I don't know about you, but my concentration levels are not what they were two months ago. No matter how riveting the book, I can't help jumping over to the computer every few minutes for the latest on COVID-19. You might notice my picks for spring/summer books are a bit lighter than usual.
I'm intrigued if the author is from the Carolinas, which is what prompted me to settle in with Therese Anne Fowler's "A Good Neighborhood" (St. Martin's. $27.99), which came out in March.
What I hope for in a new book is exactly what Fowler _ who lives in Raleigh _ delivers: a riveting story line and an ending that grabs you by the scruff. Fowler, the author of "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald," creates a desirable, close-in neighborhood in a town somewhere east of Charlotte. Here, in a modest ranch, lives Valerie, a black ecology professor and her 18-year-old, bi-racial, musically-gifted son Xavier.
Next door, on a lot bulldozed of all trees to make way for their McMansion and pool, are newly-rich Brad Whitman, his wife and two daughters _ one of whom is 17-year-old Juniper _ all white. Yes, Xavier and Juniper fall in love.
Yes, that love goes haywire, though how you cannot imagine. Meanwhile, Valerie begins to notice her beloved backyard oak is dying, likely the result of the recent lot clearing next door. The oak is not the only beautiful thing in this tale that will wither from bulldozing _ whether it's delivered via machine or via overheated emotions. Kudos to Fowler for her forthright examination of the complicated intersections of race, class and culture. Don't miss.
I like a writer who can deliver the weather (no one's better than Thomas Hardy on this) of a particular place. And Leah Konen can certainly do fall and winter in Woodstock, N.Y. Konen studied English and journalism at UNC Chapel Hill, and her third novel, "All the Broken People" (Putnam, $26, coming out in July), is set around Woodstock, where 28-year-old Lucy flees with her dog Dusty to escape an abusive boyfriend back in Brooklyn.
She befriends _ no, she falls in love with _ her next door neighbors, a glamorous, somewhat older couple down on their luck. The three hatch a plan to fake the husband's death _ John's an artist and wife Vera believes his paintings will begin to sell if people think he's dead. Trouble is, John is dead, and now Lucy is a prime suspect. Edge of seat? You bet.
I'm sneaking this one in from last summer's list because April 3 was the 100th anniversary of the marriage of the two principals. "Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald," edited by Jackson Bryer and Cathy Barks (Scribner, $22), includes a trove of Zelda's previously unpublished letters, along with those of hers and Scott's we've read in other publications.
In her introduction, Eleanor Lanahan, the couple's granddaughter, says she believes, as did her mother, that Scott and Zelda stayed in love until the day they died. The letters reinforce what we suspected all along _ Zelda's mental illness was not Scott's fault and Scott's alcoholism wasn't Zelda's. These letters show so poignantly how extravagant carelessness can undermine beauty, talent, hopes and dreams.
Any woman reading Julia Alvarez's "Afterlife" (Algonquin, $25.95) who has one or more sisters, will instantly identify with how these four sisters operate in a crisis. (Says the main character Antonia Vega, "They might be one whole person, but not without constant altercations, meltdowns, hurt feelings. It's exhausting.")
The publicity surrounding this book refers to Antonia as an immigrant. But she feels no more immigrant to me than Alvarez herself, who left the Dominican Republic for the United States at age 10 in 1960. Like Alvarez, Antonia is a former teacher now living in the northeast.
Recently widowed and retired, Antonia is all too vulnerable when a pregnant, undocumented teenager appears on her doorstep. Another rollicking read from the author of "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents."
Carson McCullers has long been the darling of Charlotteans because she wrote part of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" in two locations here in 1937-38 � in an upstairs apartment in a house on East Boulevard, now home to the Copper restaurant, and in another, no longer standing, on Central Avenue. So of course I'm all in when I hear about the recent "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers," by Jenn Shapland, who discovers elusive truths about herself as she uncovers new information about McCullers.
While Shapland was interning at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she discovered love letters to McCullers from a Swiss heiress with whom McCullers had had an affair. Bingo! That discovery changed Shapland's life, and soon she could finally call herself a lesbian.
One reviewer praised Shapland's book for being about gaps. That's true. It's also about uncovering the cover-ups, half-truths and white lies that have been told over the years in so many McCullers biographies. Shapland literally moved into McCullers's childhood home in Columbus, Ga., bathed in McCullers' tub, baked in her childhood kitchen, all the while soaking up McCullers in order to absorb her own true self. A truly brilliant approach to biography. Bold, brave and fascinating.
I'm excited about a July memoir _ "Memorial Drive" (Ecco, $27.99) _ by Pulitzer-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, whose stepfather shot and killed her mother in 1985 in Atlanta when Trethewey was 19.
For years, Trethewey has written poems about this devastating event. What new emotions and or understanding will she discover as she turns to prose, and what will we learn from her about the process of turning grief, pain and anguish into poetry?
Some writers simply have a knack for keeping you hooked. South Carolina Lowcountry writer Mary Alice Monroe is one of them.
Now out in paperback "The Summer Guests" (Gallery Books, $16.99), set in Tryon, was inspired when the author herself _ with a "wildly eclectic group of evacuees" _ escaped a hurricane that threatened the Lowcountry for a farm near the Tryon International Equestrian Center.
With a gift for turning fact into fiction, Monroe writes of a Category Five hurricane threatening Florida and the Carolinas and several horse owners/breeders/trainers who flee with their horses to Tryon to bunk at Freehold Farms, the luxurious estate of Grace and Charles Phillips.
Did I say none of the guests knows each other at the outset? Monroe packs in the drama: A man whose spirit returns when, at last, he gets back on a horse. A dashing Olympic medalist who follows his heart. An overbearing mother who learns to let go. It's all here, including divine-sounding meals and stolen kisses in the horse barn. No, this is not a candidate for the Man Booker Prize. Just a darn good read. Monroe's latest will be out this month � "On Ocean Boulevard" (Gallery Books, $26.99).
For years, I turned up my nose at thrillers. Now I enjoy being hooked. "The Girl from Widow Hills" (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) is the latest from the prolific Megan Miranda of Huntersville. Here, a 6-year-old girl sleepwalks into a rain storm, is swept away in a flash flood and trapped in the pipes for three days before being found clinging to the grate.
Her rescue is so dramatic and highly publicized, she changes her name before she's off to college. But here she is, years later, working in North Carolina, and she sleep walks again. This time she wakes to find a dead man at her feet and blood on her hands. Kirkus says, "This is Miranda's best book yet."
Two more for suckers like me who like stories set in small Carolinas towns. Spartanburg's Susan Beckham Zurenda gives us the spring novel, "Bells for Eli" (Mercer, $25), set in fictional Green Branch, S.C., in the 1960s and '70s. It's a tale of first cousins _ a boy and a girl _ and their devotion and forbidden love. Sandra Conroy calls it "a stunning debut."
And Bessemer City native Renea Winchester's "Outbound Train" (Firefly, $26.99), set in 1976, a story about mothers and daughters, heartache and healing, with pitch perfect dialogue and enough courage to keep you turning the pages. Barbara Parker wrestles with demons every night, and every morning at 5:30, she wakes to the train's whistle before heading out to the "blue jean plant." Layoffs. A missing daughter. An essential novel for these unsettled times.
