Return to Sender by Stephanie Parente

RETURN TO SENDER by Stephanie Parente is a debut novel which succeeds and surprises on many fronts. While mainly a rom com, it explores aspects of identity, friendship, and grief, offering humorous sidenotes and road trip adventure with appealing characters. The most endearing is fourteen-year-old Phoebe who has recently lost her father and is living with her twenty-six-year-old sister, Violet, a teacher. Parente is described as “passionate about writing messy characters falling in love,” and she begins the story with a rebellious Phoebe opening and reading a stranger’s love letter. That leads to their finding and convincing Dex, a troubled young man, to return the letter to its intended recipient, named Catalina. Along the way, the trio visits several highlights (e.g., Yogi Bear statue, Coney Island, a gay bar in Chicago) and experience moments of self-reflection (“The sort of unremarkable night that maybe once would have been easily forgotten, but now I knew to hold onto it with both hands. What a privilege it was to be bored and boring. We were alive at the same time, on opposite sides of the couch. I could have lived in this moment with him forever.”). Violet often focuses on naming three good things and is relentless in trying to stay positive (although her musings about being a guardian can feel repetitive). As readers might expect, there are several romantic scenes as well. RETURN TO SENDER received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“a zany road trip provides a path to recovery”).

Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson

CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE by Ann Larson is an eye-opening tale of “Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register.” We have all stood in line at the supermarket check-out, often frustrated with the wait and the poor quality of packing. Larson encourages readers to take another perspective by relating her own COVID-era experiences as a worker and those of her colleagues. She certainly made me feel more compassionate towards the frontline supermarket employees, standing in place for hours on end and repetitively swiping products past a scanner. Yet, it is worth pointing out that Larson takes an activist perspective and writes, “it was as an outsider that I saw how the supermarket as an institution is a window into larger social divisions and injustices.” She notes, for example, that “many grocery workers are food insecure” and “being perpetually too tired to cook was one of the ironies of working at the supermarket.” And her statistics on dental care, tooth pain, and missing teeth (“One-quarter of adults in the United States over the age of 65 are missing all of their teeth and our country has one of the highest rates of toothlessness in the world”) are surprising and class related. CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. This book deserves attention and could join others (e.g., Evicted, Nickel and Dimed, Maid, or even How May I Help You?) which have been part of our curriculum as students learn to appreciate the struggles of their neighbors. Extensive source notes (approximately fifteen percent of the text) are included.

Lightning Beneath the Sea by James M. Tabor

LIGHTNING BENEATH THE SEA by James M. Tabor is a fascinating read about “The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age.” Tabor, an award-winning and widely published author, chronicles events surrounding efforts to lay the first transatlantic cable. Most of this activity takes place in the mid-1800s and while the technology is interesting in itself (e.g., the need to develop a salt water cable and a way to safely lay it across the ocean floor) so are the various players, including Samuel Morse, and financiers of the day. I was astounded to learn that Cyrus Field and the group who formed the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company in 1854 “committed $1.5 million ($57 million [in today’s dollars]) to start the project. That came from just five men and amounted to about 4% of the American government's total spending then.” For more than a decade, they battled some amazing obstacles, including weather issues, which adds to the tension of this tale of remarkable resilience. LIGHTNING BENEATH THE SEA received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“epic maritime adventure, as well as a riveting study of technological progress”) and The Wall Street Journal described it as “full of drama and excitement.” Enjoy!

An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton

Suspenseful and with a surprising ending, AN INFINITE LOVE STORY by Chanel Cleeton (The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes) is a work of historical fiction and set in the 1960s. The emphasis is on the nascent space program and the lives of test pilots, early astronauts and their families. Cleeton begins with the facts that divorces in the United States at that time were 2.9 for every 1,000 marriages; while “there were thirty-nine married astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. Twenty of those marriages ultimately ended in divorce.” And, then she shifts to fiction and the news of a missing spaceship in 1968. Employing frequent flashbacks, she introduces readers to the main characters: Vivian, an aspiring journalist, and Joe, a fighter pilot who has dreams of travelling in space. The most memorable element of this book is the devotion which Viv and Joe have for each other. For the most part, that is beautifully written, but it becomes somewhat repetitive as Cleeton continually emphasizes the tension: “It must be an extraordinary thing to be loved by a man who felt things so deeply, so passionately, that he devoted his life to a vocation with such singularity. Or was his love for flying, for his dreams of space, so great that there was room for little else?” Still, AN INFINITE LOVE STORY not only conveys the love between two people, the historical events and details also invoke many memories of rocket launches and a country’s love affair with space travel in a more hopeful, inspiring time. Discussion questions are included as are references to relevant works like The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger, and Rocket Men by Robert Kurson. Publishers Weekly gave AN INFINITE LOVE STORY a starred review, saying, “Readers won’t want to miss this.”

