The Spectacular by Fiona Davis

 One by one, iconic buildings in New York City are intricately woven into historical fiction novels by Fiona Davis: The Spectacular is a June offering focusing on Radio City Music Hall in the 1950s. A second timeline in 1992 revolves around an anniversary celebration bringing a retired dancer back to the music hall.

Marion Brooks has been either taking dancing classes or teaching dance for most of her young life. She goes to an open audition for the Rockettes where she nails a spot for herself at only 19. However, Marion lives at home with a domineering father and her older sister, and both take a dim view of Marion being a dancer when she should really either go for a career in nursing, teaching, or be a secretary until she gets married and has children. Not only has Marion’s relationship with her family become splintered, the city of New York has been plagued for 16 years with the "Big Apple Bomber."

Marion finds being a Rockette to be both grueling and satisfying, calling for the glamourous precision-dancing troupe to perform in four shows a day, three weeks in a row before having one week off. Out of the blue, her sister Judy contacts Marion who invites her to this spectacular art deco theatre to see a show. Unfortunately, the bomber explodes another of his pipe bombs in Judy’s row, right in front of Marion, who gets a good look at the man wearing a trench coat and carrying a black briefcase.

Marion cooperates with the police, frustrated that the bomber is still operating after 16 years. Through another dancer, Marion meets Dr. Peter Griggs who is a medical resident specializing in mental illness. His ability to profile Marion after meeting her leads to him offering up a psychological profile of the bomber to the authorities, who at first dismiss the whole idea until the arrest of a suspect is negated when bombings still occur.

How will Dr. Grigg’s profile of the bomber aid in identifying the criminal? How far will guilt-ridden Marion go to lure the bomber back to Radio City? How will she repair her relationship with her father?

Fiona Davis is a Canadian-born author who began her career in NYC as an actress. Upon earning a master’s at Columbia Journalism School, her writing career has embraced both journalism and fiction. Her previous novels have been about the Barbizon Hotel, The Dakota, Grand Central Terminal, the Chelsea Hotel, the New York Public Library, and the Frick Museum.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting May 28, 2023.

I would like to thank PENGUIN GROUP Dutton and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

 

The Beach Read Queen Elin Hilderbrand is back with The Five-Star Weekend coming out June 13. Nantucket native Hollis Shaw really needs a boost to restart her life after the death of her husband in a car accident.

Modeling her girls’ weekend after an influencer, she invites someone from each stage of her life: Tatum, her best gal pal growing up; Dru-Ann, her college roommate, and Brooke, her friend from her married life in Boston where her husband was a heart surgeon. She adds a newcomer, Gigi, who she has grown close to on social media where Hollis has a very popular blog.

All was not rosy when Matthew died as the couple had been growing apart. In addition, since her blog has become so popular, her daughter Caroline and Matthew have joined forces leaving Hollis out of a lot of activities. To draw Caroline closer, Hollis asks her daughter to film and photograph the weekend.

Hollis is the consummate hostess providing all the meals and activities on her dime, entertaining the “stars” joining her at her summer place in Nantucket. Tatum has a surprise for Hollis in the form of her first love, Jack Finigan, which stirs up romantic feelings for the pair.

The “stars” are not without their own problems: Tatum is concerned about a lump in her breast, Dru-Ann’s career is on the rocks, Brooke is ready to divorce her husband after yet another inappropriate relationship at work, and newcomer Gigi has many secrets that intersect with Hollis’ life. Add to the mix that Tatum and Dru-Ann have been at odds since Hollis’ wedding years ago, and Brooke is insecure about being around Hollis’ longtime  friends.

How can this weekend turn out well with Tatum and Dru-Ann sparring? What can Hollis do to keep Brooke pumped up with all her insecurities? What devastating news does Gigi have that promises to spoil the fresh start Hollis is hoping for? Can an old love heal a broken heart?

Elin Hilderbrand has traveled widely before settling in Nantucket, the setting for many of her books. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the fiction workshop at the University of Iowa, Elin plans to retire in 2024 saying she “deliberately wants to quit while there’s still an appetite for her writing.”

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting May 25, 2023.

I would like to thank Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Radcliffe Ladies' Reading Club by Julia Bryan Thomas

The Radcliffe Ladies' Reading Club, started by Alice Campbell in her Cambridge Bookshop, was attended by four freshmen women in college there--Caroline, Tess, Evie, and Merritt-- starting in the fall of 1955. The book, by Julia Bryan Thomas, will be published June 6.

