Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Taking over her family's failing taxidermy shop in the wake of her father's suicide, a grief-stricken woman pursues less-than-legal ways of generating income while struggling to figure out her place among her eccentric loved ones. (Description from NoveList.)

"No one knew the story of Elsa Weiss. She was a respected English teacher at a Tel Aviv high school, but she remained aloof and never tried to befriend her students. No one ever encountered her outside of school hours. She was a riddle, and yet the students sensed that they were all she had. When Elsa killed herself by jumping off the roof of her apartment building, she remained as unknown as she had been during her life. Thirty years later, the narrator of the novel, one of her students, decides to solve the riddle of Elsa Weiss."

Kill Bill meets The Joy Luck Club in The Ninja Daughter, an edge-of-your-seat debut novel about Lily Wong a modern-day female ninja, dedicated to rescuing women from abusive relationships while trying to hide the truth about her real life from her overprotective family. (Description from NoveList.)

"When Frankie's mother dies, the six-year-old comes up with a plan: go to France, find a police station, and ask the officers to ring his father--and so begins Giller-nominated Pauline Holdstock's eighth novel. Narrated in turns by Frankie, who likes cheese, numbers, the sea when it's pink and "smooth like counting," and being alone when he feels bad, and a cast of characters that includes his Gran and his father, Here I Am! is a mesmerizing story about innocence lost and found."

A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the mother of chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father. (Description from catalog)

When Anna, wondering who she really is, discovers that the African father she never knew is still alive, she embarks on a journey to a small nation in West Africa where she searches for her family's hidden roots.
(Description from catalog)

Ending her relationship with a man who she discovers is a popular anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, a woman activist travels from Washington, DC, to Berlin, where she struggles with increasingly manipulative dynamics in her online, business, and social circles.
(Description from catalog)

Living in a utopian world shaped by alien invaders who make any dream possible, a 50-year-old trans woman is devastated by the end of her marriage before an unexpected quest pits her against the aliens' most avid supporters. (Description from NoveList.)

"Her name is Renee Blackbear, but what most people call the 19-year-old Ojibwe woman is Cash. She lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota's Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. She has one friend, the sheriff Wheaton. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. Since then, Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms, driving truck. Wheaton wants her to take hold of her life, signs her up for college. She gets an education there at Moorhead State all right: sees that people talk a lot but mostly about nothing, not like the men in the fields she's known all her life who hold the rich topsoil in their hands, talk fertilizer and weather and prices on the Grain Exchange. In between classes and hauling beets, drinking beer and shooting pool, a man who claims he's her brother shows up, and she begins to dream the Cities and blonde Scandinavian girls calling for help."--Provided by publisher.

The author of the National Book Award-nominated A Kind of Freedom explores the impact of racism and interracial relationships between women through the story of an early 20th-century farmer and her unemployed single mother descendant. (Description from NoveList.)

Engaging in a secret affair with a closeted white man, an Ojibwe from a northern Minnesota reservation navigates small-town discrimination before a ghost leads him to the grave of a basketball star whose murder becomes linked to a local legend. (Description from NoveList.)

"Growing up in early twentieth-century Illinois, Ruby Drake is a happy child. But one winter's night, her beloved parents perish in an accident and suddenly Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, Minnesota, where she finds work on the farm of the Schoonovers, who soon become a second family to her. Ruby falls in love with Roland, a married neighbor. When Ruby is asked to care for Roland's wife, Ruby is torn between duty and passion."

"At the end of a dark prairie road, nearly forgotten in the Kansas countryside, is the Finch House. For years it has remained empty, overgrown, abandoned. Soon the door will be opened for the first time in decades. But something is waiting, lurking in the shadows, anxious to meet its new guests ... When best-selling horror author Sam McGarver is invited to spend Halloween in one of the world's most infamous haunted houses, he reluctantly agrees. At least he won't be alone; joining him are three other masters of the macabre, writers who have helped shape modern horror. But what begins as a simple publicity stunt will become a fight for survival. The entity they have awakened will follow them, torment them, threatening to make them a part of the bloody legacy of Kill Creek."--Cover flap.