![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/family-lore.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Family Lore<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Elizabeth Acevedo<\/p>\nFrom National Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes the story of one Dominican American family told through the voices of its women<\/em><\/p>\n Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake\u2014a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she\u2019s led\u2014her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else\u2019s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.<\/em><\/p>\n But Flor isn\u2019t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.<\/em><\/p>\n Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo\u2019s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces\u2014one family\u2019s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.<\/em> – HarperCollins<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n Babur \u201cBobby\u201d Singh, Indian immigrant, single parent, and owner of a fledging rideshare business, remains ever hopeful about ascending the ladder of American success. He lives in an affluent suburb of New York with his introverted teenage daughter Angie.<\/em><\/p>\n During summer break, Angie is walking home after swimming at the high school pool when she finds Henry McCleary, a white classmate from a wealthy family, stabbed and bleeding on the football field. The police immediately focus their investigation on Chiara Thompkins, a runaway Black girl who disappears after the stabbing and\u2014it\u2019s later discovered\u2014wasn\u2019t properly enrolled in the public high school.<\/em><\/p>\n The incident sends shock waves through the community and reveals jarring truths about the lengths to which families will go to protect themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n A gripping story about privilege, race, family, and belonging, Our Best Intentions shows how drastically everything can change in a single moment and the rippling effects of the choices we make and the lies we tell.<\/em> – HarperCollins<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t call the police right away.\u201d Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.<\/em><\/p>\n Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything\u2014which is why she isn\u2019t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don\u2019t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia\u2019s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.<\/em><\/p>\n What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut, Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.<\/em> – Penguin Random House<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie\u2019s once-lucrative car business is going under\u2014but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he\u2019s on the brink of running away.<\/em><\/p>\n If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda\u2019s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?<\/em><\/p>\n The Bee Sting, Paul Murray\u2019s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.<\/em> – MacMillan Publishers<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. There, she\u2019ll live with another family for the duration of the war, where they hope she\u2019ll stay safe.<\/em><\/p>\n Scared and angry, feeling lonely and displaced, Bea arrives in Boston to meet the Gregorys. Mr. and Mrs. G, and their sons William and Gerald, fold Bea seamlessly into their world. She becomes part of this lively family, learning their ways and their stories, adjusting to their affluent lifestyle. Bea grows close to both boys, one older and one younger, and fills in the gap between them. Before long, before she even realizes it, life with the Gregorys feels more natural to her than the quiet, spare life with her own parents back in England.<\/em><\/p>\n As Bea comes into herself and relaxes into her new life\u2014summers on the coast in Maine, new friends clamoring to hear about life across the sea\u2014the girl she had been begins to fade away, until, abruptly, she is called home to London when the war ends.<\/em><\/p>\n Desperate as she is not to leave this life behind, Bea dutifully retraces her trip across the Atlantic back to her new, old world. As she returns to post-war London, the memory of her American family stays with her, never fully letting her go, and always pulling on her heart as she tries to move on and pursue love and a life of her own.<\/em><\/p>\n As we follow Bea over time, navigating between her two worlds, Beyond That, the Sea emerges as a beautifully written, absorbing novel, full of grace and heartache, forgiveness and understanding, loss and love.<\/em> – MacMillan Publishers<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n A four-year-old Mi\u2019kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years<\/em><\/p>\n July 1962. A Mi\u2019kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family\u2019s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister\u2019s disappearance for years to come.<\/em><\/p>\n In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren\u2019t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.<\/em><\/p>\n For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.<\/em> – Penguin Random House<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth\u2014another female casualty of China\u2019s controversial One Child Policy. But with her husband on her trail, the clock is ticking, and she\u2019s forced to make increasingly risky decisions if she ever hopes to be reunited with her daughter.<\/em><\/p>\n Meanwhile, publishing executive Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a prestigious family name and the wealth that comes with it, a high-powered career, a beautiful home, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. She\u2019s even hired a nanny to help her balance the demands of being a working wife and mother. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca\u2019s job but her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble and her role in her own family is called into question.<\/em><\/p>\n The Leftover Woman finds these two unforgettable women on a shocking collision course. Twisting and suspenseful and surprisingly poignant, it’s a profound exploration of identity and belonging, motherhood and family. It is a story of two women in a divided city\u2014separated by severe economic and cultural differences yet bound by a deep emotional connection to a child.<\/em> – HarperCollins<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n A young woman\u2019s past and present collide when she brings her white fianc\u00e9 home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fianc\u00e9. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she\u2019s become, from those she left behind.