, she begins to see everything clearly: her extraordinary bond with her daughter, Zoë; her nearly broken relationship with Zoë’s father; the challenges of her mentally troubled mother, whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself; and her father’s affair with a woman who has borne him a child. While struggling through the labyrinth of her past, Magnolia must also come to terms with the losses sustained that life-altering day, and nearly every day by her parents and sibling in Haiti.

Can love or family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart? Which side will prevail for Magnolia? Pulled between these questions, each of which involves a high-stakes choice—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: flitting and shimmering between different worlds.

Taking as its title a Haitian Kreyòl word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance not only of sharing grief but also of inseverable family ties. Brave and striking, Dèy is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with her signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe). BookBrowse & Amazon

Female Life on Planet Earth By Laleh Kadivi

When Heti’s mother, Ana, dies, she leaves behind a spotless legacy: affectionate parent, modern career woman, and life of the party. Heti moves in a daze until her grief is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package containing photographs of Ana as a young woman—robed, standing in front of a burning building, and pointing a gun at a group of sobbing women.

Female Life on Planet Earth follows Heti as she raises teenage daughters, keeps up with client accounts, sits in LA traffic, and prepares to host the traditional anniversary memorial—all while quietly reeling with the violent secrets of the woman she thought she knew. Though the dead can’t answer her questions, the living never seem to shut up. Heti is buoyed as she listens to the women who populate her world: hilarious aunts and cousins, aggressive soccer moms, business associates, dear friends, and total strangers. Inside these surprising, uproarious stories of female life, Heti discovers the selves women hide away, selves defiantly in search of pleasure, autonomy, delight, and connection. Heti begins to understand the complex and contradictory possibilities that exist inside every woman—including her mother, including herself. As the one-year mark of Ana’s death arrives, Heti calls together the women who knew her and asks them: Who was my mother, truly? And who are we?

Told with humor and emotional precision, Female Life on Planet Earth is a celebration of lineage, inheritance, and the boundlessness of women over time and space. BookBrowse

The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband’s return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?

Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates’s short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character’s deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. “Literature is a texture of words,” says Oates of her short fiction, “evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically.” These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return. Bookbub & Amazon

The Memory Bookshop by  Song Yu Jeong

If you’re lost or grieving, you’ll find The Memory Bookshop, where the shelves are endless; the books, strangely familiar; and where memories are bound in pages.

Jiwon’s life has been slowly disintegrating since her mother died. Until one day, caught by a sudden downpour, she stumbles into a mysterious bookstore. Inside, she is met by Manager K and offered no explanation, only a mysterious hourglass and a rare opportunity: to travel back to three chapters of her life.

But returning to the past isn’t without risk. In exchange, Jiwon must give up time in her future.

As she wanders between the shelves, the bookshop humming with memories and regrets, she must ask herself: can the past truly be rewritten? Or does the real magic lie in the life she’s yet to live?

Warm, wise, and full of wonder, The Memory Bookshop is a story about the journey of grief and the power of books to carry us home. Step inside the bookshop… BookBub & Amazon

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime.

Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.

With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art. BookBrowse & Amazon

The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon

Grace O’Malley was born to be a sea captain. But despite her natural skill on the water, Grace learns early that her dreams of a life at the helm are not compatible with the expectations of her noble family. As the only daughter of a powerful chieftain, her role is to secure a strong alliance and bear children. But when she’s sent to foster with a nearby clan, Grace falls for a clever and open-minded second son—a man she cannot have.

Married off against her will to a brutal warrior, Grace performs her duty, all the while gathering followers loyal to her, and consolidating her husband’s power, only to be ousted from his lands. But this betrayal offers Grace the opportunity to return to sea, finally leading clan O’Malley’s mighty fleet. Just as she finds true independence, Queen Elizabeth’s incursions into Ireland grow bolder and Grace must fight to defend her land, her ships, and the people she loves most against the cruel and power-hungry English deputies, who will stop at nothing to check her influence.

