Title: The Wonder Author: Emma Donoghue Genre: Fiction Publisher: Little, Brown Release Date: September 20, 2016 Format: Hardcover, Audio Pages: 304 Source: Powell's Narrator: Kate Lock Date Read: 09 February 2018 In Emma Donoghue’s latest masterpiece, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, THE WONDER works beautifully on many levels–a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. In Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, set in the mid-1800’s, Nightingale trained, British nurse Lib finds herself in the midlands of Ireland, hired by a local council to watch 11 year old Anna O’Donnell (The Wonder of the title) who, according to the family, has survived…

Title: An Untamed State Author: Roxane Gay Genre: Adventure stories Publisher: Corsair Release Date: January 8, 2015 Format: Kindle + Audio Pages: 384 Source: purchased Mirielle Duval Jameson’s fairy tale life is shattered when, during a visit to Haiti with her American husband and their child, she is kidnapped. Her father, a self-made millionaire, refuses to pay the ransom; and so Mirielle’s captors take their revenge – pushing her beyond what she previously thought possible to endure. In An Untamed State Roxanne Gay takes a hard, unsparing look at race, complicity, privilege, violence against women, and how one woman survives the horror of an abduction. Mireille is Haitian-American, a daughter not of poverty but of wealth and a sheltered life. She admits that she has a fairytale life. That is, until visiting Haiti from their home in Miami, when she is abducted by a group of men seeking a ransom from her father. At first, she wants to believe that such kidnappings are business transactions and that no serious harm will come to her. She desperately wants to believe her father will pay the ransom and she will be returned home. But, the tiny hope that she is wrong about her…

Title: The Underground Railroad Author: Colson Whitehead Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Publisher: Doubleday Books Release Date: August 2, 2016 Format: Kindle Pages: 320 Source: Hartford Public Library From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Colson Whitehead first learned about the Underground Railroad as a schoolboy and visualized it being like the NYC Metro.  That visual is key to his tackling the horrific history of slavery in the US and the attempt of one woman to find freedom in a world that does not see her as human. Whitehead…

Title: Station Eleven Author: Emily St. John Mandel Genre: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Dystopian Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Incorporated Release Date: September 9, 2014 Format: Kindle Pages: 337 Source: purchased 2014 National Book Award Finalist An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven with a more literary slant to her post-apocalyptic world than the bulk of end-of-the-world narratives out there. You won’t find many action-filled scenes of crazed road-warriors or zombies or gun-toting survivalists chasing down the ‘good-guys’.  There are no long explanations of how society collapsed. Instead, the story focuses on a handful of characters, before and after a plague that wipes out most of the world’s population. The major players in the story are all connected, yet they connect through tenuous threads, and there is no big moment where their stories converge. Kirsten a child actor when the end came, now travels with a symphony and acting troop that performs Shakespeare. Shakespeare and his world…

Title: The Queen of the Night Author: Alexander Chee Genre: Fiction Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Release Date: February 2, 2016 Format: Kindle Pages: 561 Source: purchased In the Paris of the Second French Empire, what did it take to rise from courtesan to diva? From a ferociously talented writer who is “the fire, in my opinion. And the light” (Junot Diaz) comes a blazing portrait of a woman who creates her own fate. Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera with every accolade except one: she has never created an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When she is approached with an offer to do just that, it comes with a caveat—the opera must be based on a secret from her past that she has thought long buried. Who has exposed her? In pursuit of answers she’s drawn back into her past. An orphan who left the American frontier in search of her mother’s family in Europe, Lilliet was swept up in the glitzy, gritty world of Paris at the height of Napoleon III’s rule. There she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from maid to Empress Eugenie to debut singer, weaving a complicated web of romance,…

Powerful but painful to read. I spaced the reading out because the imagery of death, of violence, of sorry, almost too perfectly rendered, stuck in my head long after I put the book down.