As a gift for the holidays, we have your favorite librarian’s list of top reads for your holiday break. Downtown Milwaukee Campus Librarian Judy Kallberg recommends:
- The Wind Knows My Name: A Novel by Isabel Allende; translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle
(This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.)
- The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland
(Told from the perspectives of four people whose actions changed the course of history, this masterful work of historical fiction takes readers back to 1811 Richmond, Virginia, where, on the night after Christmas, the city’s only theater burned to the ground, tearing apart a community.)
- The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
(In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.)
- Booth: A Novel by Karen Joy Fowler
(In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth–breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one–is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability.)
- The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
(The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true.)
- The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
(Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how?)
- This Tender Land: a novel by William Kent Krueger
(1932, Minnesota: The Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.)
