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Thanks to WPL’s Fiction Book Group, I was able to read Maggie O’Farrell's most recent novel,

I Hear the Sunspot (2017) is a touching, heartwarming manga about the relationship between two male college students. Kohei, who is hard of hearing and knows he may eventually become deaf, deliberately keeps everyone at arm’s length because he is tired of the insensitive ways people often react to his disability. Taichi, who is struggling to make ends meet, sees Kohei’s ad looking for a notetaker to help him in class and agrees to take the job in exchange for lunch every day.

Little Danny from The Shining is all grown up now. Still haunted though. 

Reading Deacon King Kong reminded me of listening to a rich and soulful jazz composition played by a brilliant ensemble that improvises playfully like nobody's business and in doing so takes my breath away. I won't even try and extend this metaphor.

I loved this new time travel novel from Emily St. John Mandel. Covering a span of several hundred years from 1912 onwards, we are taken to moments in time connected to a mysterious time slip or glitch.

Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco is a book full of thrilling twists. There are the mysteries of the paranormal that are explained as they go through. As it also mentions Italian culture and talks of food with accurate descriptions of them.

This thoughtful poetic writer is applicable for our times, opening the reader to compassion and a system understanding of oppressive systems. Their approach to social activism is inviting and ingenious. 

-Teen Reviewer

In 2021, poet, scholar, and Atlantic Magazine staff writer Clint Smith published his first major work of nonfiction,

A lesser known title in Jane Austen's collection of novels, Mansfield Park is certainly a wild ride and does not disapoint in all that is ridiculous and full of drama. Heroine Fanny Price is born to a poor family with many, many siblings, and is taken in by her aunt and uncle who can afford to give her a proper, respectable upbringing. Her experience in her new home, Mansfield Park, is something to be desired as her family members constantly treat her as their servant, entertainment, and charity case, while they behave in the most selfish, unobservant way possible.

The Sparrow (1996), by Mary Doria Russell, opens in 2059, in the aftermath of a disastrous Jesuit mission to make first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Emilio Sandoz, a priest and linguist who is the only survivor among the mission’s crew, has just returned to Earth physically mutilated and spiritually broken.

If you enjoy poetry, I recommend this collection of classics. There are a variety of long and short poems as well as a plethora of authors and topics. 

-Teen Reviewer

Yes, or dying, would be Metaxas' answer to the title of his book Is Atheism Dead? (2021).