Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2022 - Fiction with Character Name
- Mahogany S.
- Friday, November 11, 2022
Collection
Check out one of these titles and fulfill the #BroaderBookshelf 2022 Reading Challenge prompt "read a book with the character's name in the title".
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2022 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
Published in 2015
Sent to America at age nine with nothing but an old guitar, Frankie Presto achieves success on the mid-twentieth-century music scene before becoming overburdened by his ability to affect people's futures through his music.
Queenie
A Novel
Published in 2019
"Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places . . . including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, 'What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?' -- all of the questions today's woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her." -- Provided by publisher.
The Death of Vivek Oji
Published in 2020
"A tender, potent, and compulsively readable novel of a Nigerian-Indian family and the deeply held secret that tests their traditions and bonds"-- Provided by publisher.
The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano
Published in 2021
"An emotional novel about motherhood--about a woman who has never thought she wanted to become a mother, and how she does or does not decide to go ahead and have a child"-- Provided by publisher.
Edie Richter is Not Alone
A Novel
Published in 2021
"Funny, acerbic Edie Richter is moving with her husband from San Francisco to Perth, Australia. She leaves behind a sister and mother still mourning the recent death of her father. Before the move, Edie and her husband were content, if socially awkward - given her disinclination for small talk. In Perth, Edie finds herself in a remarkably isolated yet verdant corner of the world, but Edie has a secret: she committed an unthinkable act that she can barely admit to herself. In some ways, the landscape mirrors her own complicated inner life, and rather than escaping her past, Edie is increasingly forced to confront what she's done. Everybody, from the wildlife to her new neighbors, is keen to engage, and Edie does her best to start fresh. But her relationship with her husband is fraying, and the beautiful memories of her father are heartbreaking, and impossible to stop. Something, in the end, has to give."-- Provided by publisher.
The Last Story of Mina Lee
Published in 2020
"Margot Lee's mother isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown and finds her mother dead under suspicious circumstances. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the facts of Mina's life as a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother"--Amazon.
Mina
Published in 2018
Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She's also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her MP3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. But her nonstop frenzy never lets her do the one thing that might change her tragic fate: open up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn't talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina's brother, whom she's developing a serious crush on. And Crystal's starting to lose her grip.
Babbitt
Published in 1989
George E. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts with other women, and patronizes the less successful. But when his best friend is sent to prison for killing his wife, Babbitt's middle-class complacency is shattered, and he rebels, seeking a more "meaningful" life. His small revolt is quickly defeated, however, by public opinion and his own need for acceptance. Babbitt captures the flavor of America during the economic boom years of the 1920s, and its protagonist has become the symbol of middle-class mediocrity, his name an enduring part of the American lexicon.
The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett
A Novel
Published in 2020
Wanting to organize an assisted death on her own terms, world-weary octogenarian Eudora Honeysett forges an unexpected bond with exuberant ten-year-old Rose, who drags her to tea parties, shopping sprees, and other social excursions.
Betty
Published in 2020
"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty, racism, abuse, and violence--both from outside the family, and also, devastatingly, from within. After years on the road, searching in vain for a better life, the Carpenters return to their hometown of Breathed, Ohio, in northern Appalachia. There, they move into a sprawling wreck of a farmhouse that local legend says is cursed. The townsfolk decide the Carpenters are cursed, too: "My mother gave birth to eight of us," Betty tells us in her frank, wry voice. "More than one would die for no good reason in the prizewinning years of their youth. Some blamed God for taking too few. Others accused the Devil of leaving too many." But Betty is resilient. Her father's inventive stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination and even in the face of tragedy and death, her creativity is irrepressible. Against overwhelming odds, she may be the first member of her family to break the cycle of abuse and trauma--and escape"-- Provided by publisher.
Circe
A Novel
Published in 2018
Follows Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals.
What Alice Forgot
Published in 2012
Suffering an accident that causes her to forget the last ten years of her life, Alice is astonished to discover that she is thirty-nine years old, a mother of three children, and in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from a man she dearly loves.
Delphine Jones Takes a Chance
Published in 2022
"A heartening and life-affirming novel about a single mother learning to make a bigger life, and the power of human connection to grow our worlds"-- Provided by publisher.
The Missing Treasures of Amy Ashton
Published in 2021
A collector of objects, Amy Ashton, who believes it is easier to love things than people, finds her solitary existence interrupted when a new family moves in next door with two young boys--one of whom has a collection of his own.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Published in 2020
Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early eighteenth-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.
My Name is Lucy Barton
A Novel
Published in 2016
After an appendix operation puts her in the hospital, New York writer Lucy Barton reconnects with her estranged mother as the pair reminisce about the past.
Sophie's Choice
Published in 1992
As the fierce lovemaking and fights of Nathan, a paranoiac Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish-Catholic concentration-camp survivor, intensify, Stingo, a writer who lives below them in a cheap rooming house, becomes more and more involved in their lives
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
A Novel
Published in 2020
"A woman whose looks have always defined her, who has spent a lifetime trying to prove that she is allowed to exist in her own sphere, tries to be herself even as multiple men try to categorize and own her"-- Provided by publisher.
Saving Ruby King
Published in 2020
In the South Side of Chicago, a young woman is determined to protect her best friend and a deadly secret that threatens to undermine both of their families.
Rosie Colored Glasses
Published in 2018
Eleven year old Willow's marrow burns with the friction of having to navigate the two homes of her newly divorced parents, when all she truly wants is to be with her mother Rosie. As Willow struggles to make sense of her world of extreme love and extreme loneliness, she learns how sometimes all the love in the world is not enough to save someone, no matter how hard one wishes for it - how the human heart can bend and break, but how it can also heal and is resilient enough to love again. Print run 150,000.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
A Novel
Published in 2014
When his most prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, is stolen, bookstore owner A. J. Fikry begins isolating himself from his friends, family and associates before receiving a mysterious package that compels him to remake his life.
Young Jane Young
A Novel
Published in 2017
"Young Jane Young's heroine is Aviva Grossman, an ambitious Congressional intern in Florida who makes the life-changing mistake of having an affair with her boss who is beloved, admired, successful, and very married and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the Congressman doesn't take the fall, but Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins. She becomes a late night talk show punchline; she is slut shamed, labeled as fat and ugly, and considered a blight on politics in general. How does one go on after this? In Aviva's case, she sees no way out but to change her name and move to a remote town in Maine. She tries to start over as a wedding planner, to be smarter about her life, and to raise her daughter to be strong and confident. But when, at the urging of others, she decides to run for public office herself, that long ago mistake trails her via the Internet like a scarlet A. For in our age, Google guarantees that the past is never, ever, truly past, that everything you've done will live on for everyone to know about for all eternity. And it's only a matter of time until Aviva's daughter, Ruby, finds out who her mother was, and is, and must decide whether she can still respect her. Following three generations of women, plus the wife of the Congressman, YOUNG JANE YOUNG is a sympathetic, smart, funny, and very moving novel about what it means to be a woman of any age. Told in varying voices and emails and even a Choose Your Own Adventure section, it captures not just the mood of our recent highly charged political season, but also the double standards alive and well in every aspect of life for women"-- Provided by publisher.
Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies
A Novel
Published in 2020
"After a major life upheaval on the eve of her 40th birthday, Kate Parker finds herself volunteering at Lauderdale House for Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 97-year-old Cecily Finn. Cecily's tongue is as sharp as her mind but she has lost her spark, simply resigning herself to the Imminent End. Having no patience with Kate's plight, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book with a difference - it's a 1957 cookbook, featuring menus for anything life can throw at "the easily dismayed." So begins an unlikely friendship between two lonely and stubborn souls - one at the end of her life, one stuck in the middle - who discover one big life lesson: never be ashamed to ask for more.."-- Provided by publisher.