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RABBIT HEART

One of our recommended books is Rabbit Heart by Kristine S. Ervin

For readers of My Dark Places and The Fact of a Body, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman’s search for identity alongside her family’s decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother.

Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.

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THE BOY LOST IN THE MAZE

From the UK Children’s Laureate comes a spellbinding YA novel in verse blending the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur with the quest of a modern-day teen in search of his father.

Theo, a seventeen-year-old London schoolboy with a single mother, is desperate to track down the father who left them, whom he scarcely remembers. At school he discovers Greek mythology and the ancient story of Theseus, a fatherless son driven on a similar search. As Theo focuses on Theseus in a series of poems he composes, it becomes clear the two journeys echo each other in uncanny ways.

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THE TREE DOCTOR

A startling, erotic novel about the need to balance care for others with care for one’s self.
When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother’s garden–convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle–and the dormant cherry tree within it.

Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband,

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The INHERITANCE

One of our recommended books is The Inheritance by Joanna Goodman

From the bestselling author of The Home for Unwanted Girls and The Forgotten Daughter comes a compulsively readable mother-daughter story in which two women who share a difficult past must come to together to claim the future they deserve.

Arden Moore enjoyed an affluent life thanks to her husband’s high-paying job. But a year after his death, the 36-year-old is a grieving single mother deeply in debt and living paycheck to paycheck with her three children. Then an unexpected call from a well-known estate lawyer in New York offers a glimmer of hope. It is the beginning of a complex legal journey that could mean the difference between a life of abject poverty and unthinkable wealth thanks to her father,

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THE DIVORCEES

Getting a divorce in the 1950s looked very different from today. Unhappiness not enough of a cause for divorce, Reno, Nevada offered a safe haven for women to live temporarily to obtain residency and file for divorce. In The Divorcees, a debut historical fiction novel, Lois meets a group of other women staying at The Golden Yarrow, one of many divorce ranches. The women spend their days exploring outside, relaxing poolside, and drinking at casinos in the evenings. But everyone is not who they appear, and what exactly is the price a woman must pay for freedom?

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SLOW NOODLES

One of our recommended books is Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot’s genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother’s kitchen.

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house,

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