Books I’ve Loved This Year—just in time for Mother’s Day

It’s been a busy winter and early spring so I’m playing catch up with this list of books I’ve enjoyed since December. If you’re looking for a Mother’s Day gift for the mother or grandmother you love or simply want something to satisfy your hunger for a good read, there should be something here for you. These titles aren’t just for women; good books are for everyone. 

A book I adored is How to Read a Book by Monica Wood. It’s the kind-hearted, caring novel everyone needs. The title is somewhat misleading as it isn’t a how-to book. Instead, it’s a delightful novel. Harriet, a widow, volunteers in a prison where she leads a book club. Violet, who’s in the book club, is in prison for killing a woman while driving under the influence. Frank’s wife is the woman Violet killed, and he’s lonely. After serving her sentence, Violet begins working and gains confidence despite her family shunning her. When Harriet, Violet, and Frank connect in a bookstore, our world enlarges. Humor, literature, and fine characters make what could have been sentimental drivel a stellar celebration of friendship, love, and community. It inspired me to reread Spoon River Anthology and consider my own epitaph. Harriet notes that “stories have a ‘meanwhile’—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.” This novel helps us see our own “meanwhile.”GPR, BC (2024)

Families, those we’re born into and those we find, offer a look at parental love. I particularly enjoyed these that were published this year unless otherwise noted:

Elizabeth Berg’s Life: A Love Story is a book I reviewed here in March. It shows how found families have much to offer .

Allegra Goodman’s This is Not About Us is told in interrelated short stories. The Rubinstein sisters and their families have gathered around their youngest sister Jeanne as she’s dying. Older sisters, Sylvia, 78, and Helen, 80, compete with each other by baking for the visiting relatives. After Jeanne’s death, Helen and Sylvia become estranged over an apple cake and their inability to forgive. The heartfelt stories of Sylvia’s son Richard, his divorce, his daughter’s bat mitzvah, both his daughters’ ballet lessons and performances, and his new romance made me yearn for a sequel with their quotidian lives taking center stage. GPR, BC

Bruce Holsinger’s  Culpability follows a family in a self-driving car. Seventeen-year-old Charlie is texting while “driving,” then his sister Alice screams and he grabs the wheel. Their car veers and kills the elderly couple in the next lane. Noah, Charlie’s dad sitting in the passenger seat working on his laptop, wasn’t watching. Genius mother Lorelei was working in the back seat next to Alice who was “talking” with her AI “friend.” Later on vacation, Charlie falls for the daughter of a billionaire and a new crisis arises. The peppering of excerpts from Lorelei’s monograph on the culpability of artificial minds highlights the moral quandaries the characters face. I was riveted by the characters as their lives exploded within me. This would make a great book discussion on the positives and negatives of artificial intelligence. It also offers fascinating thoughts on parental love and sibling rivalry. GPR/R/SN, BC (2025)

Tayari Jones’s Kin is a beautifully written tale of two women who grew up in a small Louisiana town in the 1950s and 60s. Vernice’s father killed her mother then himself when she was a baby. Annie’s young mother left her with her grandmother and ran off to Memphis. The girls, inseparable and as close as sisters, took different paths while continuing their strong relationship. Vernice worked hard in school with the help of her strong, supportive aunt, and she earned a spot at Spelman College where she was welcomed into elite society. Annie went to Memphis in search of her mother with a ragtag crew and led a tough life. It’s a beguiling tale of friendship’s power and the ending brings the meaning of kin home. I adored Vernice. The descriptions of her trials traveling in the Jim Crow South almost undid me. I worried over Annie like she was family. This one will captivate readers. GPR/GS/PP, BC 

Lily King’s Heart the Lover is a beautifully crafted novel that filled me with love and left me in tears during the last pages. While it’s related to King’s previous Writers & Lovers, it stands alone while being enhanced by the connection. Yash is ill and “Jordan,” a woman he loved in college leaves her own son, who’s awaiting a date for brain surgery, to travel to see Yash. The love Yash’s friends have for him is a gorgeous exploration of the power and joy of friendship. Jordan’s love of and connection with her family complicates and adds to the novel’s tenderness. The book renders deep friendship, parental love, grief, romantic love, and marriage in ways that will both bend and mend you. King’s melange of emotions and connections are a tribute to her immense skills and her compassion. G/GPR, BC (2025)

Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief was on the National Book Award short list and was the 2026 Carnegie Medal winner. In just 205 pages, this novel shows how fear, hunger, and death might lead anyone to become a thief when striving to guard loved ones. Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father finally receive their passports so they can escape the heat and scarcity of near-future Kolkata to join her husband in Michigan. Boomba, a thief who knows Ma has a secret, steals her purse containing the documents and their dreams collide. One paragraph encapsulated the book for me: “No, Boomba was no monster. All Boomba was, was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family. Wasn’t that the most ordinary thing in the world?” Moral quandaries make this one for book clubs, but many will find it devastating and depressing despite the extraordinary writing. Have we all become guardians and thieves? G/M/T, BC (2025)

Catherine Newman’s Wreck wrecked me in the best way. I enjoyed Rocky and her family in Sandwich. I adored them in Wreck. Rocky is grieving her mother’s death and her widowed father has moved in as has her daughter Willa. When Rocky deals with a messy dermatology condition and a health scare, she’s at her humorous and poignant best, Newman blends gallows humor with compassion and uncanny wisdom. I didn’t think page-turners could be this profound. I hope to read the last  page of this book weekly to remind myself to live. GPR/S/SF, BC (2025)

Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants, Rachel dies giving birth to Gabriel, an 18 pound baby.  Her 17-year-old son took her to Thomas, the veterinarian, when her labor was troubled, but he couldn’t save her. Rachel wouldn’t name either child’s father so she’d been excommunicated from her Amish community. Her mother Hannah, Thomas, Billy, the local bar owner who sponsors the T-ball team that Gabriel joins, and Trey, a disgraced former football coach who returns to town and sparks Gabriel’s football career, tell the story in strong alternating voices. Gabriel is raised by his strict Amish grandparents and as he continues to grow, he becomes a football phenomenon and eventually reaches almost nine feet in height. Gabriel loves and bonds with animals as he assists Thomas, but his superhuman athletic abilities create temptations on the football field and in professional wrestling for him and those who benefit from his abilities. The novel is a war between evil and goodness expressed through kindness as the mesmerizing characters struggle on what feels like an Old Testament battlefield. It’s spectacular. GPR/M, BC (2025)

Rainbow Rowell’s Cherry Baby is both a romance and a strong character-driven novel. Cherry, her mother, and her sisters are all plus-size women. Cherry recently separated from her husband whose popular comic strip is becoming a movie featuring her image. She begins dating Russ, the mayor’s chief of staff and everyone’s favorite guy who happens to be hot. The sex is steamy and the message of body positivity and self acceptance benefits from the heat. Rowell’s clever repartee makes the characters come alive even when life is hard. The “Gift of the Magi” twist on gluten-free Christmas food demonstrates Rowell’s subtle skills. The book is important in the way it conveys valuing self while being so entertaining the reader falls into the message seamlessly. “If you don’t believe that you deserve good things, how am I supposed to believe that I am a good thing?” I’ve met Rainbow and this book is a reflection of her kindness, brilliance, and humor. It might be as good as Eleanor and Park and that’s saying something. D/GPR, BC

Elizabeth Strout’s, The Things We Never Say comes out tomorrow Tuesday, May 5. Artie, a beloved high school teacher who loves his job, family, and community, is lonely and contemplates suicide, but when he nearly drowns accidentally while sailing, he chooses life. Soon after the accident, his 27-year-old son Rob tells Artie a difficult secret. He can’t decide whether to tell his wife what he knows. Strout ties Artie’s concerns to the current U.S. under Trump when Artie opines that the “country was committing suicide” and it echoes the novel’s title that we’re lonely because there are so many things we never say as we feel no one wants to know them. As always, Strout magnificently captures the inner lives of ordinary people. You can feel Artie and Rob’s love.. GPR, BC 

If your mother likes romance, these two are perfect gifts.