Keenly observed and fiercely written, Ariel Lawhon’s new action-packed novel channels the untamed beauty and harsh realities of sixteenth-century Ireland, as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine who rightly became “the Pirate Queen of Ireland.” BookBrowse & Amazon

Plant Lady by Minyoung Kang

Everyone told Yoohee she was foolish to give up her comfortable office job to open a plant shop in a quiet neighborhood of Dosan, South Korea. Nonetheless, she forged ahead, and the shop became an instant success. Customers are drawn at first to the charm of a converted house with its lovingly tended, jungle-like interior, but they keep coming back for Yoohee herself. Fellow young women in particular seem drawn to her calming presence. Soon, they find themselves turning to Yoohee not only for tips on plant care, but to confide in her the anxieties of their day-to-day lives. Invariably, these anxieties center around men; be it Hyunjin’s controlling partner, Minha’s abusive father, Myungha’s sexist coworkers, or Suji’s violent stalker. Fortunately for the women, Yoohee has experienced men like this in her own life. She knows exactly how to deal with them—and the plant shop’s garden provides the perfect spot to bury any evidence.

Throughout the novel, Yoohee’s shop becomes a sanctuary, with plants serving as a metaphor for the women who seek it out. Though often perceived as delicate, fragile, or high-maintenance, Yoohee proves time and again how resilient and adaptable plants can be, and how, given the chance, damaged plants can not only heal, but thrive. Take this example where Yoohee reflects on a beloved tree from her own childhood: “No one bothered to look after it, but somehow it survived every winter to sprout new buds in spring.”

Yoohee’s wish is for the women she meets—those who have had their “light dimmed” by men—to be free to bloom once more, like plants blossoming against the odds: BookBrowse

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell―where she is an unlikely inmate―in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.

In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job―adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.

As she tries and fails to conceal the discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants―the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers―and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . .

This slender, disquieting first novel tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end. NPR & Amazon

San Quentin Exodus by Bill Smoot

His only friend is a pit bull he rescues from dog fighting. On the cusp of college, James commits a crime that results in a prison term of thirty to life.

Allison, a young Indiana girl obsessed with Nancy Drew novels, vows that her life’s mission will be to solve mysteries and help people. Introverted yet daring, Allison moves to Berkeley to teach prep school and volunteers as a tutor at San Quentin. She meets James when he is approaching fifty, learns his story, and after his parole denial, channels Nancy Drew to plan his improbable escape.

San Quentin Exodus is a braided novel about two people whose lives cross in a quest to reset an ill-fated life. It is a story infused with misfortune and pain, but also with hope and a fierce humanity. BookBrowse

The Secret Lives of Murderers by Elizabeth Arnott

A remarkable trio whose lives have been cracked wide open by their husbands’ crimes unite to catch a serial killer in this dazzlingly captivating novel.

Beverley, Elsie, and Margot are not your average housewives. They are all wives of convicted killers. During the sun-drenched summer of 1966, the three women form an unlikely friendship after the discoveries of their husbands’ brutal crimes. With their exes—some of California’s most infamous murderers—dead or behind bars, they are attempting to forge a new future for themselves.

Headstrong Beverley tries compulsively to maintain control of everything around her, all while raising two children. Bookish Elsie fights to make a name for herself in the newsroom, working among men who sneer at her career goals. Glamorous Margot prefers partying to homemaking and devotes all her energy to upholding the appearance that everything is fine—anything to quell the shame from her husband’s deceit.

They know people look at them and think only one thing: How could they not have known what their husbands were doing? How much are they to blame? And yet when a string of local killings hits the news, the three women—underestimated, overlooked, shrewd—decide to get to work. After all, who better to catch a killer than those who have shared their lives and homes with one?

