Welcome back to Get Rec’d! Happy New Year!
I can’t believe we’re already a week into 2023. This year, I personally want to focus on reading more backlist (so you may see more older titles come up but don’t hold me to that!). This time, I have a mystery, a beautiful graphic memoir, light fiction with romance, and sci-fi with time travel. Quite the assortment!
Get any good book recommendations over the holidays? Let me know below!
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The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living
I get a lot of readers wanting backlist titles in romance or fiction with romantic elements. This is one of my go-tos and features a lot of romance tropes that are still on trend, namely baking and city girl moves back to a small town.
A full-hearted novel about a big-city baker who discovers the true meaning of home–and that sometimes the best things are found when you didn’t even know you were looking
When Olivia Rawlings–pastry chef extraordinaire for an exclusive Boston dinner club–sets not just her flambeed dessert but the entire building alight, she escapes to the most comforting place she can think of–the idyllic town of Guthrie, Vermont, home of Bag Balm, the country’s longest-running contra dance, and her best friend Hannah. But the getaway turns into something more lasting when Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous, sweater-set-wearing owner of the Sugar Maple Inn, offers Livvy a job. Broke and knowing that her days at the club are numbered, Livvy accepts.
Livvy moves with her larger-than-life, uberenthusiastic dog, Salty, into a sugarhouse on the inn’s property and begins creating her mouthwatering desserts for the residents of Guthrie. She soon uncovers the real reason she has been hired–to help Margaret reclaim the inn’s blue ribbon status at the annual county fair apple pie contest.
With the joys of a fragrant kitchen, the sound of banjos and fiddles being tuned in a barn, and the crisp scent of the orchard just outside the front door, Livvy soon finds herself immersed in small town life. And when she meets Martin McCracken, the Guthrie native who has returned from Seattle to tend his ailing father, Livvy comes to understand that she may not be as alone in this world as she once thought.
But then another new arrival takes the community by surprise, and Livvy must decide whether to do what she does best and flee–or stay and finally discover what it means to belong. Olivia Rawlings may finally find out that the life you want may not be the one you expected–it could be even better.
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Ducks
Kate Beaton is the wonderful creator of my favorite webcomic Hark! A Vagrant. Well she released a graphic memoir about her time in the oil sands in Canada. Content warning for sexual assault.
Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Ducks by Kate Beaton
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Cozy and quickly sci-fi and fantasy is having a moment right now and I’ll never pass up the chance to rec a Charles Yu book. The main character is on the hunt for his missing father, who happened to discover time travel.
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.
Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.
Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
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Peg and Rose Solve a Murder
In the most recent Wednesday Links, I talked about the rise of older characters in mysteries. If you’re wanting more senior sleuthing in your life, this is book one in a series feature sisters-in-law main characters.
Murder, She Wrote meets The Golden Girls in the award-winning author’s brand-new series! Two cantankerous septuagenarians, opposites in every way, put aside their differences to stop a killer… if they don’t throttle each other first!
Rose Donovan looks for the good in everyone. With her sister-in-law, Peg, that sometimes requires a lot of searching. Even a sixty-something former nun like Rose has her limits, and gruff Peg Turnbull sure knows how to push them. But after forty years of bickering, they’re attempting to start over, partnering up to join the local bridge club.
Peg and Rose barely have a chance to celebrate their first win before one of the club’s most accomplished players is killed in his home. As the newest members, the sisters-in-law come under scrutiny and decide to start some digging of their own. Bridge is typically seen as a wholesome pastime, yet this group of senior citizens harbors a wealth of vices, including gambling, cheating, and adultery . . .
By comparison, Peg and Rose’s fractious relationship is starting to feel almost functional. But as their suspect list narrows, they’re unaware that their logic has a dangerous flaw. And they’ll have to hope that their teamwork holds steady when they’re confronted by a killer who’s through with playing games . . .
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Peg and Rose Solve a Murder by Laurien Berenson
Back in my 20’s when I devoured (there’s a pun there for those in the know) Virginia Rich’s Eugenia Potter mysteries, I was tickled at the thought of someone in her sixties travelling the country and having all these adventures, some quite strenuous and dangerous. And little romances as well. Sixty didn’t seem much different from eighty back in those days. Now that I’m in my sixties I reread them and OF COURSE a woman in her sixties would be adventurous and active and clever. And be open to a little romance. Always looking for a book about my contemporaries having adventures, so Peg And Rose will be going on the tbr list.
I love the idea of older sleuths – my favorite is Dorothy Gilman’s “Mrs. Pollifax” series. It is an older series, but a lot of fun.
Amateur sleuths are usually a no-go zone for me because the premise is utterly unlikely (except for the completely believable Mrs. Pollifax in my teens). THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB changed that forever and yet I’m still hesitant to try others. Some sleuthing of my own is called for here and I’m not getting younger. Thanks for all these great recommendations, Amanda.