Kimbra Drake’s Where the Heart Meets the Sea embeds the reader on Lyngōr, a tiny, picturesque island off Norway’s coast. Ella plans to sell the seaside home she’s just inherited from her grandmother who raised her from infancy in Colorado after her mother died. She visits Norway for the first time and knows nothing about her mother or the cottage. When she meets Leif, a boat builder, sparks fly. People who might have known her mother shun Ella and incidents threaten her. Debut author Drake shows how Ella’s art makes the natural world real in a romance that beautifully reflects its setting and immerses the reader in it. D/R/SF

Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, Alice and Hayden are competing to tell famed recluse Margaret Ives’s story. This one’s a touch steamier than Henry’s previous novels and that steam expresses how Hayden and Alice fall so deeply in love. The book also builds a nuanced look at the effects of trauma and childhood loss  on the characters and is a great, big, beautiful exploration of parental and romantic love. D/GPR/R (2025)

If your mother likes mysteries and thrillers, Nick Petrie’s The Dark Time, A Peter Ash Novel would be a wonderful gift. Death threats against Katelyn, an investigative journalist, and her 13-year-old daughter alert Peter Ash and his girlfriend June who find a conspiracy that threatens our entire civilization. Peter and June bring in Lewis, the threatening, tough, and capable genius. Petrie’s superb pacing, tension, complex characters, and attention to detail pull off another brilliant adventure. This one will make you think about the challenges of parenthood. Petrie’s characters always make me want to be a better person. CC/GPR

Even if Mom hasn’t read any of William Kent Krueger's previous Cork O’Connor mysteries, she’s sure to love Apostle’s Cove, the 21st in the series. Decades previously when Cork was the new Sheriff of Tamarack County, he was instrumental in the imprisonment of Axel Boshey, an Ojibwe man convicted of killing his white wife. Cork’s son, an attorney, is certain the conviction should be overturned, but Boshey who’d confessed won’t cooperate. Cork’s seven-year-old grandson is sure that the mythical Windigo has a part in the crime. This is one of Krueger’s best. GPR/SF/SN, BC (2025)

Nonfiction

Alice Hoffman editor, The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love. If your mother loves dogs, she needs this book. It elicits all the emotions loving a dog engenders. The lives of the fifteen dogs portrayed are funny, sad, messy, sweet, and outrageous—just like the dogs who fill our lives and tear them asunder. Essays  written by authors including Isabel Allende, Chris Bohjalian, Bonnie Garmus, Jodi Picoult, Elizabeth Strout, and Paul Yoon make their dogs come alive. Savor this one. Put it on your nightstand and read a chapter when you need it. It's a gem, a perfect gift for every dog lover. There is no one best dog in the world; there are as many as our hearts allow. GPR/SF

Roy, Arundhati, Mother Mary Comes to Me is the lyrical memoir of Roy’s life that formed the basis for her 1997 Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things. Mary Roy, known to her students at the school she ran in the hills of eastern India and to her own daughter as Mrs. Roy, inflicted emotional abuse on her daughter while also making her yearn to succeed. In a lesser writer’s hands, the abuse would have been impossible to read, but Roy’s masterful writing and her introspection make the memoir sing. I started reading it then switched to the audio so Roy could tell me her spectacular life story. I felt that she was standing beside me sharing her life. When Roy read the last words, I sobbed and felt her love for her mother despite her faults. If you give this one to your mother, let her know you don’t think she’s Mrs. Roy. G/R/SBP/SN, BC (2025)

Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir celebrates the love immigrant families show by the sacrifices they make to give their children a better life. When Javier was one, his father moved to the U.S. Javier’s mother joined his father when Javier was five. He lived with his grandparents in El Salvador for four years and at age nine he’s traveling alone in a group of adults and children on the way north to the U. S. to live with his parents. Javier tells the story from his own perspective at age nine as he learns to tie his shoes and keep his fears in check. Some of his fellow travelers supply the love and kindness he needs and others don’t. Javier learns to live with all of them. He is an exceptional poet and only a poet could tell this story with the poignancy, truth, and spareness it deserves. I intended to read this when it came out. I’m glad I didn’t because it means more to read it in the current political climate. Yes, it’s emotionally tough, but Javier Zamora makes it beautiful. He also reads the audio version with tender care. Your mother will love it as will you. G/R/SN (2022)

The River You Touch by Chris Dombrowski

 

The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water by Chris Dombrowski is a poetic memoir of parenthood, rivers, and place that’s laced with a magical appreciation for this planet we inhabit. Set primarily in Montana where Dombrowski has long made a living and a life as a fishing guide and teacher, his book is an ode to loving the place we call home. It’s a love song to living “a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet” in a world that’s moving away from nature and toward reliance on screens and devices. 

