The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her new adopted family, even though she is forever set apart from them by her white skin. 

 

As Lavinia is slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles an opium addiction, she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When Lavinia marries the master’s troubled son and takes on the role of mistress, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare and lives are put at risk.

 

The Kitchen House is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail..

368 pages (February 2010) 

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Title Read-alikes: Jubilee by Margaret Walker; The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden; Property by Valerie Martin; The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd; Oonagh by Mary Tilberg; The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd; The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates; The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier; The Known World by Edward P. Jones; Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford; Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly; Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper; and Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay.

Sugarhouse: A Memoir by Matthew Batt

An improbably funny account of how the purchase and restoration of a disaster of a fixer-upper saves a young marriage

When a season of ludicrous loss tests the mettle of their marriage, Matthew Batt and his wife decide not to call it quits. They set their sights instead on the purchase of a dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake City. With no homesteading experience and a full-blown quarter-life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad students/waiters/nonprofiteers decide to seek salvation through renovation, and do all they can to turn a former crack house into a home. Dizzy with despair, doubt, and the side effects of using the rough equivalent of napalm to detoxify their house, they enter into full-fledged adulthood with power tools in hand.

Heartfelt and joyous, Sugarhouse is the story of how one couple conquers adversity and creates an addition to their family, as well as their home

258 Pages (June 2012)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Title Read-alikes: This the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett; The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs; The Good House by Ann Leary; By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair; The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper; All the Way Home by David Giffels; I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron; Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle; Aftertaste by Meredith Mileti; Without a Map by Meredith Hall; The Happiness Project by Gretchen Craft Rubin; Open House by Jane Christmas; and Buddy by Brian McGrory.

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously-and at great risk-documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives. Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart

344 Pages. (March 2011)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Title Read-alikes: Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein; The Boy on the Bridge by Natlie Standiford; Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian; Someday We Will Fly by Rachel DeWoskin; Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath; Torn Thread by Anne Isaacs; Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz; Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin; The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr; The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig; Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly; Memories of My Future by Ammar Habib; and A Night Divided by Jennifer A Nielsen.