At once a riveting portrayal of shattered trust and a story of gripping suspense, The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives is a testament to the intricacies of women’s lives and how the deep bonds of female friendship can empower, uplift, and lead us to endure. Bookbub & Amazon

Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang

College freshman Lily Chen is off to spend the summer in Taipei at an intensive language program like so many Chinese American students before her, hoping to connect with the culture she inherited but never fully understood. But a promising start quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate is driving her insane, and a reckless trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon has her classmates viciously gossiping. She feels adrift, a foreigner in a country she thought would feel like home.

Then shocking news arrives: Lily’s grandfather has passed away. The loss forces her to grapple with now-unanswerable questions about her family history. As Lily grieves, she’s drawn into a journey of self-discovery—piecing together memories, stories, and silences over a series of hilarious and devastating attempts at connection.

Taipei Story asks: What if the diaspora fantasy of homecoming never comes true? What if learning a language can’t bring you any closer to the people you’re trying to reach? What if you search for your family’s history, but your family doesn’t want to share? What if you wait too long to ask the right questions? As Lily struggles for answers, her summer becomes a poignant search for understanding—of herself, her family, and the meaning of home. Amazon, BookBrowse

Non Fiction

An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln by Lois Romano

A revelatory new biography of one of the most misunderstood and vilified First Ladies in American history: Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln was at the center of politics at a time when society’s expectations for women were rigid and circumscribed. The product of Southern aristocracy, she grew up among an influential clan of politicians and elites who founded Lexington, Kentucky. Mary’s early exposure to the male-dominated world of politics instilled in her a keen political acumen and a fierce ambition. Proclaiming as a child that she was destined to become the wife of a president, she played a crucial role in boosting her husband to greatness.

But her hopes for a triumphant experience at the pinnacle of power were lost to the Civil War and unfathomable family tragedies. Still, Mary persevered. She steadfastly supported the Union war effort, visited encampments, tended to wounded soldiers, and generously donated money and gifts to refugees from slavery. She was an unconventional, larger-than-life character who dressed too ostentatiously, grieved too publicly, suffered a shopping addiction, and seemed unable or unwilling to corral her emotions, her temper, and her opinions. She made enemies—influential men who wrote her story for her, often unfairly. After Lincoln was assassinated, she was all but abandoned by the nation he had given his life to defend and preserve.

Former Washington Post writer and columnist Lois Romano rectifies the tortured legacy of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was failed at nearly every turn in her widowhood—by her family, by her government, by medical professionals ill-equipped to diagnose her mental illness, and finally, by history. Romano draws on hundreds of archives, letters, and memoirs to provide the most complete portrait—of not simply of an inconvenient widow, but of a brilliant and flawed woman, who possessed uncommon tenacity in the face of extraordinary adversity and personal torment, and helped launch one of America’s greatest presidents. Amazon & New Yorker Review Tertulia.com/books

Biological War by Annie Jacobsen

A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.

The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.

Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.

This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval. The Week 8/21/26 p22

The Black Death by Asbridge

In the mid-fourteenth century, a lethal plague struck the medieval world, causing unimaginable suffering and destruction. The Black Death was unquestionably one of history’s defining episodes, yet a critical feature of its progress has often been ignored: the disease was not confined to Europe, but rather affected almost all of the known world, including the Near and Middle East, Byzantium, north Africa and Asia.

Tracing the pandemic’s course across the medieval globe, The Black Death contrasts the experiences of different peoples, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews, charting this catastrophe’s transformative effects on diverse aspects of medieval life. And crucially, Asbridge demonstrates that the plague was often at its most destructive in the Islamic world, where it ultimately played a role in the collapse of the mighty Mamluk Empire.

The Black Death also brings the human drama of this calamitous era to life, evoking the terror and the turmoil that beset cities such as London, Cairo, and Florence. Asbridge reconstructs the lives of the men, women and children who faced the Black Death—from ruling monarchs to peasant farmers—laying bare both the abject horror they endured and the courageous resolve they often demonstrated while striving to survive.

