Lyn's Staff Picks
Lyn does it all, from bookselling to latte making to book searches. All with the same high-end talent she's known for.
MAY 2022
I stumbled across this book as an ARC and thought" Wow, way cool, Mandel has a new book coming out!" Wait, what? ----it's about a mysterious hotel and a Ponzi scheme? How boring and so not my thing. But. Mandel is a master storyteller who has a singular gift for using language. Vincent's journey from a job in a mysterious hotel to wife of a wealthy New York businessman and ultimately landing as a cook on a container ship is anything but boring
APRIL 2022
Short stories, glimpses into the lives of women emerging from the ruins of war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, 2014. A war that was never really over. We are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous woman: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. Written in short bursts and punctuated by Beloruset's photography, which in their own right are lyrical portraits of survival.You can read Beloruset's current Kyiv blog at Art Forum.
MARCH 2022
Walter Mosley is my favorite mystery writer by far. His Fearless Jones character reflects a humanity and a way of looking at the world that is brutally honest but softened with good hearted humor and empathy. The men in these stories inherit these deep human characteristics from Mosley's writing; they are unlikely heroes: odd, awkward, self defeating, self involved, struggling to move through the world as best they can.
JANUARY 2022
Meet Lute Babcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, rough rider and beaver trapper who becomes one of Michigan's first game wardens. His territory? The Keewanau Peninsula during a time of labor unrest between the unions and mining bosses. As one of the first game wardens Lute confronts sabotage: decapitated deer, poisoned streams, as the mine owners try to starve the striking workers into submission. The explosive and bloody conflict culminates in disaster when a man yells fire at a Christmas party for children and 73 people are crushed or suffocated. One of my all time favorite books!
AUGUST 2021
Often at the most inconvenient moment possible, your kid - tired, hungry beyond reason - just loses it. An it's your job to keep your cool. After all, you're a grownup. Well, here's cold comfort: it could be worse, the kids could spontaneously burst into flames - when angered or upset. Their flareups don't cause injury to themselves, but they can be seriously damaging to people and property. The kids in question, ten year old twins Bessie and Roland Roberts, have reason to be angry or upset. At five, they were pushed, along with their mother, out of their father's ancestral 19th century Tennessee mansion when he found a new wife, Madison, who is young, beautiful, shrewd, and a definite political asset. Now, a few months after the sudden death of their mother, the twins need to be kept safe and under the radar so they don't damage their father's political prospects.
MARCH 2021
On a winter's day, Rosalie returns to her childhood home where she had grown up with her father Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakota people. One morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Rosalie is told she has no relatives and is put into foster care. Now, a widow and mother, Rosalee goes back to her childhood home to search for family and to search for herself. A grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron--women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss.
JANUARY 2021
The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America’s finest, most celebrated novelists. Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, McCarthy tells the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Together with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. And, as time changes all things, an era has been removed from earth when John Wesley returns later in life and the village has been changed by time:
"They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust." The precision of language is what makes McCarthy one of the great American authors.
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NOVEMBER 2020
This new book offers an unflinching examination of race and racism in the United States -- this time in conversations with friends and strangers. This is a stunning work and the pieces are multi genre: incorporating poetry, prose, conversation and art. I enjoy meandering through this book as it I too were in dialogue with the writer.
SEPTEMBER 2020
Whenever I start to feel life pulling just a little to hard, I go to this book. Moving, powerful, insights into nature and time and the relationships within families, growing up. But most of all this book is about our relationship with nature and the beauty all around us.
AUGUST 2020
This is a magical book! Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe. On the surface Perdida and her mother Harriet seem to be ordinary people. Perdida, a school girl; Harriet, a working mom making gingerbread the people of London can take or leave, but it's popular with people in Harriet's home town, including her best friend, Gretel. A take on the fairy story of Hansel and Gretel, this tale takes the reader on a journey to define what is real and what is magic.
