Daughter of the Merciful Deep

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope is the author's second book that deals with a hard subject in our history beautifully. 

Jane Edwards lives in Awenasa, a Black town in the South. Awenasa is along a river that is to be dammed, which will cause the town to be underwater by winter. 

Government officials come to town and interview home owners, offering a small amount of money to relocate. Many in the town rent from the town's founder who set up the town as a haven for formerly enslaved folks and their families. 

Jane, who has not spoken since she was about ten years old,  spots a stranger - a man who looks exactly like her sister's former boyfriend who was lynched in their old town. 

Can he be the key to saving Awenasa? Or is he a ghost from the past come to collect what she owes him?

Leslye Penelope is a brilliant storyteller. She weaves magical realism into historically accurate portrayals Black American's lives in our history. If you live in the States, read her books.

Penelope, Leslye. (2024). Daughter of the Merciful Deep. New York: Redhook.

City of Laughter

 

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter is a family saga through four generations of women.

A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.

City of Laughter follows a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets back to her family's origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.

Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th-century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger - bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.

In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother, Mira, about whom no one speaks.

What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind. [from fantastic fiction]

Fruchter, Temim. (2024). City of Laughter. New York: Grove Press.

A Death in Cornwall (Gabriel Allon #24)

A Death in Cornwall by Daniel Silva is the 24th book in the Gabriel Allon series - following the life of an art restorer and now-retired Mossad agent. 

Art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into London to attend a reception at the Courtauld Gallery celebrating the return of a stolen self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh. But when an old friend from the Devon and Cornwall Police seeks his help with a baffling murder investigation, he finds himself pursuing a powerful and dangerous new adversary.

This is my favorite thriller/mystery/espionage series. Gabriel Allon is a great character. Daniel Silva is an amazing writer. If you like books, check out this series.

Silva, Daniel. (2024). A Death in Cornwall. New York: Harper.