You’re Snowed In … Again

Love a family saga or are a fan of superb owls

Hi friends,

Have you ever dreamed of winning a Willy Wonka-esque golden ticket, but for books? Bookshop.org is raffling off just that.

Bookshop.org is an online bookstore that supports independent bookstores nationwide. Three-quarters of the company’s profit margin is distributed to neighborhood bookshops, authors and others who promote books and reading. (Disclosure: I’m a Bookshop.org affiliate member. If you buy a book through this newsletter, I get a small commission.)

To celebrate its second year — and distributing more than $21 million to bookstores worldwide — Bookshop is hosting a raffle. The Grand Prize winner will receive an annual gift card of $600 to spend on Bookshop.org for 75 years and will also get to choose a bookstore to receive a one-time $500 donation. Five second-place winners will receive a $100 gift card to redeem on Bookshop.org. You can enter here. 

Here’s hoping one of us wins!

And, now, what to read if …

You’re Shoveling Out … Again

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

Significant parts of the country — the Northeast, the Rust Belt and even Texas — got hit with winter storms last week. If you’re surrounded by snow (or are wishing for some), Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party is your next read.

The Hunting Party follows a group of nine longtime friends celebrating New Year’s at a secluded hunting lodge deep in the Scottish wilderness. While there, as record amounts of snow fall, the year’s long resentments and jealousies surge and one member of the party ends up dead. The remaining friends and the resort’s staff are snowed in with a murderer.

I loved the structure of this book. In the opening pages, the reader learns one of the guests is dead, but not which one. The victim’s identity isn’t revealed until about three-quarters of the way through, making it a double whodunnit. I frantically alternated between the audiobook and the written book to learn not just who died but who the murderer was. 

Lucy Foley, like Ruth Ware, has rightfully earned a reputation as a modern-day Agatha Christie. She writes twisty, tightly plotted locked room mysteries featuring characters with fascinating group dynamics that keep readers guessing. 

Bonus recommendations: The Hunting Party is one of many snowed-in books I highlighted in a recent article for Strong Sense of Place. If you’ve already read The Hunting Party or are looking for more snowy goodness, check it out.

You Love a Multi-Generational Family Saga

The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade

I love a story about a family growing into better people and learning to support each other. Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds delivers just that. 

The book opens during Holy Week in a small town in New Mexico. After coming home from rehearsal for the annual Good Friday procession, Amadeo Padilla finds his estranged fifteen-year-old pregnant daughter, Angel, on his doorstep. Amadeo, an unemployed alcoholic, is unprepared to discover he’s about to be a grandfather. Simultaneously, Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, learns she has terminal brain cancer while on vacation in Las Vegas. The novel follows the three characters and a few relatives over the course of Angel’s pregnancy and the first year of her baby’s life.

The Five Wounds is the definition of a beautiful quiet, character-driven novel. The title comes from Amadeo’s decision to have actual nails hammered into his body while acting as Jesus in the Good Friday procession, an excruciating scene that takes place early in the book. From there, Quade explores the themes of resurrection and rebirth, considering what it takes to remake yourself into a better person. 

I particularly appreciated the book’s depiction of the opioid crisis. Quade writes with empathy and compassion about a community that has been devastated by the crisis, showing how it has harmed individuals, families and entire cities. It’s a heartbreaking and timely story.

You’re More Excited About Superb Owls Than the Super Bowl

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght

Each year on Super Bowl Sunday, social media lights up with pictures of superb owls. The celebration of the nocturnal birds has grown so popular, “The Superb Owl” was a category on Jeopardy! in 2019. The invaluable Know Your Meme has an explainer on the phrase if you’re interested. 

Jonathan Slaght’s memoir Owls of the Eastern Ice celebrates all things superb owl. In it, he recounts his time in the remote forests of eastern Russia looking for Blakiston’s fish owl, one of the rarest birds on Earth, while conducting research for his doctoral dissertation. Despite the fish owl’s size — they’re two feet tall and have wingspans reaching six feet — they’re remarkably difficult to find. Slaght and a team of Russian companions set out to put trackers on the owls to better understand the bird's behaviors and develop a plan to protect them. It’s a journey that involves long nights spent in tents in the frigid winter and frantic attempts to cross thawing rivers.

Slaght excels at bringing the Russian province of Primorye, an area that borders the Sea of Japan, North Korea and China, and its lush forests to life. I also enjoyed his descriptions of the people he met deep in the wilderness, who include a recluse/former KGB agent who believes in teleportation, a research assistant with a habit of driving off the road and a cabin caretaker who sleeps in a pyramid and soaks deer penises in vodka and then drinks the concoction “for virility.”   

Reminder rec: Last year for the big game, I suggested Alexa Martin’s Fumbled, a second chance romance featuring a single mom and an NFL player. 

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I have a guest recommendation from the fabulous Jolene, who writes Time Travel Kitchen, a newsletter where she writes about her experiences baking vintage recipes in her 1927 kitchen.

“I love A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir, for so many reasons and go back to it year after year, sometimes reading just a chapter. 

It offers a glimpse of Paris in the 20’s and of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ of writers and artists, as told by Hemingway in ways that range from loving and appreciative to borderline gossipy and sometimes cruel. 

His description of hunger and satiation and his joy when finally enjoying a meal of briny oysters and crisp white wine remind me of what a great food writer he was. 

And, of course, this is a beautifully written, intimate book — you hear his voice telling YOU these stories.  The details of his disciplined writing practice every morning, right down to the sharpening of pencils, inspire me to set out to write at least ‘one true sentence’ daily.”

That’s it for me today. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Thursday with a Q&A featuring Zoraida Córdova.

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What to Read If is a free weekly book recommendation newsletter. Need a rec? Want to gush about a book? Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Twitter @elizabethheld.

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