Uncovering a story that speaks to our own age, The Black Death highlights humankind’s capacity for compassion and resilience amidst a global crisis to explain how the medieval world confronted, and ultimately overcame, this shattering pandemic. Amazon

The Butterfly Season by Lea Korsgaard

“The Butterfly Season is an inspiring love letter to the magic of the natural world, in all its beauty and complexity and joy—an unforgettable reminder that wonder awakens the heart.” —Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Combining nature writing, philosophy, myth, science, and sixty-four beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, The Butterfly Season is a luminous account of one woman’s quest to see all sixty-four species of butterflies native to Denmark in a single year. Part field diary, part mythological tapestry, part existential reflection, Lea Korsgaard’s journey unfolds across seasons and geographies, through meadows, marshes, and ancient coastal lands, as she discovers the mysteries and miracles of the natural world.

On the first day of the year, Korsgaard sat at her desk, making a list. It was a typically cold, quiet January day, and the possibility of the new year—of new discoveries and new challenges—reawakened an old dream of hers: to see every Danish butterfly species in one year. At first, the goal felt impossible—Korsgaard knew almost nothing about butterflies—but she persevered, creating a color-coded tracking system that mapped butterfly regions and flight times with meticulous care. As the project developed, what was at first a simple exercise in discovery became an intimate reckoning with transformation and rebirth, the butterfly’s fleeting existence knitting together beginnings, endings, and the life made in between.

The Butterfly Season is perfect for readers of Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton and The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. Book Browse & Amazon

Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks by Benjamin Hale

With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas. Amazon & Lit Hub

The Dangerous Shore: How a Motley Crew of Scientists, Mobsters, Double Agents, Retirees, Volunteer Pilots (and a Boy Scout) Stopped the Invasion of America – NYT Bestselling WWII History by  Sara Vjadic

History books have told us, in the decades following World War II, that Pearl Harbor was the only major attack on the United States’ home front. But this is not the whole truth. In The Dangerous Shore, leading researcher and bestselling author Sara Vladic unveils a much different story, one hidden away in dusty archives and behind press embargoes: Throughout the Second World War, German U-boats presented a very real threat to America’s eastern coastline, destroying ships, landing spies, and planning assaults on cities. With the country’s attention focused on the European and Pacific fronts, the U.S. would have been left undefended, if not for a ragtag bunch of characters who rose to the occasion.

Comprised of misfits, rejects, and outlaws, this motley crew came from unexpected places. Among their ranks was the stalwart Gill Robb Wilson, leader of a barnstorming corps of volunteer civilian pilots; the brilliant Dayton engineer, Joe Desch; and the nearsighted yet “clairvoyant” Kenneth Knowles, commander of the Phantom Fleet, entrusted with ULTRA intelligence.

Meanwhile, the cooperation of Grace Buchanan-Dineen, a self-styled countess and German spy turned double agent, helped the FBI net even more spies. Notorious but all-American mobsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Socks Lanza struck deals with Naval Intelligence and kept watch over critical ports. Together their efforts turned the tide of war at home and saved thousands of American lives.

A thrilling and eye-opening read, The Dangerous Shore leads you through American history like never before. The story is an ode to the bravery, loyalty, and patriotism of our most unsung—and unlikely—heroes. Amazon

The Fallen: the Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence  by Louise Brangan

A haunting and brilliantly researched history which interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland, and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century.

Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons, but also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. Taken together, this system of confinement held over one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States.

The Magdalene Laundries specifically targeted towards women, and the actions that could necessitate a woman’s reform were vast: wearing a short skirt, smoking, defiance, or, most troubling, pregnancy out of wedlock. Women were taken off the street, admitted by their families, or sent by the state when a girl had no family. Once a woman entered the system, it was almost impossible to leave.

