Library Staff Directory
Posted Nov 14, 2025
On Saturday, November 8th, the Friends of the Shorewood Public Library hosted their annual Holiday Book Talk with Boswell Book Company proprietor Daniel Goldin. Daniel shared three dozen of his new favorite books. Below are his recommendations.
All title summaries are adapted from COUNTYCAT. Head over to Boswell Book Company if you're looking to make a purchase, or check one out from the library!
ADULT FICTION
In the fall of her senior year of college, our narrator meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal's wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they've lost. Margaret's husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm's way--until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie--but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
Ruth is a woman who believes in and despairs of the curative power of love. Her daughter, Eleanor, who is addicted to drugs, has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth adjusts herself in ways large and small to give to Eleanor what she thinks she may need--nourishment, distance, affection--but all her gifts fall short. After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor's apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth's past defeats and disappointment. Love without fear is a new feeling for her, almost unrecognizable. Will it last?
Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo
A young Amish woman delivers a baby that's eighteen pounds and twenty-seven inches long, and no one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of the boy. Raised by his brother in rural poverty, Gabriel Fisher walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and possesses extraordinary athletic abilities. When his older brother dies by suicide, Gabriel is taken in by devout Amish grandparents, who hide him away from the English world. At age seventeen, and nearly eight feet tall, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach, and his life changes.
The Phoebe Variations by Jane Hamilton
Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family. But on the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. With the help of her best friend Luna, Phoebe runs away--as far as their friend Patrick O'Connor's chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his thirteen siblings. What begins as a adolescent rebellion soon spirals into a whirlwind of transformation and self-discovery. As Phoebe grapples with her shifting identity, she must navigate the tumultuous road out of girlhood and chart a new and unknown course.
Shopgirls by Jessica Anya Blau
Nineteen-year-old Zippy is the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, "San Francisco's Finest Department Store." For a girl who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment above a liquor store with her mother and her mother's madcap boyfriend; a girl who wanted to go to college but had no help in figuring out how; I. Magnin represents a real chance for a better and more elegant life. Zippy may not be in school, but she's about to get an education that will stick with her for decades. Her fellow salesgirls (lifetime professionals) run the gamut from mean and indifferent to caring and helpful. The cosmetics ladies on the first floor share both samples and advice ("only date a man with a Rolex"); and her new roommate, Raquel, an ambitious lawyer, tells Zippy she can lose ten pounds easy if she joins Raquel in eating only every other day. Set in the Day-Glo colors of 1980s San Francisco, Shopgirls is an intoxicating novel of self-discovery, outrageous fashion, and family both biological and found.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry by Elinor Lipman
Taking over her parents' estate-sale business is not the life's work that Emma Lewis bargained for. Yes, she grew up helping them empty people's nests, but nothing prepared her for her biggest and stickiest "get"--the grand, beautiful house of ill repute masquerading as a decidedly beddable B and B. Should Emma turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady, escort-y, and proud of it? No. A girl must make a living. Around some hairpin turns, Lipman ingeniously reveals a straight shot to happiness.
A Dog in Georgia by Lauren Grodstein
A missing dog sets Amy on an adventure away from her tumultuous marriage and towards a journey of self-discovery. Amy is a chef. Or rather, was a chef. Somewhere along the way she also became a wife and a stepmother and an emergency contact, and the part of her that was a chef disappeared entirely -- along with her sense of self. Which is why she is currently in the republic of Georgia, on a mission to find a lost dog named Angel, and, more importantly, the life's purpose she once took for granted. For months, Amy has escaped by watching YouTube videos of Angel walking the children of Tbilisi to school. When Angel goes missing, Amy volunteers to go find him. The fact that her husband may be having (another) affair and her stepson is away at college probably has something to do with it. Who is Amy, after all, if she's not taking care of other people? But to her surprise, Angel proves elusive, and while she does make friends with a number of stray dogs, what she finds in Tblisi is entirely human.
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train's crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.