This is also Alice’s “freshman” year as she has left her husband, traveled from Chicago, and settled into a small store where she can surround herself with books she loves. It is Tess who first enters the bookstore and learns about the club. Recruiting her roommate and two others, they attend the gathering once a month. In the fall, they read and discuss Jane Eyre, A Room of One’s Own, and The Age of Innocence.

The bookstore is not only a safe harbor for Alice but also for the four students who must deal with a society that wants to limit their options to marriage and children. With each book club meeting, the young women and Alice learn a little bit more about each other and life itself.

When a tragedy occurs to one of the “college girls,” she keeps it a secret as she withdraws from socializing with the once cohesive foursome. Before the freshman year is finished, the four young women will find their paths greatly altered from what they expected.

Julia Bryan Thomas’ writing career started with exchanging letters filled with poems and stories with her grandmother.  Her novel For Those Who Are Lost received much attention for its story about the children of Guernsey displaced during World War II. Born and raised in Tulsa, she grew up studying literature. A graduate of Northeastern State University and the Yale Writers’ Workshop, she is married to mystery novelist Will Thomas.

  

My Magnolia Summer by Victoria Benton Frank

 

Writing for readers who have missed books by Dorothea Benton Frank since her passing in 2019 is her daughter Victoria Benton Frank, who has captured all the elements of fun chick lit set in South Carolina Lowcountry. My Magnolia Summer, out June 6, is the story of a family of strong women with the focus on sisters Magnolia and Violet Adams.

Hard to believe Maggie would choose New York City over her roots in Sullivan’s Island, but she’s killing it there on her way to becoming a culinary chef. The days are long and hard as she works her way up in the kitchen career she has chosen, and a phone call from Violet changes everything with the news that their mother and grandmother have been in a serious car accident.

Maggie heads to Sullivan’s Island where she finds her grandmother Rose in a coma and her mother Lily has fallen off the wagon. Equally troubling is that The Magic Lantern, the family-owned restaurant, has deteriorated after having been turned over to Lily and her boyfriend Buster. The pair have changed the menu from homestyle cooking and created a pirate-themed dining room, neither of which is helpful for the future of the business.

The logical solution would be for Maggie to stay and take over the kitchen but that would mean giving up her dream of being a chef in the Big Apple. Her sister Violet has been trying to help out in the restaurant working in the front and with paperwork, but the kitchen has become a frozen food disaster instead of the place where family recipes were prepared to the delight of the customers. In addition, Violet is pregnant with a baby whose father is not ready to make any commitment.

The Adams women have been going strong since great-grandmother Daisy opened the restaurant, and Maggie and Violet are determined to find a solution to all of the situations they face including a hospitalized grandmother, a bitter and broken mother, and a business that has been turned upside down.

Victoria Benton Frank partnered with her mother to create the children’s book Teddy Spaghetti (2020). Frank was born in New York City and raised in Montclair, New Jersey. A graduate of the College of Charleston and the French Culinary Institute, she worked in restaurants in New York before returning to Charleston, South Carolina, with her family.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting May 8, 2023.

I would like to thank William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

 The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende looks at the immigrations system, then in 1938, and now in 2019, in this historical fiction novel due out in June. The effects of war on children, be it the Nazi takeover of Europe or the Civil War in El Salvador, are heart breaking as experienced by Samuel Adler, a 6-year-old Jewish boy during Kristallnacht and 7-year-old Anita Diaz, who is blind and has been parted from her mother at the border as the family separation order goes into effect.

Samuel was born in Vienna, where he lived with his mother and father, until his father disappeared and his mother found a spot for him on the Kindertransport train going from Austria to the United Kingdom. A violin prodigy, Samuel can take only his instrument and a change of clothes as he embarks on a journey eventually landing in the United States.

Eighty years later, Anita and her mother had sought rescue from the danger in El Salvador as they made their way to Nogales, Arizona. Soon her mother is singled out and removed from Anita, who “talks” with her late sister in a magical world in her mind.

Selena Duran, Anita’s case worker, partners with a lawyer from San Francisco, to find a solution for the child. Together they learn there is an unknowing family member in the States who could offer Anita a home, Leticia Cordero, an employee in the home of an aging Samuel Adler, tying the two immigrants together.

Allende’s latest work exemplifies the sacrifices of parents and the resilience of children in a harsh world where only the wind knows their names. The picture she paints with words about the conditions of immigration in America today is hard to imagine with people put into “coolers” and babies and children taken from their parents to dissuade immigrants’ ideas about the conditions in America.

Isabel Allende, bestselling author of The House of the Spirits and A Long Petal of the Sea, has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author.” An exile from Chile herself, Allende infuses her books with realism.