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FEBRUARY 2020
JANUARY 2020
January brings gray skies, the after-the-holidays hangover. Evening in Paradise, a collection of short stories is a great antidote to the after the holidays blues when the sky remains gray for days on end. Lucia Berlin takes her readers to the warmth of Mexico and SW Texas to Chile. There you will find beauty in the darkest places, feel the warmth of the sun and the cold, dark desert at night. The stories are short enough to read in a sitting. Berlin's writing is in turns humorous and sad, and devastatingly detailed.
NOVEMBER 2019
This is a book about resilience and redemption, it is about forgiving yourself and immutable choices. The five Dunbar boys are left to bring each other up in a world run by their own rule. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance. And Clay will build a bridge —for his family, for his past, for his greatness, for his sins, for a miracle.
OCTOBER 2019
"What is the worst thing you've ever done?""I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that's ever happened to me....the most dreadful thing."Four old men gather to tell one another stories, each story more frightening than the last. But not as terrifying as the tale of something they did long ago, buried deep in the past. None of them dare talk about the horrifying accident and the beautiful actress. The past cannot remain buried forever and when a mysterious woman arrives nightmares become reality.
SEPTEMBER 2019
In this very realistic, powerful portrayal of addiction, Nico Walker describes the desperation and despair of the never ending loop of using and scoring, and the dreaded hopelessness of being dope-sick. The narrator is a typical middle class kid who can't figure out who he is or what he wants to do with his life. College is party time, and the narrator becomes a low level dealer and eventually drops out of school. Unable to decide which direction to head in a directionless life, he joins the army and is deployed to Iraq. Drugs, particularly heroin help to take the edge off life and he returns a full blown addict. Robbing banks to pay for his and his girlfriend's addiction. Eventually everything unravels.
![House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed]: A Novel By N. Scott Momaday Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/954/909/FC9780062909954.JPG)
AUGUST 2019
What makes a place home? Certainly it's more than familiarity, even more than our relatives and ancestors. How do we know who we are without the backdrop of the familiar? The descriptions of the land and it's inhabitants is exquisite. Abel must learn who is in the modern industrial world when he comes home from war. This is a story about the tragedy and sadness of being separated from culture, not knowing your place in the world, of finding the way back to what is familiar and sacred.
JULY 2019
One of the most overlooked books from last year, and hands down one of the best I've read. Beautifully written, Tin Man is a study of lives and what might have been if circumstances had been different. The story is narrated by two childhood friends: Ellis, artist by nature and "tin man" in real life, banging out dents in car bodies at the pland and Michael, wanderer and writer, still searching for his real life as he is slowly losing his life to AIDS. This is a story of deep friendship, unrequitted love, and the loneliness of being unable to have what you cannot.
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JUNE 2019
What’s better entertainment in the summertime than a good mystery featuring an ex-cop and lots of action? August Snow marks the debut of a new made in Michigan detective, and straight out of Detroit comes a new hero. Ex-cop August returns to his roots in Detroit’s. Mexican town, where he hope to help revitalize his old neighborhood. An old acquaintance asks him to investigate suspicious events at an investment bank, and of course, there are old enemies and old scores to settle.
APRIL 2019
Secrets, lies, and betrayal as well as deep love is at the heart of Yellow Raft in Blue water. Three generations of women, Rayona, the half black daughter of rebellious Christine and Aunt Ida the woman who raised Christine as her own, come together in kinship on a dusty Indian reservation in Montana. Each woman has a distinct section in this novel to tell her story– Rayona, 15, trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs, Christina– who fiercely loves her daughter, yet abandons her, and then there is “Aunt” Ida who raised Christine as her own, and has her own tightly held secret.
JANUARY 2019
Blue Self-Portrait is written as a stream of consciousness; the rhythm mimics Arnold Schoenberg’s compositional in innovations. Don’t be put off by the long sentences and the absence of chapters, this book is easy to follow. The novel takes place during a 90 min. flight from Berlin to Paris. The main character reflects on a relationship she developed with a composer/pianist she met in a Berlin cafe who is also obsessed with Schoenberg’s self-portrait. Shame, self-doubt, denial, the ability to say one thing and then mean another, saying she simply isn’t capable of caring and then wallowing in shame at her forwardness, her thoughtlessness. This book isn’t without humor, but it’s an ironic, looking-backward humor, as the protagonist struggles, as we all do with self doubt.
