Maude McDaniel
Content by Maude McDaniel
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Admittedly, 12-year-old Tom Page is no Gulliver, but he’s way ahead of his time (late 18th-century England) in his belief that animals and humans can interact with respect—and even love
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Who'd have known? Apparently there are strict rules of behavior for witches in this world, and many of these rules aim at preserving a fairly conventional moral structure.
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Paige Dunn is smart, beautiful, loving, and, not incidentally, paralyzed from the neck down.
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This is exactly the kind of book you would expect the now-legendary Sully Sullenberger to write.
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Everything about Africa seems outsized—the landscape, the beauty, the dangers, the passions.
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<B>A mother's quest to heal her daughter</B> When Catriona's eight-year-old daughter Daisy shows flu symptoms that won't go away, the London doctors, stymied, start looking for the answ
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Not that it's a bad thing for your first novel to be a bestseller.
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In Japan, there is an old tradition of writing wishes or prayers on pieces of paper and tying them to “wish trees,” so that they might come true.
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To be a good busybody, you need people skills and the best of intentions.
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<b>An invitation to the Lord's supper</b> When Nick Cominsky receives a formal invitation to dinner with Jesus Christ, he assumes it's just another prank by the fellows at work.
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Wherever you stand in the argument about purloining art in order to preserve it, this evenhanded novel probably won't help define your position.
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Webster first saw her “wrapped around a tree,” the victim of an automobile accident he was called to help with as a new recruit for the local emergency rescue service.
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When "the great Ivan Z" returns to the little Appalachian mining town where he grew up, he is "a grown man with only one box." Indeed, the former football hero turned sheriff's deputy, whose dream ca
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In Minding Frankie, Binchy assembles a large cast of characters (many of them familiar faces from the close-knit Dublin neighborhood last depicted in Heart and Soul) and deploys them with her characteristic playfulness, effortlessly forming yet another warm tale of individual growth and human community.
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Father Flynn has a problem: basically the sheer weariness that comes of being a religious man in an increasingly uninterested and illiterate religious climate.
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An ornithologist by choice and trade, Nathan loves the world of birds, but as a character he is as much Tom Sawyer as John James Audubon.
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Faith Bass Darling has her moments. More and more of them all the time, when she has to repeat her checklist ("My name is Faith Bass Darling.
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A shockingly hilarious debut, Crazy Rich Asians will carry the reader to a civilization comparable to Lilliput, Wonderland or Narnia.
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When endearing, distracted Bridget dies unexpectedly, the battle's on between her two younger sisters for custody of her 10-month-old daughter Jade. This isn't Kramer vs. Kramer, but it is Jean vs.
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Ever since the last of her four children left home during the war, Agnes Schofield had looked forward to their return.
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Margaret Drabble is the dean of English fiction writers, with some 17 novels and two biographies on record, not to mention having served as editor of two editions of The Oxford Companion to Engl
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When Madeline and Aaron marry, they have a right to expect that life will yield up its customary variety of experiences.
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And we thought Lady Macbeth was a terminal basket case, mad with fury and ambition, who stopped at nothing and was stopped by practically no one.
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Past tense is as important as present tense in Anita Shreve's delicate story of growing emotional and physical maturity, glimpsed and gained through two painful years of memories and hope.
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All he wanted for Christmas was a glass-wax stencil kit. Not so much for a young boy to ask, even in 1953.
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Eccentric old maid, one-of-a-kind, an original none of these clichŽs do justice to 50-year-old Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, who has second sight, carves life-sized wooden figures for company and si
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Emma Gant, newly graduated from college and bristling with ambition, takes a job with the Miami Star in the summer of 1959 a great time to start growing up.
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Youth isn't easy for any of the young in this book, but then life is no great shakes for the older ones either. At least, that may be the reader's first lesson from this first novel.
