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 Ordinary Grace

Wow! This was such a good book.  Written from the point of view of a teenage boy in the 1960s during a summer in which there are five local deaths.  You learn how all the deaths end up being connected but I promise this is not a scary book.  The story focuses mostly on how the deaths impact the local community and specifically the main character’s immediate family.  It reminds you that children often know a lot more about what is going on than adults give them credit for.  If you read any book from this list, I would recommend it be this one.

 Dragon Teeth

It was fun for me to read a book in which most of the setting is in the Black Hills.  This story is about a college man in 1876 who joins a group of students (because of a bet) who will be spending the summer digging up dinosaur bones.  The group is lead by a famous paleontologist who is incredibly secretive about their plans for the summer.  The cause for such secrecy is the intense rivalry the professor has with another paleontologist.  The goal that summer is to dig up as many bones as possible, preferably types of dinosaurs that haven’t been discovered yet.  From gunfights in Deadwood to Indian attacks, this book provides a little history about the Bones Wars in the West.

 The Handmaid’s Tale

I wanted to read the book before I started watching the series. This dystopian novel, like most, is a little creepy because you can see how these events could possibly occur.  After the U.S. government is taken out, a new militant order takes over.  The narrator is one of the society’s Handmaidens.  A Handmaiden’s purpose is to procreate with the high ranking officers whose wives are no longer fertile.  Everyone must adhere to the very strict rules or banishment to the colonies or worse occurs swiftly.  I found the ending came about all of a sudden and left you wanting to know more.

 The Sunshine Sisters

Three sisters, all extremely different, have been brought back together because of their mother’s impending death. Throughout the book, the reader learns how growing up with the same selfish mother has lead to dramatically different results in each sister.  Their mother’s death is sure to either separate the sisters for good or finally create a peace again.

Skip – A Certain Age 

Truthfully, I never even finished the book, I was too bored. The story is about engagements, affairs, etc in the 1920s among the upper-class.  It is told from two women’s points of view with snippets interspersed from a reporter at a criminal trial.  The story moves slowly and the reader figures out what happened too early in the book to care.

Want more good books to read? Check out what I recommended in July.