Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Weekly Winners in the Summer Reading Challenge - Winners in Weeks 2 through 6 of the "Take Your Chances in the Library" summer reading program at Crawfordsville Library are (2) Alissa L., Cheryl M., and Tanya H.; (3) Jane W., Margaret L. and Cathy M.; (4) Joyce B., Charlotte D., and Mark A., (5) Bev S., Krystal N. and Kristol V., and (6) Rhonda N., Karen L., and Dee B..

Come visit special places where new stories are set. First, come to the Amish town of Sugarcreek, Ohio where Shelley Gray offers two stories within that society called "Winter's Awakening" and "Spring's Renewal". Over in Charm, Ohio an Amish widow caregiver finds romance in Wanda Brunstetter's "Lydia's Charm". In the Red Bud Indian Reservation in 1904 South Dakota, a Christian helps to heal an epidemic in Bethany House's "A Heart for Home" by Lauraine Snelling. The plot of "Bitter in the Mouth" by Monique Truong begins in the 1970s in North Carolina when a young girl is cruelly labeled naughty by her grandmother, so even when she grows into a New York lawyer she knows her past is scary; later she has to return to her roots and face being connected and disconnected at the same time.

"Beneath the Lion's Gaze" by Maaza Mengiste takes us to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974 on the eve of revolution when a family works for freedom against almost all odds. "How to Read the Air" by Dinaw Mengestu captures two generations, an Ethiopian family traveling from Peoria to Nashville searching for a new identity as an American couple, then the son's desire 30 years later to repeat his parents' adventure. "The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht is a family legend in a Balkan country mending from years of conflict where a young doctor encounters public and private secrets, which she unravels through reminiscences of her grandfather’s stories. "The Informationist" is Steven Taylor's thriller about an informant helping clients learn to face dangerous men in lawless central Africa; later a billionaire hires that informant to find his daughter who vanished in Africa.

Nancy Pickard's "The Scent of Rain and Lightning" forces a family in Kansas to deal with the return of a man who murdered their head of house. The clever "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell takes on a Florida Everglades' gator-wrestling theme park that is about to "go under" because of a competitor called the World of Darkness.

In Patrick McManus' eyes, a western lawman uses cunning and guile on the ladies, so he uses that technique for his cases when he's led into a haunted swamp to catch a mass murderer in "The Huckleberry Murders". American history is treated personally in the novel "Parrot & Olivier in America" by Peter Carey. The funny story is an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville who was a child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution, and the life of a motherless son of an itinerant English printer who's a spy for the marquis. A political thriller about terrorists, Supreme Court personnel and the press is "The Confirmation" by Ralph Reed. The deep woods of Hungary and the streets of New York figure in the tale of government cover-ups while one man searches for truth in "Saint" by Ted Dekker.

Damon Galgut's "In a Strange Room" could be labeled a compelling travelogue-novel, as a young loner travels across the eastern hemisphere with adventurous episodes in a life on the road. Monica Ali's "Untold Story" is the imagined creation of Princess Diana's life at fifty in 2011, had she not perished at 37 years old. An "unselfish, helpful" woman's life is changed in "South of Superior" by Ellen Airgood, when she moves to a hardscrabble town on the southern edge of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where there's joy in simple things, and a tradition of caring for each other.