Animal Farm is a novella about rebellion where all the animals of the farm rebel from their human owner and take over the farm. But afterwards, the same animals become like their owner. The pigs, who are considered the “bosses”, take control, change the rules and treat the other animals as inferior, just like humans do. With this story, Orwell wants to show how power can be abused and how inequality persists. This book gives you a “reality check” on politics and gives a clear and powerful message about how power can be easily corrupted, manipulated and abused.
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12/10/2025
This big, beautifully-written book follows two couples through the decades from WWII to Vietnam. The story creates a genuine feel for middle-America during those eras and covers serendipitous meetings, closely-hidden personal secrets, and how they weave misunderstandings into family lore. It covers tradition and the breaking of tradition, mediums and belief, childhood friendships, and what it means to be parents, partners, and friends through life's trials. A wonderful, warm, and thoughtful novel.
Publisher description:
In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.
Omar El Akkad writes with a strong sense of moral clarity about the fight to maintain one's humanity in the face of state-sanctioned violence. His background as a writer shines through each meticulously crafted sentence. The blend of memoir, journalism, and call to action gives the reader a sense of urgency to do what's right when it counts. This book is upsetting, yes, but also moving. It gives the courage to find hope amid so much loss.
Publisher's Description:
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.
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Hilo native Jasmin 'Iolani Hakes spins a multigenerational story of a Hawaiian family fighting to keep their traditions alive through the discipline and sacrifice of hula dancing. When family secrets are exposed, everything the Naupaka family has built is in danger of being swept away by the rising tide of colonialism. A beautifully written book that explores the connections between culture, hula, family, land, and what it means to be truly Hawaiian.
Publisher's description:
Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there's a lot she doesn't understand. She's never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history. In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to live up to her name and solidify her place within her family legacy. But in order to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition, she will have to turn her back on everything she had ever been taught, and maybe even lose the very thing she was fighting for. Told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival, Hula is a spellbinding debut that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten kingdom that still exists in the heart of its people.
12/03/2025
This book was my introduction to Toews' work and I'm hooked. Her memoir is a response (or non-response) to the prompt "Why do I write?" It is powerful, exquisitely detailed, and takes you on a journey through loss and tragedy with lots of humor. I also learned a lot about wind. You must read it for yourself! For anyone who has lost someone close to them and is working through it...
Publisher description:
Why do you write? the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, 'A Truce That Is Not Peace' explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane -- this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
12/01/2025
A very cozy read with light, unintentional time travel. If you love T.J. Klune, Sarah Beth Durst, or Alice Hoffman, you'll love The In-Between Bookstore. Reading this feels like a great big hug and a warm blanket, with a cup of tea, brewed perfectly, on the side.
Publisher's Description:
A very cozy read with light, unintentional time travel. If you love T.J. Klune, Sarah Beth Durst, or Alice Hoffman, you'll love The In-Between Bookstore. Reading this feels like a great big hug and a warm blanket, with a cup of tea, brewed perfectly, on the side.
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11/29/2025
I have loved everything Megan Miranda writes, but this one has been my favorite by far. Miranda really nails the small town with secrets vibe every single time and this is no exception. Following a girl, now woman, who survived a freak storm during childhood, you get to discover with her just how deep some lies go.
Publisher's description:
As a child, Arden Maynor was swept away while sleepwalking during a terrifying rainstorm. Found alive days later clinging to a storm drain, the girl from Widow Hills was a living miracle. Arden's mother wrote a book. Now a young woman living hundreds of miles away, Arden goes by Olivia. With the twentieth anniversary of her rescue approaching, the media will inevitably renew its interest in Arden. Then Olivia begins sleepwalking again. One night she jolts awake in her yard-- and at her feet is the corpse of a man she knows from her previous life.
11/24/2025
Marcellous, the giant octopus, builds a special relationship with Tova, the aquarium cleaner, which helps Tova to unravel a surprising discovery of meeting her grandson. This is an easy and joyful reading, and you are going to love it. Marcellous' smart human-like behavior, the unheard conversations, and internal thoughts of Marcellus and Tova offer some clues about the plot.
Publisher’s description:
After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her 18-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over 30 years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors --- until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.
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Mamie Fish, last seen on The Gilded Age, was a grande dame of New York and Newport society who flaunted conventions and opened up the stuffy 400 of Mrs. Astor. Learn more about how America evolved from the Puritans who didn't celebrate Christmas to a society of the well-to-do willing to spend their wealth to purchase their way into titled families in Europe. Fish set the pace in fashion, parties, and tweaking expectations of who women should be (and not heard).
Publisher's description:
From the author of Madame Restell and Get Well Soon, a biography of Mamie Fish that explores how women used parties and social gatherings to gain power and prestige. Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames "Mamie" and "The Fun-Maker," threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you were a member of New York high society in the Peak Age of Innocence Era, you simply had to be on Mamie Fish's guest list. Mamie Fish understood that people didn't just need the formality of prior generations - they needed wit and whimsy. Make no mistake, however: Mamie Fish's story is about so much more than partying. In Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, readers will learn all about how Fish and her friends shaped the line of history, exerting their influence on business, politics, family relationships, and social change through elaborate social gatherings. In a time when women couldn't even own property, let alone run for office, if women wanted any of the things men got outside the home - glory, money, attention, social networking, leadership roles - they had to do it by throwing a decadent soiree or chairing a cotillion. To ensure people would hear and remember what she had to say, Mamie Fish lived her whole life at Volume 10, becoming famous not by playing the part of a saintly helpmeet, but by letting her demanding, bitchy, hilarious, dramatic freak flag fly. It's time to let modern readers in on the fun, the fabulousness, and the absolute ferocity that is Ms. Stuyvesant Fish - and her inimitable legacy.
Publisher's description:
Blue Sargent comes from a family of psychics. Only, she has never had the same clairvoyant abilities they had and has always felt too ordinary within the magic that surrounded her. Enter Gansey, a rich student from Aglionby, the town's all-boys private school teeming with wealth, privilege, and trouble. Blue's always made it a point to stay away from its students, the Raven Boys. But when Gansey asks her to join him and three other Raven Boys on his quest to find a long-forgotten Welsh king rumored to be sleeping beneath the mountains of their quiet Virginia town, Blue doesn't hesitate. She jumps at the chance to finally be a part of something real and full of magic, a world she was born into yet one that always stood just out of reach. Soon enough, she's swept into a strange and shifting world woven into theirs, one far more dangerous than anything they could have dreamt up.
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