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MERCI SUÁREZ PLAYS IT COOL

One of our recommended books is Merci Suarez Plays it Cool by Meg Medina

For Merci Suárez, eighth grade means a new haircut, nighttime football games, and an out-of-town overnight field trip. At home, it means more chores and keeping an eye on Lolo as his health worsens. It’s a year filled with more responsibility and independence, but also with opportunities to reinvent herself. Merci has always been fine with not being one of the popular kids like Avery Sanders, who will probably be the soccer captain and is always traveling to fun places and buying new clothes. But then Avery starts talking to Merci more, and not just as a teammate. Does this mean they’re friends?

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CHILDREN OF THE CATASTROPHE

One of our recommended books is Children of the Catastrophe by Sarah Shoemaker

It is 1908 and Smyrna is the most cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean Sea. Though long a part of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna has always been Greek, and its citizens honor the traditions of previous generations. The Demirigis and Melopoulos families are no different, and now Liana Demirigis will wed the only Melopoulos son, Vassili—a marriage arranged by her parents.

After the wedding, Liana and Vassili build an idyllic life for themselves and their children outside of the city, safe from rising political tensions roiling the region and the world. But less than a decade later, the growing divisions between the Greeks and Turks threaten to boil over.

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THE REAL MRS. TOBIAS

One of our recommended books is The Real Mrs. Tobias by Sally Koslow

A sharply funny and big-hearted multi-generational story about the deeply complicated relationships between mothers- and daughters-in-law, told through three women who marry into the same family, a treat for fans of The Nest and Fleischmann Is in Trouble. 

It’s 2015 in New York City, and three women all known as Mrs. Tobias—Veronika, the matriarch, her daughter-in-law Mel, and Mel’s daughter-in-law Birdie—are trying to navigate personal difficulties, some of which are with one another. Veronika and Mel, despite having little in common, are both psychotherapists who are more skilled at helping other people than solving their own problems.

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EMPIRE OF PAIN

One of our recommended books is Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world,

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WHEN YOU GET TO THE OTHER SIDE

One of our recommended books is When You Get to the Other Side by Mariana Osorio Gumá

The morning they left Amatlán in the bed of a pickup truck, in the hours between darkness and daybreak, the world became immense and noisy. Emilia Ventura shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, bringing in the fresh air of her homeland. She wanted to hold onto it. Let it go down into the depths of her soul, wrapped securely in the mist of daybreak.

Twelve-year-old Emilia and fifteen-year-old Gregorio spend their childhood following their tenacious grandmother, Mamá Lochi, through the oak- and jocote-filled mountains of Amatlán, México–gathering herbs for the folk remedies Mamá Lochi makes, listening to her awe-inspiring stories about becoming a curandera,

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THE SKI JUMPERS

One of our recommended books is The Ski Jumpers by Peter Geye

A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless—Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he’s always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights. But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he’s afraid he never will.

In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind,

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