All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr 4.5
This New York Times bestseller, about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France, illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another as they try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
What She Left Behind Ellen Marie Wiseman 4.5
Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept 10 years ago. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloguing items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past. Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara's father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care and commits her to the public asylum. As Izzy deals with the challenges of another new beginning, Clara's story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother's violent act? Piecing together Clara's fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices with shocking and unexpected results.
The Whip Karen Kondazian 4.5
The Whip commemorates a true female legend of the Gold Rush era who survives the struggles of joblessness by reinventing herself. Charlotte (Charley) Parkhurst was left in a basket at the door of an orphanage in Massachusetts on a cold day in March 1812. Luckily, lonely Lee Colton, a four-year-old boy, enters the baby's dark room and rocks her to sleep. For four years, the children are inseparable. Management changes at the orphanage result in harsh disciplines that affect the personalities of the two children over the years. Charley is removed from the sewing room, beaten, and escorted to the barn to break her spirit. Her greatest success is caring for the strong-willed horse, Beelzebub. She leaves the orphanage at age 16. Mysterious events lead to a relationship and the birth of a beloved infant, but her joy is short-lived when vigilantes murder her black partner and baby. Charley recognizes one of the men fleeing and vows to kill him. Disguised as a man, she applies for a job as stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo. Extremely skilled with a whip and handling a team of horses, Charley wins a competition and trip to San Francisco to even the score with the nameless vigilante.
I Am China Xiaolu Guo 4.5
In her flat in north London, Iona Kirkpatrick sets to work on a new project translating a collection of letters and diaries by a Chinese musician. With each letter and journal entry, Iona becomes more and more intrigued with the unfolding story of two lovers: Jian, a punk rocker who believes there is no art without political commitment, and Mu, the young woman he loves as fiercely as his ideals. Iona cannot possibly know that Jian is mere miles away in Dover, awaiting the uncertain fate of a political exile. Mu is still in Beijing, writing letters to London and desperately trying to track Jian down. As Iona charts the course of their twenty-year relationship, from its early beginnings at Beijing University to Jian’s defiant march in the Jasmine Revolution, her own empty life takes on an urgent purpose: to bring Jian and Mu together again before it’s too late.
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