Caroline left her family, friends, and a broken heart in rural Southwest Washington to pursue a career in high fashion. Ten years later she returns home with her career in tatters, destroyed by a powerful fashion icon, and her best friend's two traumatized children to raise on her own. With huge challenges and few resources, she is nearly overcome with doubts and anxiety. Armed with a strong purpose for helping women and incredible design skills, she moves into a life even bigger than she could have imagined. Can she also repair her broken heart? This rich story takes on the #MeToo challenges most women have faced, and shows that together, supporting each other, we can get through just about anything. ~ Jane Danielson

I never thought I would jump up and down over a book about World War II, but upon seeing Sam Kean's name on the cover, that's exactly what I did. My all-time favorite science writer, Kean presents typically murky, nap-inducing subjects (like the atmosphere or the periodic table) with a digestible, smart-assed writing style that makes them gripping. This fast-paced foray into military history is no exception. The Bastard Brigade is a vivid and engrossing telling of scientists and spies and arguably the most important Allied mission of WWII, to prevent the Nazis from creating an atomic bomb. ~ Jane Darrah

This is my first Ruth Ware mystery, and I'm told it's her best one yet! She introduces us to Hal, a young heroine you will feel empathy for right off the bat. After losing her mother, Hal continues reading tarot cards to eke out a small life on her own. One night Hal receives a puzzling letter about the death of her grandmother, requesting her to be at the reading of the will. Even though she knows this must be a mistake, she considers it because of her desperate financial situation with the seedy loan shark knocking at her door. You will keep turning pages on this one for sure!  ~ Kathie   

I don't ordinarily go in for longer novels, but Powers' masterful saga illuminates and dramatizes the seamless interconnection between trees and humankind in a way I find both revolutionary and tremendously satisfying. The intricate narrative tendrils follow nine characters as their lives intertwine with trees, sometimes in surprising ways, offering readers a view of the arboreal universe as a global society with a vital relation to our own. Culminating in protests involving old-growth trees in the western states, Powers' revelatory work stands as a rich panorama and a profoundly important work. ~ John

Emmaline uses her sense of smell the way most people use their vision - to help puzzle things out, to understand the weather, or animals, or even people. That made sense when, as a child, she lived with her father on a remote island with no other people. But when tragedy struck and she left the island, her reliance on smell made her an outsider. So did her lack of knowledge about who she was, where was her mother, and why she had been living off the grid. Bauermeister follows that trail in this fascinating novel of loss and love, scents and sense, and identity. ~ Victoria