Dombrowski shares the quotidian details associated with living from paycheck to paycheck, the joys and miseries associated with being a parent, and the need to get out of oneself by going outside onto his beloved rivers or deep in the woods. He teaches us to fully enter Mary Oliver’s charge to “pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it” when he shares his attendance to detail and awe in what he observes every day as he lives life fully on the river and with his family and neighbors. 

He depicts curmudgeon, seventy-five-year-old, “not-so-nimble” poet raconteur Jim Harrison in a drifter on the “beast that is Rock Creek in runoff. Even in average flows, the water’s steep pitch and boulder gardens make for arduous rowing and during high-water events, when deadfalls suddenly loosed from logjams can form new strainers and render previously cleared channels impassable, the River in aptly named a creek can take a boat in its teeth and refuse to let go.” Later, he asks Harrison’s friend Dan, who’d spelled him on the oars, how he’d become such a fine oarsman. “Got good quick,” he deadpanned. “Because I never learned to swim.” It’s Dombrowski’s ability to make seemingly effortless switches from lyrical descriptions to wry one-liners that make this book sing. Seldom does a book so gorgeously penned leave the reader almost whiplashed with changes in tone that keep us intrigued. 

When Dombrowski renders the technicolor scene of his toddler choking on a piece of apple, it brings back the fears and release of every parent particularly in the sentences after “Lily coughs once, gasps, and begins to cry; a loud and comforting cry, like the once just after birth. Good. Cry. Keep crying. Let us know you’re alive.”  

Chris Dombrowski delivers the reader into his world and makes every detail a part of us. He does so when we’re on the river with him: “Slip of an oar blade, squeak of the oar locks. Water lapping at the hull.” He also captures us when we’re sharing bingo hour in Friendship Manor’s dining hall with his maternal grandmother Shirley. He does it again as he brings a bull trout “near enough to note a single roe-colored spot on its flank amongst countless white ones, a single planet, Mars, standing out from a sill of stars.” Chris Dombrowski takes us along on his journey and we’re better for that trek.

Summing it Up: Read The River You Touch to enter a way of living life with attention to every detail. Chris Dombrowski shares his love of life in Montana and in so doing he teaches the reader to love the people in the place they inhabit. His sharing of his journey as a fisherman, poet, teacher, husband, and father is an ebullient invitation into a life well lived. Not since Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It have I read such a powerful love letter to the American West.

Note: I had the privilege of introducing Chris Dombrowski when he read from The River You Touch at the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book and of hearing him on a panel with other esteemed writers. If you have the opportunity, listen to him in person. His wisdom is contagious.

Rating: 5 Stars 

Publication Date: October 11, 2022

Category: Five Stars, Gourmet, Nonfiction, Soul Food, Book Club

Author Website: https://www.cdombrowski.com/ 

What Others are Saying:

Foreword Reviews: https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-river-you-touch/ 

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chris-dombrowski/the-river-you-touch-dombrowski/ 

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/9781639550630 

“In the way a fable points us toward rightness, so The River You Touch leads us to a necessary truth: that deep knowledge and love of a place shapes us in all the ways we will need to survive. With poetry, vulnerability, and crisp storytelling, Dombrowski takes us into a wild, river-thrummed Montana, and into the stormswept territory of marriage and family. It’s a journey with a guide who knows the country at a cellular level, and whose bafflement and wonder renews our own. The magic of the book is that I came away convinced that learning to love a trout, or an autumn snowfall, or a wolf crossing a river, would teach me to love a friend or a partner in pain—and so to love and be connected to all beings. Damn.”

—Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars, The River, and The Guide

“With The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski has established himself at the forefront of American writers of place. This beautiful, clear-eyed, tender memoir is as intimate as a love letter, brimming with wise observations on family, parenthood, home, duty, and passion. The Montana within these pages is wild and rugged, yes. But it is also as gentle as a cold stream running through your fingers or a child sleeping in your arms. I loved this book.”

—Nickolas Butler, bestselling author of Godspeed and Shotgun Lovesongs 

What Kind of Mother?

Mothers come in all shapes and sizes. There are “Hallmark” card mothers who resemble moms in 1950s sit-coms. There are step-mothers who nurture and women without biological children who make a difference in the lives of many children. These books feature unique forms of what our culture calls “mothering.” 

*The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave is a suspense-filled thriller that’s also a careful pondering of trust, marriage, and family allegiance. Hannah and Owen have been married for a year when he disappears and leaves a note saying Protect her. Hannah knows he’s writing about his 16-year-old daughter Bailey whose mother died when she was four. When the FBI and a U.S. Marshall visit her, Hannah learns that Owen wasn’t who she thought he was. She puts herself in danger to try to learn enough to keep herself and Bailey safe. Great twists in a book I could not put down for a minute. GPR, BC (2021)

*Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir  by Ashley C. Day focuses primarily on
Ford’s childhood and young adulthood as she examines how growing up with her father in prison and her mother unable to give unconditional love because of her own trauma had such a profound effect on Ashley’s life. Her grandmother’s influence helps us see how Ashley survived. The writing is brilliant with lines like: “My earliest memories are sunburnt Polaroids, frozen moments gone blurry at the edges and spotted all down the middle. Then, at four, the pictures become clearer as do the voices within them.” Read this memoir! G/GPR, BC (2021)

+Honor by Thrity Umrigar, Smita left India with her family as a young teen and promised herself she’d never return, but when her closest friend and fellow journalist falls ill and can’t tell the story of Meena, a Hindu woman attacked by her family for marrying a Muslim man, Smita feels compelled to return to write the story. Meena and her daughter Abru captured my heart with the horrors of their lives plus the way the treatment of women and anyone a group deems “other” is beautifully, but tragically, told. I can’t think of another author who consistently makes readers bear witness to those treated as less than human as well as Umrigar does and also did in her magnum opus The Space Between Us. This novel will break your heart in a good way, GPR/SN, BC

*Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Doyle was a best-selling Christian author known for her bravery and openness in sharing her marital and substance-abuse struggles when she announced that she’d fallen in love with soccer star Abby Wambach. Read her story for sentences like “Being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything.” Her insights on control and trusting our instincts feel right because she presents them with courage and honesty. She also shows that a woman can’t be a good parent if she isn’t true to herself. GPR/SF, BC (2021)

*Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara is a compelling and insightful mystery wrapped in a historical fiction novel set primarily in 1944 Chicago. I lived within two blocks of the intersection noted in the title in the 1970s and had never heard of a Japanese-American community there. Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from an internment camp in Manzanar, CA, so they follow Aki’s sister Rose to Chicago where she’s killed by a subway train the night before they arrive. When officials say Rose killed herself, Aki can’t believe it could be true, so she investigates and learns of sinister plots and bigotry. I’m hoping for a sequel to this Edgar Award-winning author’s latest that embeds you in the story. GPR/PP/SN, BC (2021) Note: I just learned from the author that there will be a sequel. Evergreen will come out in August, 2023. 

+Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is especially timely after the recently leaked SCOTUS draft on abortion. This novel takes place primarily in 1973 Montgomery, AL, where Civil, a newly graduated Black nurse, works in a federally funded clinic serving poor Black women and girls. When Civil learns that she’s to administer unapproved birth control shots to 11 and 13-year-old girls, she tries to intervene but doesn’t act quickly enough to prevent the girls’ sterilization. The novel also looks at Civil in 2016 when she’s near the end of her career as an OB-GYN who can’t stop thinking about the past despite all she’s done for women and girls. It’s a page-turner that Brit Bennett’s and Tayari Jones’ fans will enjoy. Read it to learn about forced sterilization and horrific medical treatments done to Black women and to grieve what we’ve allowed. GS/PP/SN, BC

Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner

The title of Dawn Turner’s exquisite Three Girls from Bronzeville sets the stage for the reader. We immediately know that we’ll meet three girls and most of us from Chicago can picture those girls in Bronzeville, a section of the city south of downtown where the Black migration established a distinct community. For those who don’t know about Bronzeville, Turner shares that it was the home of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, cardiac surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, Louie Armstrong, and Ida B. Wells. 

