Not just the weather My Friends, but the wonderful books that will be coming to us here in this last month of the summer of 2010!

Girls of Murder City:  Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry is a book I can’t wait to get my hands on.  Belva Gaertner was a wealthy divorcee and Beulah Annan was a young and beautiful wife  who captured the imaginations of 1920’s Chicago when they shot their lovers to death.  This is not just an account of the murderesses but also the young woman reporter who blazed a trail and broke the barrier of the all male crime reporters.   This book sounds like it will be one of my favorite things:  history made fun and readable.

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson explores the bond between mother and son and lives not fully realized in this highly anticipated novel.  Things are not going well for Arvid Jansen.  He is in the midst of a divorce and his mother is dying of cancer.  When he decides to accompany her to Denmark to help her live out her final days he also examines what he has made of his life so far. And while this sounds as if it could be maudlin, Petterson’s style of spare writing means that this is pretty much guaranteed to be a wonderful read.

Red Queen by Phillipa Gregory is the latest installment in her series on the lives of the women in the Plantagenet family.  When we are first introduced to Margaret Beaufort she  is a worldly 12 years old about to be wed to Edmund Tutor who is twice her age.  When she is widowed at 14 and pregnant with her son she decides that she will no longer be a pawn in the royal power struggle and she will make her own way and her own rules.  This series grabbed a lot of us with the first book of The White Queen.  We are most excited about this one.

Good Daughters is Joyce Maynard’s latest.  We loved last year’s Labor Day and can’t wait to read her again.  In her most recent offering, we meet two girls who while born on the same day, in the same hospital could not be more different.  Ruth is the romantic artist type who lives in a dream world and Dana is the scientist who believes in the concrete and real.  Beginning in the 1950s and bringing us up to the present, Good Daughters examines the worlds of two very different and yet connected women.

Here is to low humidty and sunny skies and lovely reads!