<\/em><\/p>\n But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey\u2019s relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother\u2019s astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she\u2019s shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there\u2019s Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.<\/em><\/p>\n Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey\u2019s proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she\u2019s worked toward and everything she\u2019s imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?<\/em> – Penguin Random House<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n Anne Tyler meets Jade Chang in this buoyant, good-hearted, and sharply written novel about a blithely optimistic immigrant with big dreams, dire prospects, and a fractured extended family in need of his help\u2014even if they don\u2019t know it yet<\/em><\/p>\n Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father\u2019s grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng\u2019s tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the \u201cChinese groove,\u201d a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.<\/em><\/p>\n Upon arrival, Shelley is dismayed to find that his \u201crich uncle\u201d is in fact his unemployed second cousin once removed and that the grand guest room he\u2019d envisioned is but a scratchy sofa. The indefinite stay he\u2019d planned for? That has a firm two-week expiration date. Even worse, the loving family he hoped would embrace him is in shambles, shattered by a senseless tragedy that has cleaved the family in two. They want nothing to do with this youthful bounder who\u2019s barged into their lives. Ever the optimist, Shelley concocts a plan to resuscitate his American dream by insinuating himself into the family. And, who knows, maybe he\u2019ll even manage to bring them back together in the process.<\/em> – Counterpoint Press<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n \u201cI have a soft spot for underdogs. And late bloomers. You\u2019ve told me a lot of things about yourself, so let me tell you something about me.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n After thirty-six years of a dutiful but unhappy arranged marriage, recently divorced Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life. Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn\u2014until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman who seems to be smitten with him. Lata is enjoying her newfound independence, but she\u2019s caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her.<\/em><\/p>\n Meanwhile, Suresh and Lata\u2019s daughter, Priya, thinks her father\u2019s online pursuits are distasteful even as she embarks upon a clandestine affair of her own. And their son, Nikesh, pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails. Over the course of three weeks in August, the whole family will uncover one another\u2019s secrets, confront the limits of love and loyalty, and explore life\u2019s second chances.<\/em><\/p>\n Charming, funny, and moving, Late Bloomers introduces a delightful new voice in fiction with the story of four individuals trying to understand how to be happy in their own lives\u2014and as a family.<\/em> – Penguin Random House<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n Are there other multigenerational family dramas that you enjoy or want to read? Let us know in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" November and December mean that the holidays have arrived! Families start gathering to celebrate, but these gatherings mean emotions can run high. Some instances can be fun while others can test your patience. If you need an escape from your family or enjoy multigenerational family stories, try out the following[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[361,10,1,8],"tags":[7816,5583,7813,7818,7823,7819,5399,155,476,7807,402,7810,6032,7821,7822,7814,7824,7806,815,7808,7812,7811,7815,7820,7817,7809],"class_list":["post-50026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-books","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-amanda-peters","tag-angie-kim","tag-beyond-that-the-sea","tag-central-places","tag-deepa-varadarajan","tag-delia-cai","tag-elizabeth-acevedo","tag-family","tag-family-drama","tag-family-lore","tag-fiction","tag-happiness-fall","tag-jean-kwok","tag-kathryn-ma","tag-late-bloomers","tag-laura-spence-ash","tag-multigeneration","tag-multigenerational-family-dramas","tag-novels","tag-our-best-intentions","tag-paul-murray","tag-the-bee-sting","tag-the-berry-pickers","tag-the-chinese-groove","tag-the-leftover-woman","tag-vibhuti-jain"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-d0S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50026"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50048,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50026\/revisions\/50048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/our-best-intentions.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Our Best Intentions<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Vibhuti Jain<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/happiness-falls.jpg?resize=200%2C304&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Happiness Falls<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Angie Kim<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/the-bee-sting.jpg?resize=200%2C308&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Bee Sting<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Paul Murray<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/beyond-that-the-sea.jpg?resize=200%2C299&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Beyond That, The Sea<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Laura Spence-Ash<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/berry-pickers.jpg?resize=200%2C301&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Berry Pickers<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Amanda Peters<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/leftover-woman.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Leftover Woman<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Jean Kwok<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/central-places.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Central Places<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Delia Cai<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/the-chinese-groove.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Chinese Groove<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Kathryn Ma<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/late-bloomers.jpg?resize=200%2C309&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Late Bloomers<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Deepa Varadarajan<\/p>\n