Book Review Books CONTEMPORARY FICTION General Fiction LGBTQIA+ FICTION THRILLER - CRIME THRILLER

“BeatNikki’s Café” by Renee James

Renee James’s BeatNikki’s Café is a sharp, witty, and surprisingly complicated novel about transgender identity, parenthood, violence, and the uneasy compromises people make when the institutions meant to protect them fail. Set in Chicago during the summer of 2017, it centers on Nikki Finch, a transgender woman who owns BeatNikki’s, a neighborhood café that functions as both business and refuge for an assortment of LGBTQ employees and customers. What initially looks like a story about escalating hate crimes gradually becomes something more intimate: a story about Nikki learning, somewhat unexpectedly, how to be a mother.

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Book Review Books CONTEMPORARY FICTION Family Saga General Fiction LITERARY FICTION

“Mid-Century Melee” by Tony V. George

Tony V. George’s Mid-Century Melee is a family saga built around the sort of family that makes most dysfunctional families look downright well-adjusted. At its center is Asuproz, a technology company founded by aging patriarch Robert and now the source of money, status, resentment, and a ferocious battle over succession. Yet George is considerably less interested in corporate maneuvering than in the damaged people doing the maneuvering. Addiction, grief, gender identity, parental failure, sibling rivalry, and decades of buried resentment all eventually converge in a surprisingly affecting novel about the difficulty of escaping the roles families assign us.

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Book Review Books CONTEMPORARY FICTION General Fiction

“Sand Dollar Cove” by Karen L West

As in most small towns, the young people in Sand Dollar Cove must choose between staying in the place where they were born and going out into the wide world.  The catch in this case is that decisions on the island have a five-year lifespan that can’t be changed.  In Sand Dollar Cove: The Five-Year Promise, Karen L. West has created a world like no other.  She’s envisioned an island that supports several hundred people and, for reasons unknown to anyone, only appears out of an alternate dimension or plane once every five years.  It remains accessible to our Earth’s inhabitants for only ten days at each return.  In that timeframe, it must be supplied with everything it can’t grow or manufacture, enough goods to last until the next emergence from its other location.

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