Count the Ways

December 1, 2020

In the New York Times best-selling Henry's People We Meet on Vacation, vivacious travel writer Poppy once vacationed yearly with straight-and-narrow best friend Alex, but their last vacation left their relationship in shreds, and Poppy must talk him into one last trip so they can right the balance. In Jenoff's The Woman with the Blue Star, 18-year-old Sadie Gault is hiding in the sewers after the liquidation of the Krak�w ghetto when she forms a tentative friendship with wealthy Polish girl Ella Stepanek (500,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Just Last Night, the latest from the internationally best-selling McFarlane (If I Never Met You), Eve is still crushing on Ed, among their group of four forever best friends, but her questions about what might have been are interrupted by a catastrophe upending all their lives (50,000-copy first printing). Best-selling novelist/memoirist Maynard returns with Count the Ways, which tracks the fate of a family when the parents break up after an accident that permanently injures the youngest child (50,000-copy first printing). Oakley follows up You Were There Too, a LibraryReads pick whose film rights have been sold, with The Invisible Husband of Frick Island, featuring an ambitious young journalist disgruntled about having to cover a fundraiser on Chesapeake Bay's Frick Island until he discovers the townsfolk pretending to hear and see a man who's not there--all for the sake of his widow. Inspired by a real-life individual, Phillips's The Family Law stars a crusading young family lawyer in early 1980s Alabama whose efforts to help women escape abusive marriages brings death threats that eventually endanger a teenager she has befriended. In Shipman's latest, terminally ill Emily wants the lifelong friends she made at summer camp in 1985 to scatter her ashes at the camp, and The Clover Girls find another life-affirming request from her when they oblige (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). No plot details yet on Weiner's That Summer, but the setting is sunstruck Cape Cod, and there's a 350,000-copy first printing. Weir's Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife, tells the story of twice-widowed Katharine, cornered into marriage with Henry VIII and shamelessly used by an old lover after Henry's death.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2021
Since she was once a homeless orphan, Eleanor's chaotic, joyous family and farm mean everything to her. And then.... How much pain and loss can one person take? How can you end up evicted from a world you built yourself? How can doing the right thing backfire totally? In her 10th novel, Maynard vividly imagines a scenario that answers these questions with hard-won wisdom, patiently leading her protagonist and her readers through the valley of bitterness and isolation to what lies on the other side. When she is just 16, Eleanor's alcoholic, self-involved parents are killed in a car crash. At boarding school, she comforts herself by creating picture books about an orphan who travels the world; these sell to a publisher, and by the time she's a sophomore in college, she has enough money to drop out, drive into the countryside, and buy a farm. "It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived," she thinks. If you build it, they will come--right? Nonetheless, several years go by in solitude, and not without additional tragedy. At last, she meets Cam, the handsome, redheaded woodworker who will give her three children they both adore. But even as Eleanor revels in motherhood with every cell of her being, her glue gun, and her pie pan, she knows fate cannot be trusted. "If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn't survive," she tells her husband. Could loving her children too much be her downfall? she worries. When an accident that her husband could have prevented changes their lives, she will find out. She will find out how, in your grief, you can drive away the people you love most. And she will find out, slowly, what you can do about that. The novel bites off a lot--a Brett Kavanaugh-inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career--and manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily. Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with.

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May 1, 2021
What Eleanor, orphaned at 15, wants most are a home and family. In 1973, only 20 and already the author and illustrator of a popular children's book series, Eleanor buys a used Toyota and hits the road. In rural New Hampshire, she buys a long-abandoned farmhouse shaded by a mighty ash with a bubbling brook and waterfall nearby. A few years later, she has a husband, craftsman Cam, and three children. Eleanor builds a bucolic life that includes an annual spring ritual of making cork people and setting them in paper boats afloat on the fast-flowing stream. The family races along the banks, watching the progress of their creations. Some cork people make it through a dark culvert, and others don't, a poignant embodiment of Eleanor's biggest fear, that she might lose one of her children. Maynard (Under the Influence, 2016) portrays Eleanor, her family, and their precious home through three tumultuous American decades, setting their story amidst seminal events and to a soundtrack featuring the music of each era. Sensitively plumbing the complexity of human emotions, of love and forgiveness, she draws readers into a deep, aching attachment to her characters, creating an ultimately hopeful tale just right for this moment.

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