In writing this book, Louise Brangan has pulled the curtain back on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled, so could an entire populace. She shares the stories of the girls who were kept there: Eileen, who was born into a Mother and Baby Home; Carmel, who was forced to take a new name when she entered the Laundries; Brigid, so broken by twenty-seven years on the inside of a laundry, who discovered that once she was released she was completely unsuited to life in everyday society. These stories, taken directly from the historical record, restore the dignity of the women who were sent away and recontextualize the decades that the Laundries acted as a de facto carceral system for the women of Ireland.

This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember? Amazon

Home Schooled by Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son’s early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.

In this “stunning debut memoir” (Jenna Bush Hager, The Today Show), Block beautifully reflects on his experiences in both traditional and at-home education systems, delving into:

• The inception of the homeschooling movement and its massive rise throughout America
• Early memories of Block’s mother, and a poignant look into their dysfunctional mother-son story
• Block’s reentry into the public school system, both jarring yet insightful, and the bullying he withstood
• His emotional journey towards forgiveness, love, and hope as he becomes a parent himself

At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s insatiable love. Amazon

How to Rule The World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker

From Theo Baker, winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford’s president, comes a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris.

Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley’s favored teenagers.

Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.

Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, “pre-idea” funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling elite.

At the helm of this business was Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a superstar neuroscientist and wealthy biotech executive. But when Baker joined the student newspaper and started poking around the Stanford president’s record, he discovered never-reported allegations of research misconduct in studies published across two decades bearing Tessier-Lavigne’s name.

Only one month into college and thousands of miles from home, Baker began receiving anonymous letters, going on stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources. High-powered lawyers and public relations teams were hired to attack his reporting. Stanford opened an investigation into its own leader. And by the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president.

This is the incredible journey of a reluctant teenage reporter who uncovered a story that shook the scientific world and became front-page news across the country. It is also an unprecedented inside view of the students learning to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.

How to Rule the World is a shocking, hilarious, and moving debut, showcasing Silicon Valley’s training ground as never before. Amazon

Secret Ingredients to Life: A Memoir of Identity, Appetite and the Hunger for Home  by Susanne Dillingham

Secret Ingredients of Life: A Memoir of Identity, Appetite, and the Hunger for Home is the story of a woman who learns that belonging is built, one choice at a time. Adopted at three days old, Susanne Dillingham grows up loved yet searching, carrying an ache she can’t quite name. Years later, she experiences adoption from the other side as a birth mother, making a decision that will reshape how she understands family, love, and selfhood.

Threaded through the heat of kitchens and the freedom of Italy, Susanne discovers that food is identity, memory, and the language of care when words fail. She transforms that insight into a life of hospitality, building The Tiny Chef from the ground up into a sought-after brand defined by seasonal cooking, wine pairing, and white-glove trust, the invisible structure that lets clients relax and feel held. As her reputation grows, so does the pressure of running a business without losing the soul that made it special.

When a long-awaited search leads to a photo that feels like a mirror and a reunion that changes everything, Susanne must navigate the beautiful, complicated truth that family can be real in more than one direction and that success doesn’t cure hunger; it simply gives you new ways to name it.

Warm, honest, and richly sensory, Secret Ingredients of Life is a memoir about the sweetness and salt of survival, the heat that refines us, and the bravery to become your own home. Amazon

Trash : A Garbageman’s Story by Simon Pare-Poupart

A Montreal garbageman’s sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to “stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears” . . .

This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean.

Paré-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more “respectable” fields, he is still on a truck — out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.

Includes eight black and white photographs of the author on the job.

His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan. Amazon

Trash! — the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada — explains and questions efforts to “clean up” a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else. Bookbub & Amazon

The Vast Enterprise: The New History Of Lewis & Clark by Craig Fehrman

In 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return from their journey—having led the Corps of Discovery across eight thousand miles of rapids, mountains, forests, and ravines—they bring an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled survivalists, underrated scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. While there is truth in those descriptions, there is also distortion.

From one of the most exciting new historians to emerge in the past decade, This Vast Enterprise offers a novel take on the expedition: a gripping narrative that draws on lost documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Craig Fehrman spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries. He came to see that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But here we meet John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains’ hulking barge. We hear from Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men.

