Tashina’s Picks

The Year of Magical Thinking

From one of America’ s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage– and a life, in good times and bad– that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later– the night before New Year’ s Eve– the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

The Highest Tide

A mesmerizing, allegorical, and beautifully wrought first novel about one boy’ s fascination with the sea during the summer that will change his life.

One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O’ Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails, and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person to ever see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac instantly becomes a local curiosity. When he later finds a rare deepwater fish in the tidal waters by his home, and saves a dog from drowning, he is hailed as a prophet. The media hovers and everyone wants to hear what Miles has to say.

But Miles is really just a teenager on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. While the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up. In this mesmerizing, beautifully wrought first novel, we witness the dramatic sea change for both Miles and the coastline that he adores over the course of a summer— one that will culminate with the highest tide in fifty years.

I’ll Never Be Long Gone

On a brisk autumn night, Charles Bender Sr. walks into the woods behind his idyllic Vermont home with a shotgun and forever changes the lives of his two sons.

Charlie and Owen Bender are brothers and know each other better than they will ever know anyone. They are able to sit in silence and not speak, yet know exactly what the other is thinking. But fate, destiny, and a cryptic note can change even the closest of friendships.

In this note, Charles leaves the one thing that matters most to him — his restaurant — only to Charlie. To Owen, he leaves instructions to follow his own path, wherever it may take him.

On the serene banks of the Dog River, in the lush green countryside of Eden, Vermont, Charlie builds a life for himself that mimics the life his father threw away years before. He’s happy enough running his father’s restaurant and his only real regret is the absence of his brother. Once close, Charlie and Owen have not seen each other for years — the ties of brotherhood torn apart by the strange legacy Charles Sr. had left them.

Charlie’s is a solitary existence until he hires Claire Apple to assist him in the restaurant. They begin a passionate affair and, in Claire, Charlie feels he has found his reason for living. The two marry, but Charlie still longs for a relationship with his estranged brother.

Years later, when Owen, like the prodigal son, returns unannounced, Charlie feels his life is finally complete. But while Charlie opens his life and his home to his wayward brother, Claire is hesitant in accepting her brother-in-law into her family. She realizes Owen is harboring hidden resentment and jealousy for the life he could have had.

“I’ll Never Be LongGone” is a deeply felt novel about love, family, duplicity, heartbreak, and redemption. Set against the backdrop of rural Vermont and the drama of its seasons, it offers a rare glimpse into restaurant life, with vivid descriptions of cooking that rivals the best of American food writing. With evocative and lyrical language, it explores the terrain of the human heart, and reaffirms the power of love to transform lives.

Name All the Animals: A Memoir

A luminous, true story, “Name All the Animals” is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and of a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss. As children, siblings Alison and Roy Smith were so close that their mother called them by one name, Alroy. But when Alison was fifteen, she woke one day to learn that Roy, eighteen, was dead.

Heartbreaking but hopeful, this extraordinary memoir explores the after-math of Roy’s death: his parents’ enduring romance, the faith of a deeply religious community, and the excitement and anguish of Alison’s first love — a taboo relationship that opens up a world beyond the death of her brother.