Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City. (Description from catalog)

Nearly three centuries after their coastal community's witch trials, the women athletes of the 1989 Danvers Falcons hockey team combine individual and collective talents with 1980s iconography to storm their way to the state finals. - description from Novelist

Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones and the Six in this funny, wise and tender novel about a fourteen-year-old girl's coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for - who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.
(Description from catalog)

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of its initial publication, and with a new introduction by the author, here is Sandra Cisnero's greatly admired and best-selling novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. (Description from catalog)

Narrowly surviving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a bordello proprietor's daughter bonds with an unlikely new family, from a Chinese clan and an orphan caregiver to tenor Enrico Caruso and tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels.
(Description from catalog)

Beginning in the 1950s Elena and Lila grow up in Naples, Italy, mirroring two different aspects of their nation. (Description from NoveList)

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. (Description from catalog)

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their home town. It was the children who saw--and felt--what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing.... The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. Until the grown-up chldren were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
(Description from catalog)

During the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves behind her close-knit, middle-class Indiana family to enroll in an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts, becoming a shrewd observer of, and eventually a participant in, their rituals and customs. (Description from NoveList)

A young boy growing up in a rundown 1980s Glasgow public housing facility pursues some semblance of a normal life as his older siblings move on and his mother increasingly succumbs to alcoholism. (Description from NoveList)

A first novel by the award-winning author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds is written in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read about the impact of the Vietnam War on their family. (Description from NoveList.)

Jojo and his sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Mam is dying of cancer, and quiet Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
(Description from catalog)

A shy college freshman finds her perspectives transformed by a mentor activist at the center of the women's movement who challenges her to discover herself in ways that take her far from the traditional life she envisioned at the side of her boyfriend. (Description from NoveList)

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony -- a celebration that ultimately never took place.
(Description from catalog)

Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. She pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers. (description from catalog)

After witnessing her friend's death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter's life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died. (description from Novelist)