New Year, New Book Recommendations
On a bright Wednesday in January, several Mizzou Academy faculty and staff logged in for one of our quarterly book chats. Before the official event even began, Lou Jobst and Jill Clingan were already sharing poetry recommendations. As the chat continued, faculty and staff opened books to read passages, inscriptions, and to show off beautiful formatting or illustrations. Two of our teachers shared books written by their former students.
As professionals working in a global system, the whirlwind of school never stops. However, we all agreed that reading gives us an opportunity to breathe. Sarah Michaels, an instructional developer, said, “Reading is my slowdown. I read every day.”
The books on the following list offer escape, learning, adventure, and as Jill Clingan reminds us, “some truly beautiful sentences.” Through these texts we visited France, the Dominican Republic, Cameroon, Pakistan, Prague, Russia, and the United States. We met fierce youth protagonists, community-members-turned-detectives, dreamers, librarians, and poets—and through these stories, we also met different versions of ourselves.
On the dawn of this new year, we wish you a wonderful season of reading, learning, and adventuring through the stories you find in the pages of a book and the stories you live in the pages of your lives.
You can view the full list from our winter book chat below.
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Title | Author Recommender |
Goodreads Summary |
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Fiction |
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Fresh Water for Flowers Recommended by: Jill Clingan and Lou Jobst |
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole—local police chief—who has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien’s inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette’s own complicated past. |
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Country Club Murders Recommended by: Jill Clingan |
Written by Kansas City native Julie Mulhern, The Country Club Murders is a series of humorous mysteries set in the 1970s in Kansas City, MO about a socialite named Ellison Russell who somehow always finds herself at a murder scene and subsequently tangled up in a murder investigation. |
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The Thursday Murder Club Recommended by: Stepahnie Walter |
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the members of Thursday Murder Club, who are pushing eighty, find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late? |
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Behold the Dreamers Recommended by: Lisa DeCastro |
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself and his family. In the fall of 2007, he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers, and his wife is offered work at the Edwards’ summer home. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni hope to gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future. However, they discover corruption beneath the shiny surface, and when the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas face difficult choices even as they are desperate to keep Jende’s job. |
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Where the Crawdads Sing Recommended by: Sarah Michaels |
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild, unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her. But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens. |
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The Good Sister Recommended by: Stephanie Walter |
Fern Castle works in her local library and has dinner with her twin sister Rose three nights a week. She avoids crowds, bright lights, and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life and disrupting her routine can be...dangerous. When Rose discovers that she cannot get pregnant, Fern sees her chance to pay her sister back for everything Rose has done for her. Fern can have a baby for Rose. She just needs to find a father. Fern's mission will shake the foundations of the life she has carefully built for herself and stir up dark secrets from the past in this quirky, rich and shocking story of what families keep hidden. |
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory Recommended by: Stephanie Walter |
Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty—a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre—took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both living and very dead), Caitlin learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased. |
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The Maid Recommended by: Karen Scales |
Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by. Now that Gran has died, Molly has been navigating life's complexities all by herself and throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. But Molly's orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. |
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The Book of Form and Emptiness Recommended by: Karen Scales |
After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry, and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. And then he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. |
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The Lost Wife Recommended by: Sherry Denney |
During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, falls in love with Josef. They marry—but soon, like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war. In America, Josef becomes a successful obstetrician and raises a family, though he never forgets the wife he thinks died in the camps. But Lenka has survived the concentration camps, relying on her skills as an artist and the memories of a husband she believes she will never see again. Now, decades later, an unexpected encounter in New York brings Lenka and Josef back together. From the comfort of life in Prague before the occupation to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the endurance of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and our capacity to remember. |
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A Gentleman in Moscow Recommended by: Sherry Denney and Stephanie Walter |
This book immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery. |
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Demon Copperhead Recommended by: Jackie Kay |
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind. |
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Nonfiction |
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Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri Recommended by: Ericca Thornhill |
