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Robin Glossner
Robin is the adult events coordinator at the Odyssey Bookshop. She was born and raised in Massachusetts, then lived in Central Pennsylvania for 41 years. She recently retired from her job as the development director of the public library in Williamsport PA, after owning and running a kitchen store and cooking school and working in sales for IBM. She moved to South Hadley in July 2021 to be closer to her family and newborn granddaughter. She is an avid reader and working in a bookstore is a dream for her.
Fans of Saturday Night Live will love this delicious romance, set behind the scenes of a weekly comedy sketch show. Sallie is a writer at The Night Owls, single and cynical after one divorce and a history of dating the wrong men. Her friend and former officemate, Danny, is happily in love with a much more attractive celebrity, leading Sallie to coin the Danny Horst Rule: average looking men can date more attractive women, even celebrities, but women rarely if ever get that opportunity. However, when gorgeous, successful singer-songwriter Noah Brewster arrives at TNO to be the host and musical guest, sparks fly between him and Sallie. Weaving in the pandemic, celebrity culture and the press, and family and chosen family, Sittenfeld has created an appealing story you may not be able to put down. I loved it.
Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of Duke Kincaid, the biggest man in the county. Owner of the Emporium and many real estate interests, the Duke runs the small town and the county, settling disputes, and determining how the laws are enforced. Sallie is exiled to be cared for by her Aunt Faye for most of her childhood because of an accident that injures her brother Eddie, but she is called home when Eddie’s mother dies, and becomes once again a part of the family in the Big House. Walls uses the dramatic history around Tudor succession battles following the death of Henry VIII to give her story some extra heft, while winking at the reader. Sallie eventually becomes the leader of the family and finds herself helping the people of the county (and herself) by running their home-still whiskey to markets in big cities during Prohibition. But a feud with a hill family threatens to destroy all she has built, and the pressure to marry nearly derails her. Sallie is a likable, complicated heroine and gradually comes to her own answers about how to live her life and break the chain of lies and secrets that have followed her family for generations. I devoured this novel, thoroughly entertained and engaged.
Bodie Kane, back on the campus of her prep school to teach 2 winter term courses, is compelled to revisit the murder of her classmate Thalia Keith in this masterful novel. Thalia's murder was solved years ago by arresting the Black athletic trainer who had the misfortune of working nearby the night she died. But did he really do it? The murder is still the subject of active online speculation, and Bodie finds herself drawn into that world by her students and her own unanswered questions. Makkai explores themes of class, race, and the abuse of women in the service of this story. She also delves into the high school experience and coming of age, as Bodie realizes that the things she thought were true about herself and others then may not have been true at all.
Old horrors are revisited and old scores settled in this latest Three Pines novel. The reader learns about how Jean-Guy and Gamache met, many years ago, on a case that neither are sure they got exactly right. Meantime, in order to expand Myrna's living space, the villagers take down a brick wall above her shop, and discover a world of curiosities, a copy of a famous painting, and puzzles and clues. Taking down the wall is both a literal and symbolic opening of past crimes and evil. Gamache comes face to face with an enemy he believed vanquished, and must fight to save his family. One of the best yet.
Is it possible to laugh out loud at a novel that chronicles the death of a young mother in hospice? Sounds tricky, but Catherine Newman pulls it off. Ash and Edi are best friends since primary school, and as the novel opens, we learn that Edi's cancer can no longer be treated. Edi is admitted to a hospice facility near the western Massachusetts home of Ash. Ash is a mess for many reasons, only one of which is that she is about to lose her best friend. She is divorced from her husband, the perfectly named Honey, sleeping with too many people, and navigating caring for her teenage daughter and her friend in hospice. This very sad subject becomes life-affirming and beautiful in Newman's capable hands. Loved it.
If you like well-plotted mysteries with a cozy English setting and thoroughly engaging characters, then you will love the Thursday Murder Club series. Set in the retirement village of Coopers Chase, the series features septuagenarian sleuths Elizabeth, a retired MI6 agent; Ron, a former labor union leader; Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist; and Joyce, a former nurse and housewife whose diary entries provide some chapters with different perspective. The four originally met to use their skills to solve cold cases, but somehow, the bodies pile up when the four are investigating. With supporting characters from the police, their pasts, and the crime world, and with wit and humor, these stories are a great escape for the mystery lover who also likes to laugh. Let’s hope there are many more in the pipeline to enjoy!
This sweeping novel follows Damon/Demon as he grows up. His single mother has bad taste in men, and brings home an abusive stepfather. After his mother dies of an overdose, Demon endures nightmarish foster placements, until his football ability lands him a placement with the high school coach. Injuries lead to pain meds, and pain meds lead to addiction. He falls in love with a beautiful, fragile addict, and cannot keep her alive. Told in the first person, the story reaches out and grabs the reader. I often had to put it down as I could not bear one more terrible thing happening to this boy. But Demon's will to survive, his talent for art, and connections he makes help pull him out of addiction and toward perhaps a better life. Kingsolver is unsparing in her writing about opioid addiction and foster care, and yet her love of the people of Appalachia comes through.
