Summer is officially five days old, which means there’s no time to lose on that summer reading. Susie Orman Schnall weighs in with a nostalgic novel set at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (now the home of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. In the Roaring ’20s, it was the ash heap that proves key to the denouement of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”).
Schnall’s iteration of the site, “We Came Here to Shine” (St. Martin’s Press) finds two women seeking their destinies during a magical summer when the future truly seemed limitless. (If you’re lucky enough to have relatives who attended and recorded the fair, it looked like something from outer space.)
Single mothers take center stage in two other new novels. In “Derailed” (Camel Press) by Mary Keliikoa, Kelly Pruett must balance being a single mother to her deaf daughter with following in her father’s footsteps as a private investigator.
“The Gretchen Question” (Delphinium Books” by Jessica Treadway treads a little traveled path in a tale of a difficult relationship between a single mother and her teenage son.
Happy reading.
