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February 14, 2025 - February 28, 2025

Here are reading recommendations with your comments and a rating of 1 to 5 stars for the contest period of February 14 - February 28.

February 13, 2025

Reporting on the 2025 Savannah Book Festival

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By Nancy Bader
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The Savannah Book Festival was moved up a week, so it ended up competing with Super Bowl weekend instead of Presidents’ Day weekend. There’s no word yet on what the change might have meant for attendance. Saturday's weather was perfect for walking between the seven speaker venues and grabbing a bite from one of the food trucks.

Victoria Christopher Murray, author of Harlem Rhapsody

In 1919, high school teacher Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all. W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife nor their 14-year age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor. Under her leadership, The Crisis thrives. When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater and the arts. But as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

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Erin Crosby Eckstine, author of Junie

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act --- one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that no longer can be ignored.

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Jessica Soffer, author of This Is a Love Story

For 50 years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now. Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew --- their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives --- and the parts they didn’t always want to know --- the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs.

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Allegra Goodman, author of Isola

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian --- an enigmatic and volatile man --- spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

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Marie Benedict, author of The Queens of Crime

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment. As they embark on their own investigation, the Queens of Crime discover that they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

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March 2025 Bookaccino Live Signup

Links to https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K1A2VLe_QR-epDbpy-IlzA#/registration.

March 2025 Bookaccino Live Signup

Links to https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K1A2VLe_QR-epDbpy-IlzA.

Editorial Content for The Business Trip

Book

The Business Trip

Teaser

Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?

Promo

Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?

About the Book

THE BUSINESS TRIP is the gripping, page-turning debut from author Jessie Garcia.

Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip, and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man --- the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.

And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women --- or what did they do to him?

Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?