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The 40 members of the Class of 1997 at the highly respected Siddons School for Girls (K-12) on New York City's Upper East Side see only one predictable year ahead before their lives break out into th
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The author of 10 previous books, including Stones From the River and Salt Dancers, Ursula Hegi was born in Germany and has won more than 30 grants and awards.
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We knew of them at the time, but we did not know them for what they were—acts of national ruthlessness for which Pearl Harbor was no excuse.
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There is one thing you can be sure of in Nicolle Wallace’s debut novel: Every background detail and procedural item is accurate to the very last degree.
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Claire married Martin because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
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No one can find the fun in human dynamics like Clyde Edgerton, the author of such keenly observed Southern romps as Raney and
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Vincent was a giver. All his life he believed in, and put great thought into, giving gifts to his friends. Perhaps that is why he got so upset in ninth grade about the O.
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Betta Nolan stops running when she reaches Stewart, Illinois.
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If you've read the Bible, you know the story of the book of Ruth. Bret Lott takes that timeless tale as the basis of his lyrical new novel, A Song I Knew By Heart.
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You've heard about the four-and-twenty blackbirds, but an 18-inch, 7-year-old boy, baked in a pie? The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
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Shades of the Duke, the King and even Fagin: Benjamin Nab spins stories that have them all beat. Wanted on 17 separate charges, he can usually come up with the necessary lie to get out of the fix.
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For sheer enjoyment, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is one of the best books of the year.
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First, you fall apart. That's OK. You have just been told by your doctor that you have cancer. On hearing such news, everybody falls apart, in his or her own way.
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<b>McDermott's finely honed family portrait</b> John and Mary Keane are ordinary people, too ordinary perhaps by today's standards: quiet, steady, dependable.
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Spying is a complicated business, and that's not even counting the spying part. The intelligence acronyms are hard enough to keep straight (FI, CI, HUMINT, COMMI).
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Spying is a complicated business, and that's not even counting the spying part. The intelligence acronyms are hard enough to keep straight (FI, CI, HUMINT, COMMI).
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In 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) began in upstate New York with six men.
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Growing up is what Kitty does in Playing with the Grown-ups, but as usual the process isn't always pretty.
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Kate Atkinson’s remarkable, and vastly enjoyable, new novel requires a reader on ball bearings—someone capable of turning with every plot variation and yet able to stay balanced through
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Classic storytelling and a modern sensibility don’t always come in the same package.
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Whenever the “white wind” blew down the mountain toward Louisville, the city hunched away.
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Despite the passage of 300 years, things do not seem to have changed much in the land of Don Quixote at least according to author Andromeda Romano-Lax.
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When Mia and Mac start receiving threatening graffiti messages from a neighborhood gang, they decide it might be a good idea to move out to the Chicago suburbs.
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Every picture, they say, is worth a thousand words, and in Jonathan Coe's eighth work of fiction, The Rain Before It Falls, the reader lucks out in both categories.
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Everyone in Jamesland, it seems, is on hold.
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Gail Godwin is one of the few contemporary novelists willing to tackle the ticklish (to modern writers) topic of religion in real life.
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Youth can be almost pathological for some, and so it proved for Bill Argus. Unfortunately, the impact of his early behavior was, as so often happens, even more disastrous to others.
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As clients of the Moulton Foundation for which Lindy Caton works, Ulwa, Adhah and Seelah are ancient and mysterious crones indeed, considered gypsies by many in Acheron (pronounced Ash Run), Louisi
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Unexpected riches—that's what you'll find if you open I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People, an unassuming memoir that takes up where Marian Cannon Schl
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Perhaps most of us occasionally long for earlier, happier times, but Maryam Mazar puts her yearning into action, returning to Iran from England in a struggle to make sense of our days and dispel th
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Okay, so there are sharks. And reconstituted dinosaurs. Unfriendly nuclear powers and hostile aliens and berserk asteroids. But the flu?
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What I wouldn't give for a gaggle of ancestors like Janice Woods Windle's. They make such marvelous fiction!
