LJ, School Library Journal, and Junior Library Guild staffers climb back into the cockpit after a long holiday weekend in this post–Independence Day, postconference (the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference was held June 23–28) “What We’re Reading” column. This week, we’re planning big trips, relishing romance, hefting Outlander, curating our closets, checking out YA nonfiction, parsing Patchett, and sticking the dismount (see below, all will be revealed!).
Bette-Lee Fox, Managing Editor, LJ
I became a Grace Burrowes acolyte when I stumbled upon her 2011 book The Soldier, which I put forward as an LJ Best Book that year (the staff thanked me for introducing them to romance; needless to say, it was not chosen as a top ten title). I’ve loved just about every one of her historicals ever since. Burrowes recently signed a three-book deal with Grand Central (Hachette) after a long association with Sourcebooks. Time will tell.
I discovered a book from 2014 among my TBR pile. Douglas (Sourcebooks Casablanca. [Lonely Lords, Bk. 8]) is a lovely story of hesitant adults who feel they don’t deserve to be loved but seem to find in each other a spark that causes them to reconsider. Throw in a precocious five-year-old (Burrowes’s depictions of wee ones are generally fabulous), and readers are in for a treat. What’s truly interesting is that the story is sort of a prequel to her “Windham” series, but here the Windham men are all unmarried and the duke is decidedly the villain, demonstrating feet of clay that will ultimately be remodeled when he and his brood are the stars of the show.
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
It’s unusual for me to go so long without reading; I’ll blame a 
family visit over the holiday weekend for my lapse. I had just finished Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood (NYRB) for a nonfiction breath of fresh (yet smoggy) Los Angeles air, and was feeling puckish. I wanted more Babitz, STAT, and please not those $500 first editions of her Fiorucci: The Book (unless some kind collector would like to send me one). I appear to be in luck: NYRB is reissuing Babitz’s second book, Slow Days, Fast Company, which some say is *even better* than Eve’s Hollywood, in August. While I’m twitchingly awaiting that release, I’ve been looking through “style and minimalism blogger” Anuschka Rees’s The Curated Closet (Ten Speed: Crown), a September title that my colleague Stephanie Klose reviewed for LJ‘s July issue. I consider these decluttering, “minimal living” books and guides aspirational reading of a sort. Good tips and strategies but exhausting to actually do. Rees may just win me over though. Her prose is clear and direct, and in the intro she mentions three women whose style she most admires—Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Grace Coddington—saying, “These women are style icons not because they follow rules but because they make their own, and each have a strong sense of style and a clear signature look.” Having approved that message, I turned to the next page, which has a flow chart of “Closet Diagnostics” that made me laugh (and take notes). So maybe I’ll try this closet curation thing, trade in a few unworn frocks for say, an original edition of Babitz’s Fiorucci: The Book. A girl can dream…
Laura Girmscheid, Research Manager, LJS
This write-up is hard for me, because I normally love Ann Patchett’s books. I recently read her latest, Commonwealth, due out from HarperCollins in September, and I’m sorry to say it was a miss for me. There just wasn’t much of a plot to sink my teeth into. It tells the story of what happens to members of an extended family through the decades, beginning in 1960s California. There are divorces, kids and stepkids, and an acclaimed writer who steals their story as his own. I’m not sure what the oranges on the book’s cover are supposed to represent, but I have a feeling some English teacher out there could tell me.
Molly Hone, Editorial Assistant, JLG
After a long break, I am once again picking up Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander (Delacorte), the first in the “Outlander” series and the inspiration for the television show of the same name. This time, I hope to finish it! I’ve been hooked since the beginning—I love a great time-travel story; the writing is excellent, and the author seems to have thoroughly researched the historical periods covered—but all of my required reading keeps me from picking it up regularly (plus, I am reading the mass-market edition, which is intimidatingly thick!). It’s always on my nightstand, though, and I can’t help but feel totally immersed when I do get the chance to visit the Outlander world. Let’s hope the novel doesn’t end in a cliff-hanger, because I’m not sure I’ll be able to read the next seven books in a timely manner.
Rebecca Miller, Editorial Director, LJS
A visit to the Great Neck Library, NY, to escape the heat yielded finds to feed planning for a long-awaited family trip to my husband’s homeland of Australia, coming up in August. We’re using plenty of online resources, but nothing really beats browsing a book. So, we have a small stack of Lonely Planet’s Australia and DK’s Eyewitness Travel: Australia (images are good for kids to see), along with Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country (Broadway: Crown), which I have just cracked.
This on the heels of an engrossing read of a galley I picked up at ALA of Flying Lessons & Other Stories (coming in January from Crown Books for Young Readers), a collection edited by Ellen Oh, cofounder of We Need Diverse Books (an organization that was named a 2015 LJ Mover & Shaker).
Meanwhile, I am nursing a copy of Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island (Houghton Harcourt), handed to me by LJ’s Prepub Alert Editor Barbara Hoffert on the eve of the weekend of July 4th when I asked her for a reading tip. She knows me so well! It’s a story set in a fictionalized version of one of my favorite places on earth—Washington State’s San Juan Islands (where said husband and I tied the knot)—and is both gorgeous and heart-wrenching for it.
Meredith Schwartz, Executive Editor, LJ
I am about halfway through Kat Howard’s Roses and Rot (Saga: S. & S.). It remains to be seen if it will stick the dismount, of course, but so far it is a lovely, elegiac contemporary (but far from urban) fantasy novel about and for grown-ups. For me, I cannot help but read it as intensely in dialog with Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin (reissued by Firebird), since the plot is ringing the changes on a similar setup, with some important differences. I have no idea if Howard was influenced by Dean and little sense of what this book would be like for someone coming to it fresh, but I think it could only hit more powerfully if one had nothing to compare it to.
Henrietta Verma, WWR emerita
On the plane back from Orlando, where the ALA conference took place, I started Elizabeth Lesser’s Marrow: A Love Story (HarperWave), a memoir about how the author tried to mend her relationship with her sister before donating bone marrow to her, on the theory that the donation would “take” better if the two were more open to each other. It’s often too religious for me, but the parts about mending a frayed relationship and being open to loving and being loved are sometimes revelatory.
I’m always on the lookout for great nonfiction for my children (it’s too rare!), and while in Orlando I also picked up Dust Bowl Girls: A Team’s Quest for Basketball Glory, by Lydia Reeder (Algonquin, Jan. 2017). The author was so enthusiastic and interesting at a presentation I attended that I was really intrigued, and thus far my 11-year-old is feeling the same way.