Aging Out by Lucy Schiller

AGING OUT by Lucy Schiller is subtitled “An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old,” but it seems to be more of an internal evaluation expressed in a series of essays. Schiller, a non-fiction writing professor at Texas Tech, begins by talking about a move to Pittsburgh after leaving a job in Germany and living with Mary Ann, her grandmother, for a bit during COVID. And then she reflects on her other grandmother, Anita, who died from COVID. Eventually, Schiller starts to quote industry statistics for senior living facilities, but it feels really negative. She herself says, “From my pink couch in Pittsburgh, I read this hodgepodge of age-fear, the sunlight slanting down through the dark wood windows.” She makes a very valid point that “there is no class you take, at any point in your life, alongside everyone else, in which you learn such facts. Perhaps it is because there are so many options, instead of a few or even more simply, one. …. perhaps you wonder how to make sense of all these pieces of some larger puzzle whose shape, and picture, you can't see.”  Does she help answer those questions? Again, not really, even though she supplies data points like “The median cost, nationally, of a semiprivate room in a nursing home in 2025 is around $110,000.” Information is buried in the text (e.g., she describes Papa, a private company worth more than a billion which offers elder companions on demand), but those details are not easily accessible and certainly not very action oriented. This was a missed opportunity to give direction on how to gather information and make choices from an author who had obviously researched the topic. Approximately twenty percent of the preview was devoted to a Notes section but unlike so many other texts about aging, there was no helpful list of resources, government agencies, or relevant websites. Publishers Weekly gave AGING OUT a starred review, commenting “It’s a deeply human portrayal of what it means to get older in a society unprepared to care for its most vulnerable.”

The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts

THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR OF JUDITH POTTS by Robert Thorogood is the latest in the Marlow Murder mystery series (also on PBS Masterpiece). When reading this story, it was incredibly easy to picture the interactions of three friends, Judith Potts, Susie Harris, and Becks Starling in their small English village. This time, some famous locals (a sportsman and a writer) are found dead and the friends set out to investigate, but something Is clearly not right as Judith is distracted, and police liaison Tanika Malik has been suspended. That shifts the burden of investigating to Becks and Susie while Thorogood seems to over-emphasize some of their less attractive qualities (e.g., rule-follower and boisterous, almost rudeness), perhaps to replace the tension that existed between the investigators and police in earlier series entries. They have even more to solve when Judith is threatened with exposure of being involved in her long-ago husband’s death. The ending is exciting, and readers will be gratified to learn more about Judith’s cryptic past.

On the Street Where You Live by Kathryn Nicolai

ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE by Kathryn Nicolai is self-described as a cozy audio (total length about 5 hours) and is narrated by the author and several other performers. Basically, this is almost like a set of short stories as each section (lightly tied together since everyone lives in the same neighborhood) focuses primarily on one person (baker, book seller with a cat named Alphabet, piano teacher, star gazer, historian, novelist, librarian, puzzle maker, innkeeper). The pace is gentle and slow (the author also crafted Nothing Much Happens, a collection of stories “to soothe your mind and help you sleep”) – one can easily listen to this audiobook at 1.5 speed. The characters generally face limited conflict (e.g., what food to make and bring to neighbor) and their actions (e.g., juicing a lemon, searching through photos) tend to be methodical and described in a deliberate manner. Nicolai cleverly interweaves the stories (e.g., a piano student leaves a book behind and returning it introduces listeners to the next character). It looks as though ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE will only be available as audiobook or audio CD. Look for it (release date is July 28) if you would like a gentle, peaceful listen.