33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen
On the eve of the occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever. Art student Charlotte Sauvin, daughter of a prominent architect in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls and voices echo, the distinct knock of her dearest friend, Julian Raphaël, the eldest son of an art collector's family across the hall in 4R. But all that's familiar for Charlotte and the other residents of 33 begins to fracture as whispers of Nazi occupation become reality. The Raphaëls disappear, becoming refugees, nurses, soldiers, reluctant heroes. Masha, the seamstress on the 5th floor, deepens a dangerous affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3R, a man far less feckless than he'd have his neighbors believe. And in the face of a perilous new reality, every member of this accidental community will discover they are not the person they believed themselves to be.
The Last Assigment by Erika Robuck
Fall, 1956. Award-winning but often-maligned combat photojournalist Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle works press for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), started by Albert Einstein during the Second World War to bring the plight of the world's war refugees to the American people for their support. Still grieving the death of her mother two years after the death of her father, Dickey identifies deeply with displaced people and longs to help them however she can. After a refugee rescue goes wrong, Dickey finds herself imprisoned in a Soviet camp, and it's there that a flame is lit deep inside her. Her journey will take her all over the world, and in the most perilous of dangers, Dickey will realize that in trying to galvanize the American people to save the oppressed peoples of the world, that she is saving herself.
The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa is where high society goes to see and be seen. Located deep in the West Virginia mountains, where healing sweetwater flows, the hotel is managed by a local, June Hudson, whose skills were noted by the wealthy Guilfoyles who own the place. War has begun, and June is trying to shield the Avallon from it, but when the owner's son makes a deal with the State Department to house dozens of Axis diplomats, June must convince her staff to offer luxury to Nazis for the war effort. Peacefully. Meanwhile, FBI agent Tucker Minnick is searching for a spy among the detainees. He has his own history with West Virginia and would have done anything to avoid coming back, but this mission is an exile that he can't escape unless he earns it. As tension grows between locals and the detainees, Tucker's spy games disturb the peace, and the eerie sweetwater proves more dangerous than once thought. June's future at the Avallon hangs in the balance -- but who is she without the hotel? And what is it without her?
Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings
From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, a dazzling novel about two brilliant sisters and what happens to their undeniable bond when a mysterious and possibly perilous new world beckons. When seven mysterious doors to another world appear, twin sisters Ayanna and Olivia are drawn into a realm that promises wonder but hides danger. As curiosity turns to crisis and one sister goes missing, the other must confront the truth about the new world--and their bond--before it's too late.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Throughout her life, Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. A mother, grandmother, wife, divorcée, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén
Bo is running out of time. Yet time is one of the few things he's got left. These days, his quiet existence is broken up only by daily visits from his home care team. Fortunately, he still has his beloved elkhound Sixten to keep him company. Though now his son, with whom Bo has had a rocky relationship, insists upon taking the dog away, claiming that Bo has grown too old to properly care for him. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotion, leading Bo to take stock of his life, his relationships, and the imperfect way he's expressed his love over the years.
The Satisfaction Café by Kathy Wang
Joan's life is a series of unexpected events: she never thought she would live in California, nor did she expect her first marriage to implode. She definitely did not expect to fall in love with an older, wealthy American man and become his fourth wife and mother to his youngest children. Joan and her children grow older, and one day she makes a drastic change: she opens the Satisfaction Café, where customers can find connection through conversation. With humor and grace, Joan creates a space for meaningful relationships and constructs a lasting legacy.
A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter's family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Seven years later, Kinnick's old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia? With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he'd left behind.
There, There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past. Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe's Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack's reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack's estranged sister and Mitch's former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go-and what they will sacrifice-to win it all.
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father's car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante's recklessness has placed them all in real danger. Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he's forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills. Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything. Because everything burns.