Each chapter moves to a different person’s point of view, describing their desires and contradictions. We see Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest—his secret political maneuvers to fund the expedition, revealed here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. We witness the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, completely upending our understanding of Lakota-American diplomacy. York, in his chapters, finds ways to wield power and make choices in an era that didn’t allow him much of either. Clark is not a folksy Kentuckian but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman discovered his college notebook; no previous biographer even realized that he went to college.) Lewis is someone willing to sacrifice everything for his country and his mentor, Jefferson.

In the end, the captains are men who needed help—from Sacajawea, from the Corps, and from each other. Mile after mile, the expedition pushes on through hailstorms and flash floods, frostbite and infections, rattlesnakes and rabid wolves, with the Spanish cavalry in fierce pursuit. Fehrman balances the story’s adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. The result is a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us. Amazon & Bookbub

*https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/top-nonfiction-picks/2026/8

The Wound is Where the Light Enters by Chris Young

The inspiring memoir of a brilliant young man who, sentenced to life in prison, refused to surrender his future―a story so powerful that it transformed even the judge who handed down the sentence.

If our world were more just, Chris Young would have been crossing a stage at college graduation at the age of 22. Instead, he was marched into a maximum-security federal prison, facing life under mandatory drug sentencing laws. Like far too many young Black men from his neighborhood in Clarksville, Tennessee, this was where his story was supposed to end.

But one day in the prison library, a book caught his eye: an encyclopedia. As he began to turn the pages, Chris felt himself transported. Knowledge became a portal. He began to confront the nihilism around him, the trauma of his past, and the cruelty of a system determined to confine him. From the library, his cell, and even solitary confinement, Chris built an education from scratch, studying philosophy, art, anthropology, history, physics, and politics. He learned to analyze the stock market and taught himself how to code without a computer. He trained his mind―and refused to let prison dictate the limits of his imagination. At his sentencing hearing, Chris gave such a moving speech that the judge resigned from his lifetime appointment to the bench and fought to free him.

Started in solitary confinement and finished beyond bars, The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is a powerful meditation on choice, consequence, and human potential, told through the story of a man who was never given a chance―and who fought until, at last, he was. BookBrowse & Amazon

You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters By Rachel Aviv

You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.”

Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives. Amazon

Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder that Inspired the Abolition of Slavery by Siddharth Kara

From the Pulitzer Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives Perfect for fans of David Grann’s The Wager and The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery.

When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship’s captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship’s owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.

The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo?

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic. Amazon

Young Adult

Building 903 by Lois Lowry

In the tradition of her bestselling, award-winning phenomenon, The Giver, Lois Lowry delivers a story about censorship, comfort, complicity, and the radical power of books to open portals and unlock our humanity through our most powerful tool: the imagination.

Twins Tessa and Theo live in a world ruled by a tyrannical leader, where there are no dangers or rebels… or so they’ve been told. In this world, citizens live long lives, and while many hate their leader, they are comfortable and safe. So, when Tessa’s brother disappears, nobody wants to discuss it. But then Miriam, their 135-year-old neighbor bound for the retirement community, slips Tessa a key—not only to her brother’s disappearance, but to the source of all real magic . . . books. As Tessa and her parents begin their search for Theo, Tessa learns that books not only tell us stories—they open portals and unlock our humanity through our most powerful tool: the imagination. Once that truth has been revealed, Tessa won’t be able to rest until she has retrieved her twin and society itself has been transformed.

Two-time Newbery-winner Lois Lowry has crafted a narrative that feels at once prescient and eternal: in this world, the imagination is the revolution. Not only does Building 903 sit in the same resonant space as The Giver Quartet, but it is also a profound addition to Lois’s enduring body of work—and a testament to the strength and value of her voice, vision, and legacy. Amazon & NPR

Thank you for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, BookBrowse,, BookBub,  Lit Hub, NPR, The Week or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com