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A Good Read: Step out of your comfort zone with these books

As someone with a lifelong love of reading, I always have a stack of books on my bedside table.
book

As someone with a lifelong love of reading, I always have a stack of books on my bedside table. My go-to books are literary fiction, Canlit, mystery and books about bookstores (my guilty pleasure).

Working in a library, however, has pushed me to read outside my comfort zone and I have developed a great fondness for fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels and young adult fiction. Here are a few books I’ve picked up in the past three months that stand out as good reads:

• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman: As the title suggests, Eleanor is fine. She has a job, an apartment and her routines. Weekdays she works, weekends she eats pizza and drinks two bottles of vodka and talks to mummy on the phone. Quickly, we start to see that everything is not fine for Eleanor. All of this changes when she and the new IT person at work save the life of a man who has been hit by a car. She is suddenly pulled from her comfortable routines into the lives of other people and she finds that she likes the new people, new routines and new life that begin to crack open for Eleanor. She begins to want something that is more than just fine. But before she can fully embrace this new future, she has to deal with mummy.

• Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella: Audrey is on a break from school while recovering from an unnamed incident that happened at her school. She is suffering from severe anxiety and depression, and readers are invited in to see what this recovery looks like. At the start of the book, Audrey rarely leaves the house except to visit her therapist, Dr. Sarah; she is on medication, wears dark glasses most of the time and is slowly relearning how to be in the world. This book gets a lot of things right. The family feels like a real family with all the quirks and weirdness. Audrey’s recovery is up and down and she isn’t “cured” by the end of the story. This book is a good introduction to mental illness for teens that isn’t too scary.

• Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan: This novel opens with the main character, Lydia, discovering the body of Joey, one of the bookstore regulars, hanging from the ceiling. In his pocket is a picture from Lydia’s 10th birthday. This discovery, along with the messages from some oddly disfigured books, sends her down a rabbit hole as she revisits a traumatic event from her past, her estranged father and a policeman who won’t let the past go. This intricately plotted book keeps your heart pounding until it finally gives up the answers at the very end.

• The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley: Flavia is back with a new mystery to solve. This time, the whole family and Dogger have gone on a boating trip as they mourn their beloved father. On a lazy trip down the river, Flavia catches what she thinks to be a fish — but it turns out to be a corpse. And what better way to distract a grieving Flavia than by solving a murder? Soon, she is busy with new characters, chemistry experiments and tantalizing clues.

• The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline: In a world destroyed by climate change, Indigenous people are being hunted for their bone marrow. After losing his own family, Frenchie is taken in by a group of Indigenous refugees who are heading north trying to stay one step ahead of the recruiters who are hunting them. Along the way, we learn each character’s back story; these stories bind them together as a group and strengthen them as they face this dystopian world together. This story asks hard questions about what it means to be human.
Happy reading!

A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Kathy Johnson works at Coquitlam Public Library.