August Staff Picks

Scot says,

“With a sub­ti­tle like that, is there any­thing left for me to say? When Eric Robert Rudolph det­o­nat­ed a pipe bomb in Atlanta’s Cen­ten­ni­al Olympic Park in July 1996, I was a 20-year-old in Alaba­ma who only occa­sion­al­ly paid atten­tion to the news – but, based on the lit­tle news that did make its way to my eyes and ears over the fol­low­ing months, I, like an awful lot of peo­ple, was pret­ty cer­tain a secu­ri­ty guard named Richard Jew­ell was respon­si­ble for the crime. Quick­ly laud­ed as a life-sav­ing hero, then tar­get­ed as the investigation’s chief sus­pect, Jew­ell was even­tu­al­ly, after months of very pub­lic scruti­ny, cleared of any asso­ci­a­tion with the bomb­ing. In The Sus­pect, Kent Alexan­der – the US Attor­ney in Atlanta who pub­licly removed Jew­ell as a tar­get of the inves­ti­ga­tion in Octo­ber 1996 – mas­ter­ful­ly tells the heart­break­ing sto­ry of an inves­ti­ga­tion gone wrong and of the flawed, yet hero­ic, Jewell.”

Ali says,

“I’m a suck­er for books about friend groups aging and chang­ing over time, and although it’s a hor­ror nov­el about col­lege friends sum­mon­ing a drag­on to smite their ene­mies, King Sor­row by Joe Hill scratched that itch for me. The book blends hor­ror and fan­ta­sy, with leaps in time that allow for deep char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and unlike­ly over­laps between the fan­ta­sy nar­ra­tive and our own real­i­ty. Fans of Stephen King will enjoy this (Hill is King’s son, after all) but so will fans of Lev Gross­man­’s Magi­cians series. I enjoyed how var­i­ous char­ac­ters dis­ap­pear and reemerge in ways that shock and sur­prise the read­er – while the drag­on is the biggest issue in this book, oth­er char­ac­ters are just as capa­ble of doing good and evil and shift­ing the plot in wild ways. I could­n’t put this down!”

Lib­by says,

“What is fam­i­ly? Are you born into it, or is it where you land? If you’re Helen, Lily, and Karen, it’s one part inten­tion, one part con­ve­nience, and one part fight­ing snakes. The bleak Appalachi­an hills pro­vide the set­ting for this unusu­al fam­i­ly. Lily and Karen were kicked out of their all-women’s land trust for pro­duc­ing a male child, Per­ley. Merg­ing resources with them is Helen, a tough but vul­ner­a­ble woman dragged off the grid by her ex, deter­mined to make a go of it on her 20 acres of land. Over the years, they nav­i­gate nutri­tion, elec­tric­i­ty, school­ing, the intrud­ing state gov­ern­ment, and their inter­minable snake infes­ta­tion. As he grows old­er, Per­ley begins to nar­rate his own chap­ters, and his inno­cence and accep­tance of his unusu­al home life often broke me. He adores his Women (as he calls them) but has a long­ing for social­iza­tion that con­founds him. Stand­ing along­side these women and their child as they build a home for the bit­ter win­ters with no con­struc­tion skills, feed a fam­i­ly of four with no income, and con­stant­ly bat­tle the snakes that are always work­ing their way into their dwellings is hilar­i­ous, heart­break­ing and bewildering.”