The Center of Your Community
Me & Emma / Elizabeth Flock (2005 fiction, F Flock)
Eight-year-old Carrie Parker and her little sister, tired of living in an abusive environment, concoct a plan to run away, but their escape is thwarted by a shocking revelation that will change their lives.
Secrets of a charmed life / Susan Meissner (2015 fiction, F Meissner)
An elderly Oxford woman reminisces about her childhood during World War II, during which she was evacuated from London during the Blitz and was separated from her sister.
Lillian Boxfish takes a walk : a novel / Kathleen Rooney (2017 fiction, F Rooney)
Embarking on a walk across Manhattan on New Year’s Eve in 1984, eighty-five-year-old Lillian Boxfish recalls her long and eventful life, which included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America, whose career was cut short by marriage and loss.
Everything you want me to be : a novel / Mindy Mejia (2017 suspense, F Mejia)
When a civic-minded high-school senior is found murdered on the opening night of the school play, town sheriff and family friend Del Goodman discovers unsettling truths about the victim’s mesmerizing nature and the secrets that led to her death.
The signature of all things / Elizabeth Gilbert (2013 fiction, F Gilbert)
Traces the multi-generational saga of the Whittaker family, whose progenitor makes a fortune in the quinine trade before his daughter, a gifted botanist, researches the mysteries of evolution while falling in love with an artist.
Wilde Lake : a novel / Laura Lippman (2016 suspense, F Lippman)
Seeking to establish herself during a first case against a mentally ill drifter accused of murder, newly elected state’s attorney Lu Brant struggles through painful memories about a mysterious death that overshadowed her family.
Prep : a novel / Curtis Sittenfeld (2005 fiction, F Sittenfeld)
During the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves behind her close-knit, middle-class Indiana family to enroll in an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts, becoming a shrewd observer of, and eventually a participant in, their rituals and customs.
Maine : a novel / J. Courtney Sullivan (2011 fiction, F Sullivan)
Descending on a family beach house won in a bet years earlier, three generations of women gradually impart difficult respective secrets including a pregnancy, a terrible crush and a deeply held resentment for past misdeeds.
The vacationers / Emma Straub (2014 fiction, F Straub)
Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter’s high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.
Vinegar girl : The taming of the shrew retold / Anne Tyler (2016 fiction, F Tyler)
A modern retelling of “The Taming of the Shrew” follows the experiences of a preschool teacher who alienates others by speaking her mind and who is expected by her eccentric father to marry his assistant to prevent the young man’s deportation.