Cover Image: Buzz Books 2020: Fall/Winter

Buzz Books 2020: Fall/Winter

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Member Reviews

Buzz Books is the perfect way to get a head start and great suggestions for the newest “must-have” reads! In this edition I was happy to see four books that I had already read and I know they are worth the Buzz! Several other excerpts from books led me to enlarge my ToBeRead list and I look forward to delving into these books by both familiar authors and newbies! Highly recommend this book when you want a sneak peak at what’s coming up! I received an ARC of this book from NetGAlley and Publishers Lunch in return for an honest review, which this has been. #NetGalley #BuzzBooks2020:Fall/Winter. #PublishersLunch

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This is so informative. It has been incredibly helpful to have upcoming releases at my fingertips. Thank you for compiling it!

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Thank you Publishers Lunch @Netgalley for the catalogue. I found a lot of interesting books that I requested and look forward to reviewing them!

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A great taste of what to look for this fall/ winter season. A lot to choose from, and to add to your To Be Read List.

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An exciting look of the up and coming books.
So excited for some of these. Thank you netgalley for the opportunity to get a preview.
Will always recommend this.

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As always, some wonderful excerpts to read and there are a few I will look out for. (I'm in the UK so I may have to wait a little while).

I like the sound of The Incredible Winston Brown by Sean Dietrich and also The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans. I suspect they are more for the US market but hopefully will eventually be available here.

I read The Pillars of the Earth and the sequel some years ago and although I can't remember every detail I know I enjoyed these books. I'll be looking out for the prequel, The Evening and The Morning,.

I don't think I've read any of Matt Haig's previous books but I've already reserved The Midnight Library e-book from our library although I'll have to wait until June 2021.. It sounds intriguing.

When the Apricots Bloom is another one that sounds good.

I've just finished reading The Thursday Murder Club (thanks NetGalley!). It's excellent. A well written murder mystery (and more). Great characters, lots of humour, plenty of twists, turns and red herrings. A very enjoyable read.

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What a fabulous idea to compile a quick blurb about the books that are upcoming. I was able to find some debuts I'm excited for, as well as some of my favorite authors' upcoming releases.

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I'm so glad to have read this sampler. I found so many great sounding new books, specifically Beauty Among Ruins by J'nell Ciesielski. I cannot WAIT for that title! Thanks for putting this together! Looking forward to the Spring edition.

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WOW! So much goodness in here, with incredible titles to get excited about! If ever there was a time to be stuck at home with more time to read, I’m thrilled to have so many titles coming out that I NEED to read!

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I enjoyed the opportunity to see books coming out this year but wish there were even a sentence or two descriptions to really help me narrow down what I wanted to read.

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Nice book with reviews of new books. If you are looking for some good Fall and Winter books, I would,look this book over. It has several wonderful reads that will be out in the next few months. It has a variety of topics and genres. Looks like it will be a good season for reading.

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Wow! There is a great selection of book excerpts in this Buzz Books 2020: Fall/Winter edition! I only read a few excerpts; but I wrote down the titles and authors of quite a lot to check out on the Internet. I also saved the edition to go back to and read excerpts when I have more time. This being the first time I have downloaded Buzz Books, and being very satisfied with the selections; I will be sure to check out the next edition and would recommend it to others who enjoy reading a variety of titles and authors. For those interested in this selection of book excerpts, I found it on NetGalley.com to download.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Publishers Lunch for the chance to read a copy! But for everyone else, please note this collection of samples is available free at e-book retailers.

I love Buzz Books and the chance to try things I normally wouldn't, even if it seems like maybe the average reader isn't the target audience. The introduction and its giant list of books is overwhelming -- maybe industry professionals recognize names and publishers and what not, but I had to cling to the occasional annotations like "A new novel from the author of JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL." And I am also confused about why Fiction and Debut [Fiction] are separated into distinct sections, and why these comprise 80% of the 30 titles with just 3 non-fiction and 3 YA. But oh well, I quickly moved on to the samples.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam
Cover: beautiful with its night-time lighting, cool color palette, and stylized illustration
Excerpt: I found this excerpt pretty off-putting, with the omniscient POV head-hopping (I'm used to deep third-person) and many gross references to bodies
Would I Read It: this isn't for me, although the cover copy about this being an isolation suspense/thriller-type read was the first hint