Turner embeds the reader into 1970s Bronzeville when she and the other two girls were young—showing the reader a place that redlining and disinvestment kept economically challenged despite its desirable location. She also shows us the region in earlier times when her mother, aunt, and grandmother were also three girls from Bronzeville. This is both a chronicle of the community and a compelling character study of three unique girls growing up in it. What sets this book apart from other memoirs set in disenfranchised places is Turner’s ability to place the reader in her life and that of the other two girls. Turner’s detailed observations coupled with her open-hearted sharing of her own story make the book both intimate and genuine. 

The opening lines establish the connection with the author: 

“I often think about my sister and my best friend. Not every minute. Not even every day. I mostly think about them when I am experiencing something I would have wanted to share. Some moment that would allow us to tug on a line, thin as a filament, that begins “Remember when . . .” and draws a seemingly ever-present past nearer.” 

When the book begins, we see Dawn Turner’s younger sister Kim following nine-year-old Dawn and her new best friend Debra. Both their families have recently moved into a privately owned apartment complex that’s just a chain-link fence away from the Ida B. Wells Homes, a deteriorating public housing project. The girls are inseparable and we get to know them as they go to school and play together every day afterward. That we know these little girls so well, makes watching the different paths they follow real to us. When Dawn is admitted to Hyde Park High School where she also takes classes at the University of Chicago, we can see that she may be leaving the other girls behind. 

Most descriptions of the book will tell you that Kim died at age 24 and Debra was addicted to drugs and incarcerated while Dawn became a successful journalist, novelist, and Nieman Fellow. Those are facts. Three Girls from Bronzeville invites the reader into the truth beyond the facts.

It’s more important for readers to know that this book is what it tells us it is: “a story of second chances. Who gets them, who doesn’t, who makes the most of them.” Read Three Girls from Bronzeville to feel what getting or not getting second chances can mean to both the community at large and to those who do or don’t get them.

Summing it Up: This memoir of growing up on the south side of Chicago shows the power of believing in second chances and forgiveness. It reads like a compelling novel especially when the author reconnects with her imprisoned friend Debra and examines her own life. It combines the author’s meticulous reporting skills with her desire to find the truth. Rarely does a memoir capture the characters in the writer’s life as well as Turner does in Three Girls from Bronzeville. Read this poignant, powerful, inspiring memoir and select it for your book club to ponder.

Appearances: Dawn Turner will open the Printers Row Lit Fest in a conversation about Three Girls from Bronzeville at 10 a.m. Sept. 11 in Chicago’s South Loop. https://printersrowlitfest.org/

Dawn Turner will also participate in the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book on September 25. She will appear in two panel discussions: “Subverting Stereotypes'' at 10:30 a.m. and “Reclaiming a Life” at 3:30 p.m. FYI: I’ll be moderating a session titled “Making the Midwest Universal'' at 9:00 a.m. Festival registration is waitlisted at this time.

A Note: If you love this memoir as I did, you might want to read a spectacular novel that’s also set in Bronzeville and other areas of Chicago’s south side. Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West is a testament to friendship, secrets, and family.

Rating: 5 stars 

Category: Five Stars, Grandma’s Pot Roast, Nonfiction, Soul Food, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication Date: September 7, 2021

About the Author: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Dawn-Turner/148064544

Interview with the Author: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-dawn-turner-three-girls-bronzeville-20210903-4vyxdlk6tvbsvj7cjfts4xu4ka-story.html

Read an Excerpt: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Three-Girls-from-Bronzeville/Dawn-Turner/9781982107703

What Others Are Saying:

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dawn-turner/three-girls-from-bronzeville/

Library Journal: https://www.libraryjournal.com/?reviewDetail=three-girls-from-bronzeville-a-uniquely-american-memoir-of-race-fate-and-sisterhood-2118398