The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler
Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. She seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires her as its first woman operative. Only an hour into the job, Harriet has an assignment: Discover the whereabouts of a missing maid from one of the most extravagant mansions on Prairie Avenue. Owner Pearl Bartlett has a reputation for sending operatives on wild goose chases around her grand estate, but Harriet believes the stunningly beautiful Agnes Wozniak has indeed vanished under mysterious circumstances
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Finding Lost by Holly Goldberg Sloan
Cordy Jenkins is searching for something that will change her life, and for the safety that vanished when her father died. She is convinced that if she just tries hard enough, she will find part of what her family lost, which will stop her mom from wanting to leave the small town she and her little brother have always called home. What Cordy finds instead is a muddy, hungry little dog with bad breath. And he's the start of her family's new beginning. You'll fall in love with Cordy and her family as they fall in love with the stray pup named Lost. Full of unforgettable moments, family, and warmhearted humor, Finding Lost is a tender story of making peace with the inevitable truth that change is a constant, and that after profound loss there is still always the possibility of unexpected joy.
ADULT NONFICTION
The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available --sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today, we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body's failings. When and how does a person decide they'd be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina? Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit.
Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean
We have a good idea of what the past looked like. But what about our other senses? The tang of Roman fish sauce and the springy crust of Egyptian sourdough? The boom of medieval cannons and the clash of Viking swords? The frenzied plays of an Aztec ballgame...and the chilling reality that the losers might also lose their lives? History often neglects the tastes, textures, sounds, and smells that were an intimate part of our ancestors' lives, but a new generation of researchers is resurrecting those hidden details, pioneering an exciting new discipline called experimental archaeology. These are scientists gone rogue: They make human mummies. They investigate the unsolved murders of ancient bog bodies. They carve primitive spears and go hunting, then knap their own obsidian blades to skin the game. They build perilous boats and plunge out onto the open sea all in the name of experiencing history as it was, with all its dangers, disappointments, and unexpected delights.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality. In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare-a leveret-that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton's house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.
Night People conjures the undeniable magic of the city's bygone nightlife -- a time when clubs were diverse, glamorous, and a little lawless, and each night brought a heady mix of music, ambition, danger, delight, and possibility. It's about the beauty of what you can create with just two Technics and a mixer, in a golden era before Giuliani, camera phones, and bottle service upended everything. It's also about a teenager finding his way -- stalking DJ Stretch Armstrong and biting his mixes, crate-digging in every corner of New York, grinding gig after gig through a decade of incredible music -- and finding a community of people who, in their own strange ways, lived for the night. Organized around the venues that defined his experience of the downtown scene, Ronson evokes the specific rush of that decade and those spaces -- where fashion folks and rappers on the rise danced alongside club kids and 9-to-5'ers -- and invites us into the tribe of creatives and partiers who came alive when the sun went down.
Destroy This House by Amanda Uhle
The Long family's love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led. Amanda's striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother's hoarding disorder flourished and her father's schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amanda's father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real.
Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He's a loner, awkward and obsessive; she's charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream, but Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive on the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests.
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerland by John U. Bacon
On November 10, 1975, during one of the fiercest storms ever to hit the Great Lakes, the massive freighter Edmund Fitzgerald vanished beneath the waves of Lake Superior, taking all twenty-nine crew members with her. In The Gales of November, acclaimed journalist John U. Bacon delivers the definitive account of this haunting maritime disaster and the era that produced it. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with families, friends, and shipmates of the lost men, Bacon explores how the Fitzgerald came to symbolize the power and promise of America's postwar industrial might -- and how its loss marked the end of a booming age of Great Lakes shipping.
Milwaukee Flavor by Ann Christenson, photos by Kevin Miyazaki
What’s the magic ingredient that’s inspired Milwaukeeans to craft a celebrated cultural legacy that we continue to hone and push forward? We collaborate fearlessly, with open arms. We innovate, but with reverence for the legacy of those who came before us. And we celebrate Milwaukee Flavor in all its forms. Now it's your turn to explore those dynamic flavors through a collection of personal recipes from local chefs who champion Milwaukee's diverse food and restaurant culture every day.
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