It starts with a storm that throws people from Beartown and Hed together in unexpected ways, and ends with a tragedy that leaves no one untouched. Backman wraps up his Beartown trilogy with an emotional wallop. The characters we know and love are back, with new chapters to their stories, and he introduces some new characters to the mix: Matteo, a lonely, bullied boy; Aleksandr, a new member recruited to the A team; Lev, an immigrant businessman with his fingers in a lot of pies; and Hannah and Johnny and their children, a midwife and a fireman thrown into responding to various crises. The story moves toward a satisfying, emotional conclusion. Backman is a favorite author, and this is my favorite of his novels.
Bird, born Noah, lives with his father in Cambridge in a tiny dorm apartment, in a time not unlike our own. His father was a professor of lexicography, now a humble shelver of library books. His mother Margaret, a noted poet, has disappeared. Their society has been through an economic and political crisis, and the Chinese people, and all Asians, are being scapegoated for it. Children are removed from parents deemed unfit to raise them; books are removed from shelves; dissent of any kind is not tolerated.But Margaret's words from a poem, 'our missing hearts,' have come to be a rallying cry for the resistance. Prompted by a cryptic communication from her, Bird goes on a quest to find his mother.
Ng weaves a compelling story that echoes issues in our own time. The power of words and their meanings, and the power of stories to change hearts and minds are central themes. By far my favorite of Ng's books, so far.
It’s London in the 1920s, and everyone seems to be in the mood to party. The novel centers on three strong women whose drive to survive is the engine of the story. Nellie Coker, who owns a string of successful nightclubs, is just being released from a short stay in jail for license violations as the novel opens. Freda Murgatroyd, a teenager, has run away from her home in York with her best friend Florence, seeking fame and fortune on the stage. And Gwendolen Kelling, who has left her home in York and a sedate life as a librarian to help find Freda. Weaving together corruption, gang crime, poverty, bodies in the Thames, and one incorruptible Chief Inspector, Atkinson tells a Dickensian story of Jazz Age London and its underworld that kept me turning the pages.
Back to the 16th century with Maggie O’Farrell, this time in Renaissance Italy. Lucrezia de Medici, the third daughter of a grand duke, is married off to the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso, when her sister, his fiancée, dies suddenly. Alfonso commissions two artists to paint her marriage portrait, but her survival is threatened because she has not yet produced an heir. Based on a true story, O’Farrell gives us an engaging young heroine and a gripping story of her fight to survive.
Billie, Helen, Natalie, and Mary Alice have been assassins working for a top secret agency known as the Museum for 40 years. Sent on a luxurious retirement cruise by the organization, they become aware of a plot to kill them by their long time employers. They must figure out why, and stop the plot, while avoiding the best assassins in the business, their colleagues. It’s so much fun to have smart, funny, and fully capable heroines in their 60s. A great escape.
Carrie Soto is a retired tennis star whose record for Grand Slam wins has surpassed by a younger player. She comes out of retirement for one last shot at the Grand Slam tournaments, aiming to beat that younger player, coached by her father, himself a former professional star. Carrie is fierce and determined, not loved by the tennis press, and perhaps, at 37 past her prime. But her one final season will prove life changing in many ways, and is an unforgettable and unputdownable story, even for someone like me who knows little about professional tennis.
Maria Lagana is a woman determined to make it in the Hollywood of the 1940s. She is an Associate Producer at Mercury Pictures, a third-tier studio struggling between the pressures of the censors and the interest of a Congressional committee in the opinions and activities of her boss, the left-leaning studio head. Maria and her mother have come to LA from Mussolini’s Italy, where her father is imprisoned for his outspoken political beliefs. When America enters the war, Mercury Pictures makes propaganda for the War Department, using the talents of its refugee employees from Europe. Rich with characters ranging from Maria’s Italian immigrant aunts to the exiled Austrian miniaturist working in set design, Mercury Pictures Presents offers a sweeping story of a world at war, an industry coming of age, and one woman’s journey. I thought I had read enough World War II narratives for one lifetime, but Marra has created a story that is entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking.
Fans of The Rosie Project will think they are reading a similar story and be surprised by the direction it takes. When Ethan marries Barb, he thinks his lonely, socially awkward days may be at an end. As they consider starting a family, Barb brings home twin boys to foster. As the global pandemic forces the young family into lockdown, Ethan becomes more and more obsessed with keeping the boys safe, which drives Barb away. But on a post-lockdown father-son bike trip through Italy, designed to bring back the feelings of his and Barb’s honeymoon, Ethan must come to terms with the trauma in his past and the truth about the boys.
A feel good novel about what happens when a woman who is about to turn 40 finds herself time traveling back to her Sweet 16 party. Alice was raised by her single father, who is dying in the present, but simply a writer with some bad habits back in 1996. What would she do differently in her relationship to her father, with her high school crush, with her life-long best friend? Set in a charming Upper West Side version of New York, this book kept me turning pages, and laughing and sighing by turns.