IN THE GARDEN OF SPITE: A NOVEL OF THE BLACK WHITE OF LA PORTE by Camilla Bruce
Cover: suitably creepy with the fog and the skulls on the ground and the bright red font
Excerpt: we don't find out much, as there's a brief cryptic scene that then flashes back to an ominous plan for a girl to finally confront the boy who got her pregnant (serious murder ballad vibes)
Would I Read It: Novelization of female serial killer is probably catnip for someone, but it is not me (my wimpiness will be a recurring theme throughout this review)

BEAUTY AMONG RUINS by J'nell Ciesielski
Cover: not available in the excerpt, but on Goodreads it is a pretty scene of a beautiful young woman looking at an estate among rolling hills
Excerpt: Our heroine Lily is very young and spoiled and it is not very pleasant to be in her point of view
Would I Read It: presumably her character arc will include maturation, but I don't have the patience for it

THE INCREDIBLE WINSTON BROWNE by Sean Dietrich
Cover: sepia-toned picture of "Main Street"-type row of businesses
Excerpt: we have POVs from a young Deaf girl whose family is driving somewhere, a woman in a small town unhappy in her marriage, and the titular Winston Browne receiving a terminal diagnosis
Would I Read It: I honestly have no idea where this story is going, but none of the vignettes grabbed me

THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS by Danielle Evans
Cover: fun, with the highlighter and the "pencil annotations," though I'm not really sure what it means about the contents
Excerpt: a white girl wearing a Confederate flag bikini and a social media feud with a Black classmate, and a lot of controversy and stubbornness ensues
Would I Read It: yes! I couldn't stop reading, and being in this college girl's head felt especially apt as we've got local headlines about college kids being willful and stubborn and reckless about covid

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING by Ken Follett
Cover: pretty deep teal color with interesting texture, though doesn't indicate much about the book
Excerpt: the cover copy mentions many different characters but we just follow the first one, Edgar the boatbuilder's son. The first few pages made me impatient, but then the Viking ships appear and the action sucked me in
Would I Read It: yes, I'm interested to see more, and I've always meant to read Follett (I was fascinated to see his name in the Commercial Fiction section of the overview since all I knew was that his books were gigantic!)

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig
Cover: appropriately midnight blue, with eye-catching orange and yellow accents, and a nice section of motion generated by the illustrations going in and out of windows
Excerpt: should have come with a trigger warning (cat is killed, and protagonist commits suicide). the book of regrets was interesting, and the concept of a library of all your possible lives intrigued me, but I was really upset by the opening
Would I Read It: probably not, for my own wellbeing, if the depressing events and mental health issues of the protagonist continue to be a main theme

THE ARREST by Jonathan Lethem
Cover: old-timey illustration of a lake, plus a giant silver drilling vehicle
Excerpt: post-apocalyptic, fragmented prose, everything about this excerpt made me deeply uneasy
Would I Read It: this writing style is not at all to my taste (also, it just made me think of Alyssa Cole's Off the Grid series and how much I'd rather be reading it)

THE CHANEL SISTERS by Judithe Little
Cover: woman with her face hidden, with a fur stole and a black-and-white picture of the Eiffel Tower superimposed. lots of genre markers for women's historical fiction
Excerpt: Chanel sisters grow up in a nunnery, then are picked up by their grandmother and an aunt their age
Would I Read It: this isn't my style, and nothing in the opening pages caught my attention

THE BLADE BETWEEN by Sam J Miller
Cover: creepy, with the dripping font and a glowing whale
Excerpt: omniscient chapter about Hudson NY's whaling history, then two POVs, one third-person of Dom, a small-town cop, and one first-person of Ronan, an addict reluctantly seeing his family
Would I Read It: the phrase "a frightening and uncanny ghost story" in the cover copy did an excellent job of saying Not For You

MONOGAMY by Sue Miller
Cover: I know the title is Mono*gamy*, but the cover and its simple leaf pattern is very mono*tonous*
Excerpt: dissection of heroine's romantic history and how she met her husband
Would I Read It: the excerpt and the cover copy promise a deeply unromantic examination of love, faithfulness, and marriage; as a lifelong romance reader, this is just never going to appeal

BLACK WIDOWS by Cate Quinn
Cover: nice and creepy with the red light and the spindly shadow of a tree
Excerpt: stream of consciousness narration, we meet two of the three lives
Would I Read It: the stream of consciousness technique was a little much for me, and I feel a little uncomfortable with the sensationalist use of polygamy, though the whodunit plot does seem interesting

CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY by Kathleen Rooney
Cover: a landscape with far-off explosions, and focus on a pigeon flying through the air
Excerpt: narration by Cher Ami the pigeon, from taxidermied post in a modern-day museum, then by Charles Whittlesey back in post-war life and not having an easy time adjusting
Would I Read It: WWII historicals don't appeal to me, and the pigeon chapter was very sentimental which was extremely unsettling to me

WE RUN THE TIDES by Vendela Vida
Cover: not available here, though on Goodreads it is a very blocky seaside illustration that looks colored with crayons
Excerpt: narrated by 13-year-old girls, about how well they know their town
Would I Read It: books about 13-year-old girls are a very hard sell for me

MEMORIAL by Bryan Washington
Cover: very plain, with a plastic bag flying like a white flag. I have no idea what this is supposed to say about the story
Excerpt: Mike and Brian are a couple, and Mike's mother Mitsuko comes to visit just as Mike leaves to visit his dying estranged father. Brian narrates in a very stream of conscious manner, very stylized with no quotation marks
Would I Read It: this is not my style

THE PUSH by Ashley Audrain
Cover: looks like a placeholder
Excerpt: odd mix of first- and second-person narration, with interwoven historical flashbacks. both timelines are stories of unhappy and abusive mothers
Would I Read It: wayyyyyyyyyyy too depressing for me

BEFORE THE RUINS by Victoria Gosling
Cover: a figure walking through trees covered in snow
Excerpt: protagonist Andy learns in the present day that her friend Peter is missing, then flash back to her group of friends in 1996 and they're exploring an abandoned mansion
Would I Read It: why does everything have to be scary, I am just not cool enough to enjoy today's fiction trends

MAKE THEM CRY by Smith Henderson and Jon Marc Smith
Cover: a nice change of pace from everything else, bold and slanted with a car cutting across the middle trailing smoke. looks like the opening credits of an action movie
Excerpt: tough prosecutor confronted by someone in their past. very short sentences
Would I Read It: not for me, though it's cool to see an action thriller thrown into this sampler

THE PROPHETS by Robert Jones, Jr
Cover: very stylized, with a sun in the sky but also the silhouettes of faces in the sky
Excerpt: two enslaved men have a furtive affair
Would I Read It: the subject matter sounds interesting and relevant -- enslaved men find comfort in each other, but then Christianity and anti-homosexual preaching brings trouble -- but I'm not sure I'm up for reading it

THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Cover: very pretty, with a slight ombre effect of coral and pink
Excerpt: Margot goes on a road trip and tries to visit her mother, it doesn't go well
Would I Read It: the complicated family dynamics are interesting, but the way the excerpt ends makes this seem like a tough emotional read

THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB by Richard Osman
Cover: very confusing. ivory with some red accents and a picture of a wolf on a hill. The blurb from Harlan Coben is a much more useful genre indicator
Excerpt: the killer POV prologue is mercifully short and ungraphic. the rest of the story is very fun, with some narrative from a retiree named Joyce who is a newbie to the club, as well as a POV from a PC (UK police person, I'm guessing) and some history of the nursing home
Would I Read It: yes, I love the premise and I had a fun time reading this excerpt

THE WITCH HUNTER by Max Seeck
Cover: dark cover in winter, red slash across it, plenty of genre markers
Excerpt: we have a victim prologue (a trope I hate because it freaks me out), and an author who gets creepily asked "Are you afraid of what you write about," which is clearly ominous given this guy writes the WITCH HUNT trilogy and the actual book is THE WITCH HUNTER
Would I Read It: too scary for me

SET MY HEART TO FIVE by Simon Stephenson
Cover: creepy wind-up dolls
Excerpt: opens like a screenplay, then we get lots of introduction to our narrator Jared, who is a bot! Ha! There are so many exclamation points!
Would I Read It: this is much too self-consciously quirky for me

WHEN THE APRICOTS BLOOM by Gina Wilkinson
Cover: texture of sloppy paintbrushing, looks very "literary novel"
Excerpt: Iraqi women Huda and Rania each encounter the Australian diplomat's wife Ally. Huda is under pressure to spy on Ally, and Rania is down on her luck but makes a new friend in Ally
Would I Read It: there is a palpable sense of danger and vulnerability in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and I'm too much of a scaredy-cat to see what happens

