What People Magazine is Reading This Week (Jan 16th Issue)

For those Kindle readers who, like me, read for entertainment, scanning the book reviews in People magazine is good way to check out new people-related books - celebrity bios, popular novels, absorbing nonfiction - just hitting bookstore shelves. Featured in the January 16th issue of People:

Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats, by Roger Rosenblatt. Ecco, 2012. Print Length: 160 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). People's slant: "Intimate, expansive, and profoundly moving." Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt shared the story of his family in the days and months after the death of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy. Now, in Kayak Morning, he offers a personal meditation on grief itself. On a quiet Sunday morning, two and a half years after Amy’s death, Roger heads out in his kayak. He observes, 'You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.' Part elegy, part quest, Kayak Morning explores Roger’s years as a journalist, the comforts of literature, and the value of solitude, poignantly reminding us that grief is not apart from life but encompasses it. In recalling to us what we have lost, grief by necessity resurrects what we have had." - Publisher.

The Invisible Ones, by Stef Penney. Putnam, 2012. Print Length: 416 p. FICTION. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (16 reviews). People's slant: "...pulses with film-noir-esque suspense...a moving meditation on belonging and acceptance." Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Small-time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he'd been hired to find Rose Janko, the wife of a charismatic son of a traveling Gypsy family, who went missing seven years earlier. Half Romany himself, Ray is well aware that he's been chosen more for his blood than his investigative skills. Still, he's surprised by the intense hostility he encounters from the Jankos, who haven't had an easy past. Touched by tragedy, they're either cursed or hiding a terrible secret - whose discovery Ray can't help suspecting is connected to Rose's disappearance..." - Publisher.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, by Alex Gilvarry. Viking, 2012. Print Length: 320 p. FICTION. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (2 reviews). People's slant: "In this funny debut, flashy Filipiino fashion designer Boy Hernandez sees his American dream become a nightmare..." Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Boyet Hernandez is a small man with a big American dream when he arrives in New York in 2002, fresh out of design school in Manila. With dubious financing and visions of Fashion Week runways, he sets up shop in a Brooklyn toothpick factory, pursuing his goals with monkish devotion (distractions of a voluptuous undergrad not withstanding). But mere weeks after a high-end retail order promises to catapult his (B)oy label to the big time, there's a knock on the door in the middle of the night: the flamboyant ex-Catholic Boyet is brought to Gitmo, handed a Koran, and locked away indefinitely on suspicion of being linked to a terrorist plot. Now, from his 6' x 8' cell, Boy prepares for the trial of his life..." - Publisher.

American Dervish, by Avad Akhtar. Little, Brown and Company, 2012. Print length: 369 p. NOVEL. People's slant: "Akhtar dazzles with his debut novel about a Muslim family in pre-9/11 America." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (2 reviews). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. Mina is Hayat's mother's oldest friend from Pakistan. She is independent, beautiful and intelligent, and arrives on the Shah's doorstep when her disastrous marriage in Pakistan disintegrates. Even Hayat's skeptical father can't deny the liveliness and happiness that accompanies Mina into their home. Her deep spirituality brings the family's Muslim faith to life in a way that resonates with Hayat as nothing has before. Studying the Quran by Mina's side and basking in the glow of her attention, he feels an entirely new purpose mingled with a growing infatuation for his teacher... American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life. Ayad Akhtar was raised in the Midwest himself, and through Hayat Shah he shows readers vividly the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America." - Publisher.