The Secret to Happiness by Suzanne Wood Fisher

 

The Secret to Happiness by Suzanne Woods Fisher, due out in May, is the second volume of the Cape Cod Creamery series. The setting is Cape Cod in an ice cream shop, not in high demand when the story begins in late January.  

 

The mother-daughter duo of Marnie and Dawn Dixon has made a second start with their lives when Marnie purchases an ice cream shop in Chatham. Dawn has the talent for making ice cream, as she had done at home in Needham with her father until he died. Marnie needs to up her game in the ice cream making department so that her daughter can feel secure enough to leave the shop long enough to get married and go on an African safari.

To do this, Marnie attends Penn State’s Ice Cream Short Course for a 3-day workshop for ice cream store owners. She is surprised to see her niece Callie Dixon carrying a tray of ice cream cups because the last she knew, Callie was the executive chef at a convention hotel in Boston. Marnie invites Callie to join her and Dawn in Chatham on the Cape at their ice cream store, where they have an apartment upstairs. Dawn is not particularly happy about the invite as she and Callie were once so competitive which led to a breakdown in their cousinship.

Callie, fired from her dream job when she made a huge mistake in the kitchen causing 200 people at a conference to develop food poisoning, is beside herself, floundering as she attempts to find a new job. She is also keeping a big secret about her health.

Callie’s addition to the store apartment makes for close quarters, and Callie ends up spending too much time wasting away in bed. Dawn, always one to take charge, drags Callie to a community class run by Bruno Bianco, author of a book about attaining happiness. Bruno singles out Callie as a special project as she resists his approaches to turn her thinking inside out.

As Callie tries to start anew, she finds her niche in the ice cream shop that turned coffee-muffin shop to supplement to store’s business in the winter. Dawn has been making the muffins but Callie quickly identifies what makes Dawn’s muffins rubbery and unappealing, and Callie throws them out each night after the others have gone to bed and bakes fresh, delicious muffins from Dawn’s recipes. Baking and working with Bruno are just the beginning steps to putting Callie back together.

While this is the second book in the series with a third soon coming along, this book can be read as a standalone as the author offers quick summaries of events in the first book, The Sweet Life.

Suzanne Woods Fisher’s bread and butter has been in the Christian fiction market with a specialty in Amish fiction and nonfiction. Her interest in the Amish came from a grandfather who was raise Plain. She lives in California with her family and raises puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind.

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

Lucy Hart, whose childhood was one of neglect and loneliness, found her comfort in books, her favorites being the fictional Clock Island series by Jack Masterson. In The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer, coming out at the end of May, readers learn that Lucy and several other children ran away from home hoping to live with the author on his private Clock Island off the coast of Maine.

If this seems far-fetched, in 1987, a 15-year-old boy actually hopped a plane from New York to Florida in hope of living with his favorite author, Piers Anthony. In this debut novel, Lucy, now 26, along with three of the other runaways, are invited to attend a special event on the island.

Lucy is a kindergarten teacher’s aide who longs to adopt a student named Christopher who has been scarred by the overdose death of his mother and father. But in a minimum wage job, Lucy can barely provide for herself, sharing an apartment with roommates from whom she  must borrow a car if she needs to go somewhere.

The Clock Island contest will allow the winner to receive the only copy of Masterson’s latest book in the Clock Island series. Lucy must compete along with three other former runaways to win the rights to this book which would provide enough money for her to give Christopher a proper home. The other runaways have equally important wishes: Dustin’s wish is to pay off his student loans that allowed him to become a doctor, Andre’s wish is to find a kidney for his ailing father, and Melanie’s wish is to keep her independent bookstore afloat.

Masterson along with his lawyer have devised a series of riddles and games each contender must play. The one who earns 10  points will receive the one and only copy of the writer’s new book. While Lucy wins the first round, she soon finds herself neck to neck with the now two contenders as Dustin was dismissed for breaking the rules and being rude to Lucy when she wouldn’t go along with him.

Hugo Reese, the handsome illustrator of the Clock Island books, is on hand to help guide the contenders in their challenges. He has been living on the island for some time as almost a surrogate son of Masterson’s, but he wants to leave the island now and strike out on his own.

Of course, the question is, who will win the coveted new Clock Island book? If Lucy can pull it off, the funds from selling the book rights to a publisher would pay her way to obtaining custody of Christopher, her greatest wish. But what happens if she loses? The contest is more than a game for her. Winning could change her life—and Christopher’s-- completely.

This is definitely the book for fans of Willie Wonka, Dorothy in Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Harry Potter, young adults and grownups alike.

Meg Shaffer is a part-time creative writing instructor and a full-time MFA candidate in TV and Screenwriting at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri. The Wishing Game is her debut novel.