THREE ORDINARY GIRLS: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF HANNIE SCHAFT AND THE OVERSTEEGEN SISTERS, TEENAGED SABOTEURS AND NAZI ASSASSINS by Tim Brady
Cover: image of girl looking at a black and white picture of a car (maybe I'm supposed to be historically literate enough to recognize a famous scene?)
Important note: these women assassinated Nazis, they did not assassinate people for the Nazis, I was not sure from the title and had to look at the cover copy
Excerpt: we have some history of the Oversteegen Sisters and Jo Schaft (not sure when she'll take on the name Hannie?) as well as some history of the city of Haarlem (tulip mania!) and the beginning of the Nazi invasion of Europe, including the Netherlands
Would I Read It: this kind of non-fiction isn't really my style, though it certainly is an interesting subject

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE: A MURDER AT HARVARD AND A HALF CENTURY OF SILENCE by Becky Cooper
Cover: old, fuzzy photograph of a woman - Jane Britton?
Excerpt: narrator is a Harvard alum, returning at 30. heard story of a grad student murdered in 1969 and never solved.
Would I Read It: a key phrase is "unsolved, that is, until yesterday" -- there was no way I was going to read an unsolved true crime and get completely creeped out. But I'm really intrigued by this story, of poor Jane who didn't even get referred to by name in the Harvard ghost stories, and the navigation of the insular world of academics

CAN'T EVEN: HOW MILLENNIALS BECAME THE BURNOUT GENERATION by Anne Helen Petersen
Cover: fun illustration of the theme, the words have all fallen to the bottom of the cover
Excerpt: we only get the introduction, explaining about millennials and burnout and whatnot. I appreciate that the author does mention trying to decenter the stereotypical middle-class and white image
Would I Read It: Reading a book about millennials when I am one (and have a lot more advantages than those mentioned in the prologue) seems unbearably self-indulgent, so probably not

LORE by Alexandra Bracken
Cover: placeholder, though on Goodreads it's a Medusa statue
Excerpt: modern-day NYC, Lore is a fighting and there is a lot of violent boxing in this opening
Would I Read It: not my style

DEAREST JOSEPHINE by Caroline George
Cover: none, though now it's a pretty illustrated cover with flowers
Excerpt: epistolary, with emails between best friends Josie and Faith, and a few text messages in between. We JUST get to the edge of the book's concept, where Josephine has found old letters addressed to her but we know from the cover copy this will turn out to be written by a man in 1820
Would I Read It: the characters are a little young for me, but it's a cool meta-fiction setup

WE WERE RESTLESS THINGS by Cole Nagamatsu
Cover: GORGEOUS, photorealistic underwater with little bubbles and vivid flowers
Excerpt: I honestly skimmed this because the thought of a dead teenager texting from beyond the grave creeped me out so much
Would I Read This: see above

In conclusion, I guess it's popular for books to be scary and I am not into it one bit. But I did find some new books to add to the TBR!

Books I plan to read (out of the 30 excerpts):
THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS by Danielle Evans
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING by Ken Follett
THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB by Richard Osman
WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE by Becky Cooper

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This was a great introduction to so many upcoming titles! It is great to be able to put these on my radar and know what to expect and what to request so I can be ready with the best reader's advisory for my library patrons. Thank you, NetGalley, for this Buzz Books 2020 Fall/Winter preview.

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Thank you for the awesome update and selection of books. It gets everyone excited with anticipation of the upcoming releases!

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What a great way to find out about upcoming releases! I loved seeing so many great upcoming titles. Thank you so much for this resource.

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I always love these books. I look forward to them coming out every season. It helps me see what is upcoming. Thank you very much!

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I love the experience of browsing through the list seeing new titles from authors I am familiar with. The icing on the cake were the excerpts. Tons of excerpts from all genres. This was a great opportunity for me to test new authors and genres. I’ve been introduced to so many different authors I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. What a treat.

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A nice overview of upcoming titles, and it is nice to see a blend of familiar names and debuts! I particularly enjoyed the excerpts for The Push by Ashley Audrain, We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper, and The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans.

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A wonderful volume of excerpts from newly, or soon to be, published books. Several intrigued me enough to order copies. Some were clearly not my thing. I love the idea of giving readers a delicious plate of samples so we can select what we want to indulge in.

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