These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card

Hello my lovely readers! I checked this out at the library a few days ago and was reading it up until I boarded a plane for a work conference. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend.

And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.

These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the house boy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.

The Most by Jessica Anthony

 

Hello my lovely readers! This was a quick read. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Kathleen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, THE MOST breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 by Eli Erlick

Hello my lovely readers! I have a LOT to say about this book, so let's just get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Highlighting influential individuals from 1850-1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares 30 remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy, and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term.

Organized into 4 parts paralleling today’s controversies over gender identity (kids, activists, workers, and athletes), Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion

Mark and David Ferrow, two of the first trans teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment following overwhelming support from their friends, family, and neighbors.Gerda von Zobeltitz, a trans countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot 40 years before Stonewall.Frank Williams, a young trans man who was fired from over a dozen jobs for his gender.Frances Anderson, the world’s greatest female billiards player of the 1910s.

Bold and visionary, Erlick’s debut uncovers these lost stories from the depths of the archives to narrate trans lives in a way that has never been attempted before.

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner

Hello my lovely readers! This was the book I chose to read for #MegaMay on Bookstagram. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.

The Names by Florence Knapp

Hello my lovely readers! Oh my, how I loved this book! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

Strangers by Taichi Yamada

Hello my lovely readers! This was a Bookstagram find. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
A man is drawn back to his childhood home and discovers his parents living just as they were on the day they died thirty years before.

Screenwriter Harada is disconnected from the world. Lonely and jaded, he’s drifted apart from his son and is dismissive when approached with gestures of friendship, including from a lonely and mysterious tenant who lives in his mostly empty apartment building.

One night, when Harada returns to the dilapidated downtown district of Tokyo where he grew up, he meets a man who looks exactly like his long-dead father. And so begins Harada’s ordeal, thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they died many years earlier.