Essential titles to add to your collection this July
Independence Day has just passed, but in this America 250 year, books of American History will remain as hot as the summer temperatures. A couple weeks ago, we shared some can’t miss stories for young patriots, so in this installment, I’m including a few of my personal favorites for adults. Your patrons looking to celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial all year long will be excited.
I’ve also got the usual goodies for the month, like Blockbusters, Top Fantasy titles, and more, to make sure no one runs out of great reading this summer, no matter how long the vacation.
America 250: Revolutionary Reads
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Cocked and Boozy by Brooke Barbier
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From your OverDrive DCL: We often have a picture of the Founding Fathers as staid gentlemen, focused on the cause of Liberty. Well, they also drank. A lot. In this amusing new book from historian Brooke Barbier, get the Founders’ cocktail recipes and learn just how much beer the average Colonial knocked back in a day. As an extra treat, learn the hilarious number of euphemisms Benjamin Franklin came up with for drunkenness. (Spoiler: cocked and boozy just might be two of them.)
Boston, 1776 by J. D. Dickey
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From your OverDrive DCL: Not your average Revolutionary history, Dickey walks the reader around the city of Boston. See who lived, worked, and socialized in each neighborhood during the Revolutionary period. Even use this book as a guide on your next trip to the city!
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
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From your OverDrive DCL: We’ve all heard of The Federalist Papers, and many of us at least read excerpts in school. But until earlier this year, I’d never actually read all 85 essays in which 3 of America’s Founders make the case for why the Constitution should be ratified by all the states. This book offers an unmatched look at the Constitution and founding principles, so if you haven’t read them yet, I promise, this year is the right time to do it!
Revolution by Eric Metaxas
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From your OverDrive DCL: Want a one volume history of the American Revolution from its very beginnings as a movement for liberty in Massachusetts to the surrender at Yorktown? Well, Metaxas’s new book is a delightful romp through the birth of America, highlighting both the amusing and most significant stories of how American Independence was won. The author’s enthusiasm and fast pace make this a delight for any patriot.
Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick
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From your OverDrive DCL: Philbrick wrote a wonderful trilogy of books about the American Revolution, starting with Bunker Hill and ending with In the Hurricane’s Eye. But this middle volume, Valiant Ambition, is my favorite. It is a parallel biography of George Washington and Benedict Arnold, showing their separate paths to Revolutionary fame, as well as their significant personal relationship. Honestly, all three books are incredible, but this deep dive into the greatest hero and the greatest villain of the war is special.
Top Books of July
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The Gilded Blade by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
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From the publisher: In the grandest of games, there is everything to win—money, love, power, revenge—and even more to lose. From Texas to Prague to London and beyond, the Hawthorne family, the players from the Grandest Game, and allies old and new are drawn into a web of centuries-old secrets and mind-bending puzzles. Every clue pulls them deeper; every answer demands a price.
To survive, they must unravel the mysteries that bind them together…but some truths are deadly.
Discover danger, riches, romance—and the long-awaited revelations at the heart of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s most intricate and explosive puzzle yet.
Top Mystery/Thriller of July
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This Changes Everything by Lisa Scottoline
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From the publisher: Julia Pritzker loves her new life as a wife and mother in beautiful Tuscany—except that she misses her best friend Courtney, back in the States. One night, Julia calls Courtney and reaches her as she’s arriving at her grandmother’s farm in Pennsylvania.
Then the unthinkable happens. A dreadful premonition overwhelms Julia moments before Courtney enters the house—and makes a heartbreaking discovery. Her beloved grandmother has been murdered, and the killer is escaping out the back door.
Julia flies home the next morning to support Courtney in her grief. The local police believe the murder was a botched burglary, but the women suspect something much more sinister and enlist hotshot Philly lawyer Bennie Rosato to assist. In addition, Courtney entreats Julia to trust her psychic intuition to point her to the missing pieces of this dark puzzle.
But in a town filled with explosive secrets, events take a deadly turn, and Julia becomes the target of a murderous conspiracy. She ends up fighting for her life, with no one to save her … but herself.
Only a blockbuster talent like Lisa Scottoline can tell this gripping and layered of a story, combining a woman’s search for truth with the revelation of her own empowerment, as well as the enduring strength and joys of female friendship.
July Blockbusters
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Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
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From the publisher: From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.
Top Fantasy of July
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Daggermouth by H. M. Wolfe
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From the publisher: The first thing you’ll learn in New Found Haven is that mercy doesn’t exist. The second thing is that, from the highest glass atrium in the Heart to the windowless slums of the Boundary, the Veyra are always watching.
The last lesson is the hardest, but you must remember it: Love outside of your ring is a death sentence.
The city is carved into rings of privilege and poverty, ruled by the masked elite who will do whatever it takes to hold onto power. Obedience is demanded. Rebellion is crushed.
Greyson Serel has spent his life caught between two worlds. Publicly, he’s the flawless heir to the presidency. Privately, he’s entangled in secrets that could topple the regime. But when he’s forced into a political marriage meant to bind him tighter to the government’s brutal laws, he finds himself shackled to a bride as lethal as she is unwilling.
Shadera Kael is a mercenary raised to kill, not to wed. Yet when her bullet misses its mark, survival leaves her tied to the very man she was sent to eliminate. Trapped inside the corrupt heart of the city, she becomes both prisoner and wife, her every step watched, her every move tested.
Their union is no love story—it’s a battlefield. As secrets come to light and betrayals fester within the walls of power, Greyson and Shadera must decide between annihilating each other or burning the city to the ground together.
In a world where passion has consequences and loyalty is paid for in blood, their forced bond may be the spark that ignites a revolution. Or the fire that consumes them both.
Hidden Gems
New and hot books from independent presses.
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One Hundred Guinea Pigs by Gustavo Rodríguez, translated by Daniel Hahn
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From the publisher: Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too.
Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver—it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her now-obstructed view of the sea, she confronts the limits to her ability to help. That is, until Doña Carmen makes a big, last request: to transform her caretaking from helping her stay alive to helping her die. A good death has much in common with a good life, after all, and incapacity, loneliness, and isolation are devastations that a compassionate friend can help ease. Dignity, community, respect, and generosity—they’re what Eufrasia offers her clients, and what their friendship offers her. One Hundred Guinea Pigs is the lifegiving, warmhearted novel about euthanasia you didn’t know you needed.
More Recommended Lists You Don’t Want to Miss
Top Historical Fiction of July
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About the author: Shelia did everything from answering questions at the Reference Desk to tech training to running a classic lit book club in her 17 years in public libraries. Now she helps other public libraries make the most of their OverDrive collections. In her spare time, she’s either writing or reading, usually with an opera playing in the background. If you ever run into her, ask Shelia about #WITMonth.