What to read this December
Adding to Your TBR December 2017. This month has an array of amazing books to choose from. Preorder now so you can read as soon as they release.
What Remains True by Janis Thomas
Expected: 1 December 2017
This has been on my radar for months. It promises dark secrets and fractured family with multiple POVs (point of view).
P.S. Just before publishing this post I read a review on Goodreads that mentioned that the family dog is one of the POVs. I must admit this doesn’t appeal to me. If you have read it please confirm and let me know if it’s worth overlooking this detail.
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From the outside, the Davenports look like any other family living a completely ordinary life—until that devastating day when five-year-old Jonah is killed, and the family is torn apart. As the fury of guilt engulfs them, the Davenports slowly start to unravel, one by one.
Losing her son forces Rachel to withdraw into a frayed, fuzzy reality. Her husband, Sam, tries to remain stoic, but he’s consumed by regret with the choices he’s made. Eden mourns her brother, while desperately fighting to regain a sense of normalcy. And Aunt Ruth, Rachel’s sister, works too hard to care for the family, even as her own personal issues haunt her.
Told from multiple points of view—including Jonah’s—the family struggles to cope with unthinkable loss. But as they face their own dark secrets about that terrible day, they have a choice: to be swallowed up in sadness forever, or begin the raw, arduous ascent back to living – Abstract from Goodreads
The Good Samaritan by John Marrs
Expected: 1 December 2017
This thriller has been on the all of the bookish news sites recently and I can’t wait to get stuck in. So glad its available on Audible! I love being read to and thrillers are all the more exciting on audio.
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She’s a friendly voice on the phone. But can you trust her?
The people who call End of the Line need hope. They need reassurance that life is worth living. But some are unlucky enough to get through to Laura. Laura doesn’t want them to hope. She wants them to die.
Laura hasn’t had it easy: she’s survived sickness and a difficult marriage only to find herself heading for forty, unsettled and angry. She doesn’t love talking to people worse off than she is. She craves it.
But now someone’s on to her—Ryan, whose world falls apart when his pregnant wife ends her life, hand in hand with a stranger. Who was this man, and why did they choose to die together?
The sinister truth is within Ryan’s grasp, but he has no idea of the desperate lengths Laura will go to…
Because the best thing about being a Good Samaritan is that you can get away with murder. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Silver Music Box by Mina Baites & Translated by Alison Layland
Expected: 1 December 2017
As always I am drawn to books about the Second World War. This one is an epic spanning generations.
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A captivating cross-generational novel from German author Mina Baites about a Jewish family divided by World War II and an inheritance with the power to bring them back together.
1914. For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country—a country that would soon turn against his own family.
A half-century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past. With the keepsake is a letter from Lilian’s mother, telling her daughter for the first time that she was adopted. Too young to remember, Lilian was rescued from a Germany in the grips of the Holocaust. Now only she can trace what happened to a family who scattered to the reaches of the world, a family forced to choose between their heritage and their dreams for the future. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Vanishing Season by Joanna Schaffhausen
Expected: 5 December 2017
The Vanishing Season is a psychological thriller / serial killer mystery – just the thing to bring more cheer to the festive season! Seriously though this is on my Christmas wish list.
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Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She’s an officer in sleepy Woodbury, MA, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number seventeen in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived.
When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday—the day she was kidnapped so long ago—Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous. Her superiors dismiss her concerns, but Ellery knows the vanishing season is coming and anyone could be next. She contacts the one man she knows will believe her: the FBI agent who saved her from a killer’s closet all those years ago.
Agent Reed Markham made his name and fame on the back of the Coben case, but his fortunes have since turned. His marriage is in shambles, his bosses think he’s washed up, and worst of all, he blew a major investigation. When Ellery calls him, he can’t help but wonder: sure, he rescued her, but was she ever truly saved? His greatest triumph is Ellery’s waking nightmare, and now both of them are about to be sucked into the past, back to the case that made them…with a killer who can’t let go. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Ice House by Laura Lee Smith
Expected: 5 December 2017
This is not one I would have been drawn immediately, but it promises richly layers characters and the early reviews are very good.
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The Ice House follows the beleaguered MacKinnons as they weather the possible loss of the family business, a serious medical diagnosis, and the slings and arrows of familial discord.
Johnny MacKinnon might be on the verge of losing it all. The ice factory he married into, which he’s run for decades, is facing devastating OSHA fines following a mysterious accident and may have to close. The only hope for Johnny’s livelihood is that someone in the community saw something, but no one seems to be coming forward. He hasn’t spoken to his son Corran back in Scotland since Corran’s heroin addiction finally drove Johnny to the breaking point. And now, after a collapse on the factory floor, it appears Johnny may have a brain tumor. Johnny’s been ordered to take it easy, but in some ways, he thinks, what’s left to lose? This may be his last chance to bridge the gap with Corran–and to have any sort of relationship with the baby granddaughter he’s never met.
Witty and heartbreaking by turns, The Ice House is a vibrant portrait of multifaceted, exquisitely human characters that readers will not soon forget. It firmly establishes Laura Lee Smith as a gifted voice in American fiction. – Abstract from Goodreads
One Station Away by Olaf Olafsson
Expected: 5 December 2017
I have heard very little about this book, but the abstract below sounds intriguing.
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An overlooked pianist who finally receives fraught success after decades of disappointment. An elusive dancer whose untimely death her fiancé is desperate to untangle. A mysterious patient who is comatose after a violent accident.
These are the three women who animate Olaf Olafsson’s brilliantly rendered One Station Away. Magnus, a New York neurologist—son to one, lover to another, and doctor to a third—is the thread that binds these women’s stories together as he navigates relationships defined by compromise and misunderstanding, guilt and forgiveness, and, most of all, by an obsessive attempt to communicate—to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved – Abstract from Goodreads
Us by Curtis Wiklund
Expected: 5 December 2017
This enchanting book of sketches depicting artist Curtis Wiklund‘s love for his wife is a must-have! Curtis manages to capture bottomless emotion and intimacy in each drawing.
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This book of heartwarming sketches reveals the everyday intimate moments that make up a marriage.
Inspired by his wife, artist and wedding photographer Curtis Wiklund sketched a new drawing every day for a year. The result is this collection of adorable illustrations depicting the tender, true moments the couple shares. From winter walks to end-of-day cuddles, inside jokes to impromptu forts, this dreamy art has already captured the hearts of thousands of fans around the world. Now in book form, Us delights as a gift and a keepsake. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Truth Beneath the Lies by Amanda Searcy
Expected: 12 December 2017
There is always a place for thrillers on my TBR
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Fight or Flight.
All Kayla Asher wants to do is run. Run from the government housing complex she calls home. Run from her unstable mother. Run from a desperate job at No Limit Foods. Run to a better, cleaner, safer life. Every day is one day closer to leaving.
All Betsy Hopewell wants to do is survive. Survive the burner phone hidden under her bed. Survive her new rules. Survive a new school with new classmates. Survive being watched. Every minute grants her another moment of life.
But when fate brings Kayla and Betsy together, only one girl will live. – Abstract from Goodreads
Here, There, Everywhere by Julia Durango & Tyler Terrones
Expected: 19 December 2017
Friends, family and first love. This YA (young adult) contemporary has had good early reviews and despite the uninspiring cover this could be a great read. Let me know what you think.
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Zeus would rather be anywhere than here—Buffalo Falls—the tiny town his family moved to at the end of the school year. Having left all his friends back in Chicago and with nothing to look forward to except helping out at his mother’s café and biking around town with his weird little brother, Zeus is pretty sure this is destined to be the worst summer of his life.
But then he meets Rose—funny, beautiful, smart, and an incredible musician.
Zeus can hardly believe that someone like her exists, let alone seems interested in being with him. However, while Zeus is counting down the minutes until he can see her next, Rose is counting down the days until she finds out whether she will be able to leave their small town to pursue her dreams. As the afternoons spent going on local adventures pass into nights discussing their deepest hopes, Zeus knows that he doesn’t have long to convince Rose that what they have is more than a summer fling…if only he’s brave enough to seize the chance. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Last Suppers by Mandy Mikulencak
Expected: 26 December 2017
Debut author Mandy Mikulencak takes us into the prison kitchen where the last meals for death row inmates are prepared in this haunting, mysterious historical fiction book. The Last Suppers has had excellent early reviews so don’t miss it.
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Set in 1950s Louisiana, Mandy Mikulencak’s beautifully written and emotionally moving novel evokes both The Help and Dead Man Walking with the story of an unforgettable woman whose quest to provide meals for death row prisoners leads her into the secrets of her own past.
Many children have grown up in the shadow of Louisiana’s Greenmount State Penitentiary. Most of them—sons and daughters of corrections officers and staff—left the place as soon as they could. Yet Ginny Polk chose to come back to work as a prison cook. She knows the harsh reality of life within those walls—the cries of men being beaten, the lines of shuffling inmates chained together. Yet she has never seen them as monsters, not even the ones sentenced to execution. That’s why, among her duties, Ginny has taken on a special responsibility: preparing their last meals.
Pot roast or red beans and rice, coconut cake with seven-minute frosting or pork neck stew . . . whatever the men ask for Ginny prepares, even meeting with their heartbroken relatives to get each recipe just right. It’s her way of honoring their humanity, showing some compassion in their final hours. The prison board frowns upon the ritual, as does Roscoe Simms, Greenmount’s Warden. Her daddy’s best friend before he was murdered, Roscoe has always watched out for Ginny, and their friendship has evolved into something deep and unexpected. But when Ginny stumbles upon information about the man executed for killing her father, it leads to a series of dark and painful revelations.
Truth, justice, mercy—none of these are as simple as Ginny once believed. And the most shocking crimes may not be the ones committed out of anger or greed, but the sacrifices we make for love. – Abstract from Goodreads
Love, Life, and the List by Kasie West
Expected: 26 December 2017
Kasie West has never failed to deliver thoughtful, fun (but without unnecessary fluff) love stories. This one includes a mental health theme
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Seventeen-year-old Abby Turner’s summer isn’t going the way she’d planned. She has a not-so-secret but definitely unrequited crush on her best friend, Cooper. She hasn’t been able to manage her mother’s growing issues with anxiety. And now she’s been rejected from an art show because her work “has no heart.” So when she gets another opportunity to show her paintings Abby isn’t going to take any chances.
Which is where the list comes in.
Abby gives herself one month to do ten things, ranging from face a fear (#3) to learn a stranger’s story (#5) to fall in love (#8). She knows that if she can complete the list she’ll become the kind of artist she’s always dreamed of being. But as the deadline approaches, Abby realizes that getting through the list isn’t as straightforward as it seems… and that maybe—just maybe—she can’t change her art if she isn’t first willing to change herself. – Abstract from Goodreads
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily by Laura Creedle
Expected: 26 December 2017
Ancient love letters, heartfelt and humorous – sounds good to me!
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When Lily Michaels-Ryan ditches her ADHD meds and lands in detention with Abelard, who has Asperger’s, she’s intrigued—Abelard seems thirty seconds behind, while she feels thirty seconds ahead. It doesn’t hurt that he’s brilliant and beautiful.
When Abelard posts a quote from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise online, their mutual affinity for ancient love letters connects them. The two fall for each other. Hard. But is it enough to bridge their differences in person?
This hilarious, heartbreaking story of human connection between two neurodivergent teens creates characters that will stay with you long after you finish reading. – Abstract from Goodreads
Stephanie@Fairday's
So many wonderful sounding books. I already have The Silver Music Box on my list and hope I get to read it soon. Looks like I have more books to add now. 🙂
Sue @ Crushingcinders
Thank you! Happy reading.
Olivia @ The Candid Cover
I just read a glowing review for The Truth Beneath the Lies and I am really excited about getting back into the thriller genre. That being said, I am also up for some more Kasie West in my life as well. Thanks for sharing these! 🙂
Sue @ Crushingcinders
Thank you! The Truth Beneath the Lies sounds very good.
Rebecca
Nice list. I’ve been trying to moderate my to-read list as it is absolutely out of control! There are so many books I want to read but seems like I will never have time for all of them. Which is a super sad thought!
Rebecca @ The Portsmouth Review
crushingcinders
Me too. My super power would be totally selfish but immortality is the only way I’ll get a grip on my TBR!
Zoe @ Stories on Stage
Love, Life, and the List is definitely on my TBR too! It’s nice to know that we can all rely on Kasie West to deliver a cute, fluffy romance. 🙂 Thanks for sharing and, as always, fabulous post! <3
Sue @ Crushingcinders
We’ve been so lucky this year – it’s her third 2017 book! Happy reading.
ShootingStarsMag
Oh, I hadn’t heard of Us or The Good Samaritan – both very different but ones I’d like to read!!
-Lauren
https://www.shootingstarsmag.net
Sue @ Crushingcinders
I hope they live up to expectations! Happy reading.
Dena @ Batch of Books
Well, now I’m in trouble. I couldn’t just ignore your book list. Nope, I had to click on it and add ALL the books to my TBR. These look and sound so good!
crushingcinders
Aww, thank you! I hope you have lots of time to get stuck into your TBR. Happy reading.
Kimberly Sabatini
They all look good! Excited about Kasie’s for sure. <3