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Only every daughter and son alive today should read this book. The message is universal: Live long enough, and you'll finally understand your parents.
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You might call this a fairy tale for angst-ridden intellectuals but you'd be wrong.
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This book's a carrier.
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All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack.
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With all due regards to the subtitle of this book, history's the least of it! Wanderlust is astonishingly more than that, including digression, celebration, and a certain amount of excess that lift
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I hate the whole idea of the food chain.
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Linking sex to real estate is like using pretty girls to sell cars it may be hitting below the belt, but it works.
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Like the rest of the family, the Virgin Mary works in mysterious ways.
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The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed Murder, madness, glamour, and greed. Yep, I'd say that pretty well covers it.
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ere is a book written in the language of hurt, learned from childhood and refined through years of intensive education, both by the world he lives in and the person he is.
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am Greene once pointed out that Africa is shaped like the human heart an appropriate image for a land that entices so many people.
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Sometimes you get more attention by keeping your life and thoughts to yourself. J.D. Salinger managed it for years.
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Staying on track At first glance it looks something like a proud parent's "Baby Book." But appearances can be deceiving The Cancer Patient's Workbook: Everything You Need to Stay Organized and Info
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ng with cancer: helpful books for the journey First, you fall apart. That's OK. You have just been told by your doctor that you have cancer.
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omething amazing started in the late 1970s and continues to this day.
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Torn between Mexican-Jewishness and American-Jewishness, Ilan Stavans traces the roots of ethnic struggle in his earnest, rewarding memoir On Borrowed Words.
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First the settlers called the Massachusetts town Bearsville, and for good reason. Without the bears that succored Hallie Brady, the earliest settlers would not have survived their first winter.
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A classical voice teacher isolated on the plains during the Depression tries to teach a black rodeo performer with one lung how to sing, drawing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Working just a smidgeon outside the law, Casey Woods’ crew of experts, “Forensic Instincts,” tackles the daunting case of a kidnapped kindergartener, Krissy, in Andrea Kane’
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When Sydney married Laurus in 1940, she learned to cook "frikadeller and buttermilk soup and cauliflower in shrimp and dill sauce, recipes sent by Laurus' mother" from Denmark.
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In May of 1904, when Thomas Edgar returns to England from his butterfly-collecting expedition to Brazil, his young wife Sophie expects that their happy life together will resume its familiar conte
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Perhaps on the theory that unhappy endings aren't so off-putting if you know about them from the start, The Divide begins with the discovery of the dead body of the most appealing characte
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Who can resist a wunderkind? Richard Mason is 20 years old, and he has already published a novel. What more need be said? In this case, a great deal.
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No, it’s not a sequel to The Help.
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June works in the kitchen of the local elementary school, and exciting things don't happen to her very often.
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It was all a game, Alden thought, when his wife Becky responded to their new life in Prague by making all the rules herself.
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Everybody loves a treasure hunt, and, all by themselves, the Dead Sea Scrolls certainly qualify as "the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century." Add in the fact that o
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Some choose hobbits, some choose Harry Potter, but the most interesting of all fantastical cultures to read about may be the ones that actually exist—across deserts or oceans or continents.
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Put your faith in strangers, says David's mother, aiming for a bit of English irony, but when David does just that, the reader knows from the start that he will eventually pay for it.
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From the start he had too much to do: breathing, sleeping, waking, eating . . . they just went on and on.
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Being a princess—especially being a Russian princess—isn't everything Disney would have you believe.
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Milly was 16 when Cousin Bettie came to visit, and things were never the same again.
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Lily Hill, the main character in Nancy Clark's delightful debut novel The Hills at Home, is more of a balance wheel than a protagonist. Lily is both uber-maiden aunt and Mrs.
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<B>Wild things: a naturalist's love story</B> In her new memoir <B>Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild</B>, Renee Askins, who founded The Wolf Fund i
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