Bloomsbury Books is a century old new and used bookstore, run by a general manager who has 52 rules to follow, including when to serve tea. Vivien, Grace, and new hire Evie are the women who work there, clearly in the minority but determined in 1950 London to set their own course. Not a sequel, but a continuation of the story of at least one of the characters from The Jane Austen Society, the book shop endures changes, and engages with prominent literary characters of the time. Each woman finds herself breaking those rules and growing in unexpected ways. Entertaining and heart-warming.
This is a novel about money: how it is made, what it does to people and their relationships, and what happens when it is lost. It is a novel about a particular time and place, New York in the roaring twenties and the depression. It is the story of a woman whose story is told first by a novelist, then by her husband who seeks to repair his reputation by repairing hers, by his secretary who becomes a detective, trying to know more about this mysterious woman, and finally by her own diary entries. This is a masterful novel.
Set in the near future, where climate change has wreaked havoc with weather and water levels, Vigil Harbor explores the lives of people living in an affluent and mostly sheltered coastal community in Massachusetts. The architect Austin Kepner who builds homes designed to withstand the fury of intense storms; his stepson, Brecht, who has returned to Vigil Harbor after an encounter with eco-terrorism leaves him unable to continue living in New York; the divorced marine biologist who observes and despairs about the changing ocean; the landscaper who creates beauty that can withstand the elements; and his wife Connie, a Vigil Harbor native, all find their lives woven together by an act of terrorism and its repercussions. Absorbing characters and story.
In the early 1960s, Elizabeth Zott has a job as a chemist in a lab in California, but none of her male colleagues take her seriously. But Calvin Evans, a Nobel-prize nominated genius, falls in love with her mind. A few years later, Elizabeth is a single mother struggling to make ends meet, when a chance encounter leads her to television. Cooking is chemistry, and chemistry is life, she declares, and becomes the host of the most popular and revolutionary cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth teaches more than cooking; she is daring her viewers to challenge assumptions about the role of women. If you love quirky characters and extremely intelligent dogs, laugh out loud humor, and giving the patriarchy a run for its money, you'll love this book. A debut novel by an author over 60.
If you ever wondered what it is like to keep chickens, or what happened to the orca from the movie ‘Free Willy,’ if you loved ‘Tiger King’ on Netflix and want to know more about the kind of people who keep wild tigers, you will love this book. Orlean’s prose is full of detail and her curiosity about how we live with animals is prodigious. Every essay is a joy to read.
The title novella in this collection of short fiction envisions a near future, where gangs of violent white supremacists have chased Da’Naisha, her grandmother and her white boyfriend, and a diverse group of neighbors, from their homes in Charlottesville. They seek refuge in Monticello, the historic plantation of Thomas Jefferson. Da’Naisha is a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings and she comes to the mansion having been a summer intern there. The refugees begin to form a community as they learn to survive using what they find in the gift shop and in the gardens and woods. But danger is all around them, and a showdown is inevitable. The five other short stories deal with issues of race, immigration, and family. This is a masterful debut.
In 1158, the seventeen-year-old Marie de France rides out of the forest alone to become the prioress of an abbey in England. She has been sent away from the sparkling court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, because she is a royal bastard, too tall and too ugly too be married off. She finds the nuns starving and sick, the abbey in disrepair and impoverished. Over the course of many years, Marie turns the abbey into a self-sufficient, wealthy female-only community. Memories of her life at court, and her love and admiration for Eleanor, drive her ambition and her need for recognition. Not much is known of Marie; only her poetry remains. But Groff turns her into a mesmerizing figure, and uses her story and the story of the abbey to explore love, community, faith, and chosen family.
Backman starts out by telling us that this is a story about idiots, which is off-putting. But what he means is that it is idiotically difficult being human. On the day before New Year's Eve, a bank robber tries to rob a cashless bank of just enough money to pay rent, then must take shelter from the police in an apartment being shown to seven strangers. Backman uses the situation to explore the nature of love and marriage, the meaning of home, and the events that can push anyone to unexpected actions and new directions.
O'Farrell enters the world of Shakespeare's family, left behind in Stratford, through the eyes of his wife, Agnes. Little is known about Shakespeare's life and probably less about his family life, but we do know he had a daughter and then twins, a boy and a girl, and that the boy, Hamnet, died young, probably of plague. O'Farrell takes us to Tudor England, and uses this event to explore the nature of family, love, and grief, in this powerful, beautiful story.
I rarely read a book that compels me to recommend it to friends; this is one of those rare books. In the depths of the Depression, four orphans on the run from a cruel boarding school take to the river in search of safety and home. Their encounters along the road are by turns dangerous, heart-breaking, and joyous. This novel has been compared to Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. It contains echoes of Homer’s Odyssey, and The Wizard of Oz. Intrigued? Pick it up and read it now!
A middle-class white couple and their two teenage children from Brooklyn rents a house on Long Island for a week’s vacation near the beach. On their second night, there is a knock at the door and the owners, a black couple from Manhattan, arrive, seeking shelter because there is a widespread power outage in the city. Phone service, internet, television, all stop working. Without any information, and with increasing dread, the two families navigate uncertainty and strange natural occurrences. The author uses this setup to explore issues of race, class, and generational differences. A compelling read which provides more questions than answers.
