River Readers

*Starred Review* I liked my java so black, the police planted evidence on it, says the wry, self-aware, yet ultimately self-defeating narrator of this trenchant satire. Hired (after a humiliating competition) as the black face of a racist corporation, he embarks on a relentless, single-minded quest to medically demelanize his biracial son, Nigel. Nothing, not the contempt of his wife and mother nor the physical and psychological anguish of his child, will deter him from rescuing the teenager from life as a black man.

Recently divorced after a long struggle with infertility, the unnamed narrator of poet Sims' first novel clings to Cat, her ex-husband's pet that she never even liked. Sadly, work doesn't distract her from her misery. As a non-tenure-track lecturer at an overpriced, second-rate city school, she has only one class this semester, a poetry survey for a handful of students (one of whom seems to be hitting on her).

Little Girl Blue is an intimate profile of Karen Carpenter, a girl from a modest Connecticut upbringing who became a Southern California superstar. Karen was the instantly recognizable lead singer of the Carpenters. The top-selling American musical act of the 1970s, they delivered the love songs that defined a generation.

Walker's highly anticipated follow-up to The Age of Miracles (2012) is a similar modern fantasy in which strange things that change the course of the world start to happen to everyday people. In this novel, a sleeping sickness slowly overcomes students at a small Southern California college. By the time anyone recognizes a pattern, it's too late to quarantine the campus (though they try), and the odd malady spreads to the surrounding town. Those stricken suddenly fall asleep and cannot be roused. Tests show that while they are not under any physical duress, they are having vivid dreams.

*Starred Review* Award-winning Virginia-based journalist Macy, author of best-sellers Factory Man (2014) and Truevine (2016), carefully constructs the through line from the midnineties introduction of the prescription painkiller OxyContin to the current U.S. opioid crisis: 300,000 deaths over the last 15 years, with that number predicted to double in the next 5. Its addictiveness initially far underreported, Oxy was outrageously marketed to doctors and overprescribed to patients, who quickly couldn't do without it.

Michael Wolff told us about it, Omarosa flaunted it, and now veteran White House watcher Woodward pounds it home. The wheels have come off the White House bus. Of course, anyone with access to a TV set or a news feed is already aware of the book's juiciest bits: General John Kelly calling President Trump an idiot, or Trump lawyer John Dowd telling his client that a sit-down with Robert Mueller would lead to an orange jumpsuit. It requires the book as a whole, however, to really convey what a dysfunctional environment the Trump landscape has become.

*Starred Review* Following up her hit Small Great Things (2016), Picoult delivers another riveting yarn about a hot-button issue this time, it's abortion rights, with a unique narrative format: the story is told backward chronologically over the hours of a tense hostage situation in a women's clinic.

Alaska, 1974.
Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed.
For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival.

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America's last true frontier.

This work is about the art of living mentally well. Told through the first-hand experience of mental health advocate, activist and speaker Kevin Hines (who has bipolar disorder), the story is an honest account of the struggle to live mentally well, and teach others how to do the same. It educates the public about mental illness and helps anyone reading find hope in any situation.

Scott, lonely after a divorce he didn't want, could stand to lose a little weight, but, even though the scale shows a steady decrease, he looks exactly the same. He confides in the retired Doctor Bob, who is just as mystified, but at least provides good company. Now if only Scott could resolve his troubles with Deirdre and Missy, new neighbors who have opened a Mexican restaurant.

*Starred Review* Grief is disabling Poppy Lang nearly a year after her husband, Jack, was murdered on a predawn run in Central Park. She's taking a toxic mix of pills and alcohol to help her sleep, then having dreams that morph into nightmares and hallucinations, and she believes that she's being stalked by a man in a hoodie. When an orchid with a mystifying message is found in her apartment, she contacts the detective still working on Jack's case as well as Layla Van Santen, her closest friend, who, with her husband, Mac, and teenagers Izzy and Slade, are those closest to her.

An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.

This fifth stand-alone psychological thriller (after Every Last Lie, 2017) from New York Times best-selling author Kubica will keep readers riveted as they witness the unraveling of the lives of two women, one in the present, the other in the past. Jessie Sloane is struggling to build a new life after years of being sole caregiver to her mother through a protracted and ultimately terminal illness.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels offers details about her brief 2006 affair with Donald Trump, but that's not the focus of this conversational, wide-ranging, and forthright account of her life. A bright kid from Louisiana who wanted to be a writer and loved horses, Daniels grew up in a dysfunctional rat- and cockroach-infested house, was sexually abused at age nine by a friend's neighbor, excelled in school, had relationships with various boys (the details of which she candidly describes), and enjoyed horseback riding.

*Starred Review* The Mars Room is a seedy San Francisco strip club, a dark little planet where interactions are strictly cash-based, just the way Romy Hall likes it. But one regular customer plunges into obsession, and now Romy is heading to prison for life two times over. In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner (The Flamethrowers, 2013), an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity whose only vulnerability is her young son.