In this important new contribution to the historical literature, Amy Fluker offers a history of Civil War commemoration in Missouri, shifting focus away from the guerrilla war and devoting equal attention to Union, African American, and Confederate commemoration. As a slaveholding Union state on the Western frontier, Missouri found itself at odds with the popular narratives of Civil War memory developing in the North and the South. At the same time, the state’s deeply divided population clashed with one another as they tried to find meaning in their complicated and divisive history. As Missouri’s Civil War generation constructed and competed to control Civil War memory, they undertook a series of collaborative efforts that paved the way for reconciliation to a degree unmatched by other states. |
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The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series Recommended by: Lou Jobst |
This book is a riveting, entertaining look at the sitcom sensation. Glamour senior editor Jessica Radloff, who has written over 150 articles on the series (and even had a cameo in the finale!), gives readers an all-access pass to its intrepid producing and writing team and beloved cast. It’s a story of on-and-off screen romance told in hilarious and emotional detail, of casting choices that nearly changed everything (which even some of the actors didn’t know until now), of cast members bravely powering through personal tragedies, and when it came time to announce the 12th season would be its last, the complicated reasons why it was more difficult than anyone ever let on. |
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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder Recommended by: Jackie Kay |
The Little House books, for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds. But Wilder’s real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading—and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters. |
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Teen Trailblazers: 30 Fearless Girls Who Changed the World Before They Were 20 Recommended by: Kathryn Fishman-Weaver |
An often-picked-up coffee table book, this fascinating book features 30 young women who accomplished remarkable things before their twentieth birthdays. Joan of Arc. Anne Frank. Cleopatra. Pocahontas. Mary Shelley. Many of these heroines are well-known. But have you heard of Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old daughter of an American colonel who rode twice as far as the far better-remembered Paul Revere to warn the militia that the British army was invading? |
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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith |
In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted. |
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Memoir |
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SUB Wife: A Memoir from the Homefront Recommended by: Lou Jobst |
As the spouse of a newly-minted Navy submariner, Samantha soon discovers how little she and the other wives are permitted to know about the top secret workings of their husbands' lives while underway. When the Argentine submarine ARA San Juan goes quiet in November 2017, other than the reporting of an underwater "seismic anomaly," a sound consistent with an implosion, Sam and her fellow Navy wives devise ways to keep themselves afloat during the excruciating silence of their husbands' sub. Wide-eyed Sam, at times unsure of her place in a world governed by reactors, warheads, and relentless operational tempo, eventually discovers a truth about the inner strength of women. |
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The Claimant Recommended by: Lou Jobst |
When Rachel Weinhaus was five years old, a sixteen-year-old boy sexually assaulted her in the woods near her home. She never spoke of her violation, not to her parents, not to her siblings, not even, decades later, to her spouse—she wouldn’t speak a word of it for thirty-eight years until an envelope arrived from her graduate school alma mater, informing her she was a part of a two-hundred-fifteen-million-dollar settlement claim against the University of Southern California and sexual predator George Tyndall. The Claimant is Rachel’s story of being a class member in this historic lawsuit and how being a Claimant shattered her life, and then saved it. |
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Educated Recommended by: Jackie Kay and Jill Clingan |
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it. |
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YA Fiction |
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Amal Unbound Recommended by: Kathryn Fishman-Weaver |
Twelve-year-old Amal's dream of becoming a teacher one day is dashed in an instant when she accidentally insults a member of her Pakistani village's ruling family. As punishment for her behavior, she is forced to leave her heartbroken family behind and go work at their estate. She summons her courage and begins navigating the complex rules of life as a servant, with all its attendant jealousies and pecking-order woes. Most troubling, though, is Amal's increasing awareness of the deadly measures the Khan family will go to in order to stay in control. If Amal is to have any chance of ensuring her loved ones' safety and winning back her freedom, she must find a way to work with the other servants to make it happen. |
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Omar Rising Recommended by: Diane Johsnon |
Omar knows his scholarship to Ghalib Academy Boarding School is a game changer, providing him—the son of a servant—with an opportunity to improve his station in life. Then, he learns the school deliberately "weeds out" kids like him by requiring them to get significantly higher grades than kids who can pay tuition, making it nearly impossible for scholarship students to graduate. With the help of his tight knit new group of friends—and with the threat of expulsion looming over him—Omar sets out to do what seems impossible: change a rigged system. |
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Clap When You Land Recommended by: Kathryn Fishman-Weaver |
Separated by distance—and their father’s secrets—two sisters are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered. And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other. |
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Poetry |
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Musical Tables Recommended by: Lou Jobst |
A collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence—from the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love. |
Thank you to everyone who shared a book recommendation, and thank you to Jill Clingan, Stephanie Walter, and Dr. Kathryn Fishman-Weaver for taking notes and finalizing this list so that we can all reference it at our next library visit!