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/books/review/dawn-turner-three-girls-from-bronzeville.html

Publishers Weekly: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-982107-70-3

A Palette for Love and Murder by Saralyn Richard

Saralyn Richard writes murder mysteries with a twist. A Palette for Love and Murder, like the novels of my favorite mystery writer, Louise Penny, emphasizes finding the good behind the evil. Penny cites Leonard Cohen’s words “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The first pages of A Palette for Love and Murder with their emphasis on the inner life of Detective Oliver Parrott and his wife show that this will be a novel that looks for light even in the midst of horrific acts of evil. 

Most mysteries don’t open with lines like these:

"Marriage had turned out to be more. More than taking vows and sipping champagne. More than a romantic cruise to exotic islands. More than sleeping in the warmth of a lover’s embrace. Tonight, Detective Oliver Parrott had another two a.m. wake-up call, but not the kind from the West Brandywine Police Station. His first thought had been of the stolen paintings he was investigating, but the punch in the kidneys had come from Parrott’s own true love.

            “No-o-oh, oh, no,” Tonya yelled, as she thrashed about in the bed next to him.”

Later after trying to console and help Tonya, Oliver suggests that Tonya voice her fears and she responds, “Some very bad things happened when I was in Afghanistan, Ollie.” Her fingers drew a pattern onto his bare chest. “Some things I could never tell you about.”

Oliver Parrott might wish he could spend his days helping his wife Tonya, a former Navy helicopter pilot, overcome her demons, but just as he did in Richard’s first novel, Murder in the One Percent, Oliver needs to solve a case. He’s a detective in a very wealthy, rural area, the Brandywine Valley, and the residents there expect crimes to be solved quickly. When paintings by nationally known local painter, Blake Allmond, are stolen, Parrott must be careful as he tries to determine what kind of person would steal art that would be almost impossible to sell.

As clues begin to emerge, Allmond is found violently murdered in his apartment in New York City. Blake Allmond’s life hid several dark secrets that might have an impact on why he died and on whether the art theft was connected to his death. Oliver Parrott has the inside track on finding the murderer, but the New York City police have little use for a small-town detective.

The pace of this mystery never lets up, yet the depth of the characters remains a clear focus. The fact that Oliver is an African-American working in a largely white, wealthy community is expertly plumbed yet is never used stereotypically or to make points. Oliver Parrott is a good, caring man readers will love following. Richard’s first novel was a delightful dive into evil among the privileged and powerful. In A Palette for Love and Murder, Richard’s prose is more nuanced, her characters are more complex, and Detective Parrott faces bigger challenges, yet her emphasis is still on telling a captivating story.

Summing it Up: Don’t take my word for it, William Kent Krueger, one of today’s finest mystery writers, calls it a winner and this reader agrees. If you’re looking for a page-turner with complicated characters, challenging ethical questions, and a clever mystery, read A Palette for Love and Murder.

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Fiction, Five Stars, Grandma’s Pot Roast, Chinese Carryout, Soul Food, Book Club

Publication date: February 15, 2020

Author Website: http://www.saralynrichard.com/index.html

Interview with the Author: The Big Thrill: http://www.thebigthrill.org/2020/01/a-palette-for-love-and-murder-by-saralyn-richard/?fbclid=IwAR2cB8w3rijCd3pzRTlrZYULOdGLyVYCgDDd6ZsMK4uvfMdcS8qwqpN67nY

What Others are Saying:

“In the Brandywine Valley, a delicate balance exists between the very wealthy and those who serve them, but the murder of a famous artist threatens this tenuous equilibrium. In her second outing featuring Detective Oliver Parrott, Saralyn Richard offers readers a compelling story of worlds in collision. A Palette For Love and Murder probes more than the mysteries of the art world and the motives for murder. Satisfied readers will discover that it also delicately plumbs the depths of love and the human heart. Another winner for Richard.” -- William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land

“Richard’s writing style is perfect for this genre. Her story lines are detailed and logical but still warm and exciting….Her characters are well developed and endearing….I hope there will be many more books in this series.”--Killer Nashville.com