*This book is published by Transit Books, dedicated to publishing women writers in translation.
NOVEMBER 2018
Saul Indian Horse is forcibly pulled from his family and sent to a residential boarding school where his culture and heritage will be beaten from him. Salvation from his mourning and misery comes in the form of hockey and an encouraging priest. Hockey is beauty and life to Saul and he is better than good at this game. As he makes his way up to the bigger white leagues, anger and alcoholism grip Saul. The only way he can find peace is by confronting his past and telling his story truthfully. Wamagese tells Saul’s story with straightforward compassion and honest prose; from Saul’s grandmother and traditional beginnings to loss and love, eventually admitting that people aren’t always who they seem and what saves you can also undo you.
SEPTEMBER 2018
Circuses invoke mystery and the possibility of adventures. This circus is special: it only comes at night, during specific times of the year and it is held together by two magicians: Celia and Marco. Locked into competition by a secret bet between their mentors, only one can win this competition. A nostalgic love story, suspenseful, and atmospheric, the plot will pull you along and no one can remain neutral.
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JULY 2018
Omakayas lives on Madeline Island off the northern shore of Lake Superior. Erdrich details through seven year old Omakayas (little frog) the daily rituals and routines that define the seasons: sugaring, hunting and curing hides, gathering rice and settling in the snug cabin for the wintertime. Taking place during the westward expansion in the mid 1800s as Omakayas' people are being pushed away from their homes by the "chimookoman", white settlers. There is also the heartbreak of smallpox and the secret that Omakayas learns about herself. This is the first book in the Birchbark series
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MAY 2018
Memorial Day or Decoration Day, as my grandma called this end of spring day, is a few weeks away. Time to commemorate and remember the soldiers who have fought and died in our wars. Claude Wheeler is a young, idealistic restless son of a steadfast Nebraskan farmer. He sees his father's world as crass but Claude can't define his own "ideals". Conflicted as Claude is, he is very much a product of midwestern mores and morals. Discontented at home, he does his duty enlisting and going to France to fight in WWI or the "War to End all Wars", where he finds what he has been searching for all his life.
APRIL 2018
"He was eleven years old that night when, green as he could be about the world, he climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life."
Thus begins Mynah's adventures on the Oronsay. He is seated at the Cat's Table -- the furthest away from the Captain's Table -- but the better to see and observe the other passengers. The Cat's Table is peopled with rag-tag misfits and two boys Mynah's age. Each passenger has a part to play entertaining Mynah and his two friends. There is one most mysterious passenger: the Prisoner, who comes out at night chained to a guard for his exercise and the mysterious guard who shadows him is everywhere and nowhere. For pre-teen boys there is nothing like a mystery to improve the imagination. This book morphs through the childhood of Mynah, and reflects through his teens and into adulthood. True to Ondaatje the writing is spectacular, poetic, hard and real.
APRIL 2019
Secrets, lies, and betrayal as well as deep love is at the heart of Yellow Raft in Blue water. Three generations of women, Rayona, the half black daughter of rebellious Christine and Aunt Ida the woman who raised Christine as her own, come together in kinship on a dusty Indian reservation in Montana. Each woman has a distinct section in this novel to tell her story– Rayona, 15, trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs, Christina– who fiercely loves her daughter, yet abandons her, and then there is “Aunt” Ida who raised Christine as her own, and has her own tightly held secret.
DECEMBER 2020
Truman Capote is truly one of my favorite authors to turn to for the richness of his language. The three stories in this modern library edition all bring with them the nostalgia of holidays past. Even though my holidays past. Even though my holidays were not like Truman's, the stories evoke family and traditions and warm feelings of home. Seven year old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk