Summer Reading begins on June 1st! If you need ideas for how to spend those long hours at the beach, beside the pool, or on vacation, here are a number of titles you may want to bring along with you.
While planning your summer reading list, take a look at what our MPPL staff is hoping to read this summer!
When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband’s three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?
Now that the ley lines around Cabeswater are awake, magic is swirling around Blue and The Raven boys and Ronan Lynch’s ability to pull objects from his dreams is almost out of control but worst of all, the mysterious Gray Man is stalking the Lynch family, looking for something called the Greywaren.
World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia, and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom. When their paths converge in route to the ship that promises salvation, Joana, Emilia, and Florian find their strength, courage, and trust in one another tested with each step closer toward safety. When tragedy strikes the Wilhelm Gustloff, they must fight for the same thing: survival.
Lyrical and at times melancholic, Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson is a book meant to be slowly savored as each new letter between a widowed Danish professor and a English farmer’s wife reveal more about friendship and the paths that life takes us down.
Ted—a gay, single, struggling writer is stuck: unable to open himself up to intimacy except through the steadfast companionship of Lily, his elderly dachshund. When Lily’s health is compromised, Ted vows to save her by any means necessary. By turns hilarious and poignant, an adventure with spins into magic realism and beautifully evoked truths of loss and longing, Lily and the Octopus reminds us how it feels to love fiercely, how difficult it can be to let go, and how the fight for those we love is the greatest fight of all.
The story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don’t they teach you anything at school?
So says 104-year-old Ona to the 11-year-old boy who’s been sent to help her out every Saturday morning. As he refills the bird feeders and tidies the garden shed, Ona tells him about her long life, from first love to second chances. Soon she’s confessing secrets she has kept hidden for decades.
One Saturday, the boy doesn’t show up. Ona starts to think he’s not so special after all, but then his father arrives on her doorstep, determined to finish his son’s good deed. The boy’s mother is not so far behind. Ona is set to discover that the world can surprise us at any age…
Sadie hasn’t had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she’s been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water. But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie’s entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister’s killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him.
The story of five brothers who bring each other up in a world run by their own rules. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance. At the center of the Dunbar family is Clay, a boy who will build a bridge—for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins, for a miracle. The question is, how far is Clay willing to go? And how much can he overcome?
Monday Charles is missing, and only Claudia seems to notice. Claudia and Monday have always been inseparable—more sisters than friends. So when Monday doesn’t turn up for the first day of school, Claudia’s worried. When she doesn’t show for the second day, or second week, Claudia knows that something is wrong. Now Claudia needs her best—and only—friend more than ever. But Monday’s mother refuses to give Claudia a straight answer, and Monday’s sister April is even less help. No one seems to remember the last time they saw Monday. How can a teenage girl just vanish without anyone noticing that she’s gone?
The Last Time I Saw You
How Not to Die Alone
The Water Museum
David and Goliath
The Churchill Woman
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
With the Fire on High
Other Words for Smoke
The Leavers
Daisy Jones and the Six
City of Girls
The Priory of the Orange Tree
Beneath the Tamarind Tree
The Unbreakables
Witchmark
Middlegame
The Night Diary
A Sorcery of Thorns
The Library Book
The Great Believers
99 Percent Mine
The Lake House
Foolish Hearts
Disappearing Earth
Becoming
Circe
Foundryside
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Where the Crawdads Sing
Fix Her Up
The Identicals
Deep Harbor
Mouthful of Birds
Bowlaway
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors
The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs
The Bride Test
The Farm
Fumbled
The Moment of Lift
The Raven Boys
