Sarah Damoff’s 2026 novel, The Burning Side, is a work of contemporary domestic fiction that explores the deconstruction and potential rebuilding of a modern family. The story centers on April and Leo Torres, a couple whose strained marriage reaches a breaking point on the same night a fire destroys their family home. Forced to move in with April’s parents, the estranged couple must navigate the logistical and emotional fallout of the disaster while confronting the... Read The Burning Side Summary

The Calamity Club (2026) is a historical fiction novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. It is her sophomore novel, following her bestselling debut, The Help (2009). Set in 1933 Mississippi, The Calamity Club returns to the American South during a different historical crisis, exploring the intersecting lives of two women against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the American eugenics movement. The novel alternates between the perspectives of 11-year-old Meg Lefleur, an intelligent girl... Read The Calamity Club Summary

The Candy House is a 2022 novel written by Jennifer Egan. It was a New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s top 10 books of 2022. The Candy House revisits characters and themes from Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). Though knowledge of A Visit From the Goon Squad will help readers connect characters, The Candy House is a novel that can stand on its own. Jennifer Egan... Read The Candy House Summary

Wendy Mass’s novel The Candymakers is a work of middle-grade fiction that follows four children competing in a national candy making competition. As the children learn more about each other and the Life is Sweet candy factory, they give up their personal ambitions for the common good: to save the factory from a businessman who desires to steal the factory’s secret chocolate ingredient. Brown Books for Young Readers published the novel in 2010.Plot SummaryThe Candymakers... Read The Candymakers Summary

Trapped in a slot canyon after a flash flood, Nora braves myriad desert dangers—and her personal demons—as she fights to save her father in Dusti Bowling’s middle-grade survival novel in verse, The Canyon’s Edge (2020). Snakes, scorpions, and dehydration aren’t the only dangerous obstacles Nora must overcome. To survive, she must master post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and begin to cope with the loss of her mother, the victim of a mass shooting that the whole... Read The Canyon's Edge Summary

Chad Sell’s The Cardboard Kingdom (2018) is a middle-grade graphic novel about a group of neighborhood friends who creatively use cardboard to transform their world into a fantastical kingdom of adventure. Sell wrote The Cardboard Kingdom in collaboration with a team of other writers who drew on their own childhood experiences as inspiration for their contributions. Although the novel is divided into 15 chapters that function as stand-alone stories with distinct narrative arcs, each chapter... Read The Cardboard Kingdom Summary

The Caretaker (2023) by Ron Rash tells the story of newlyweds Jacob Hampton and Naomi Clarke, who were forced to elope because Jacob’s prominent family disapproves of Naomi’s working-class background. When Jacob is injured while serving in the Korean War and sent back home, his parents form a plot to deceive him and Naomi into thinking that the other has died. Jacob turns to his best friend, Blackburn Gant, in his grief as Blackburn starts... Read The Caretaker Summary

The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering is a 2007 nonfiction book by American political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Sandel initially wrote a short essay of the same name that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004. He then expanded his arguments for the book version. Although Sandel is, by his own admission, not a bioethicist, he has had a long career in political and ethical philosophy wherein he has... Read The Case Against Perfection Summary

The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer is the first in a series of young adult mystery-adventure novels featuring protagonist Enola Holmes. Enola, a character created by Springer, is the 14-year-old sister of famed fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. In this first novel, Enola’s mother disappears, inspiring Enola to become a detective herself. As she secretly travels to London—hoping to establish a new home base where she can search for her mother and avoid... Read The Case of the Missing Marquess Summary

The Castle in the Attic is a fantasy novel for middle-grade readers by Elizabeth Winthrop. Published in 1985, it tells the story of a young boy whose toy castle comes to life and draws him into a heroic adventure in which he must rescue his own nanny from a mistake he made. Widely considered a children’s classic, the book and its sequel, The Battle for the Castle, were nominated for two dozen honors. The Castle... Read The Castle in the Attic Summary

The Castle of Otranto, first published in 1764 by English author Horace Walpole (1717-1797), is considered the first supernatural work of Gothic fiction, influencing many well-known 19th century writers such as Clara Reeve, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson.The five-chapter long novella revolves around the mysterious supernatural events at the titular castle, whose owner goes to villainous lengths to maintain control of it. Walpole introduces Gothic elements that drive the... Read The Castle of Otranto Summary

In The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024), author Julia Alvarez raises questions about the power of storytelling and examines whose stories should or shouldn’t be told. The novel follows the life of Alma Cruz, a successful Dominican American writer, in the waning years of her career. When Alma inherits a plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she decides to turn it into a cemetery for the stories she has left unfinished. However, the characters... Read The Cemetery of Untold Stories Summary

The Chain (2019) is a thriller novel by Adrian McKinty. The protagonist, Rachel Klein, receives a phone call explaining that her 13-year-old daughter, Kylie O’Neill, has been kidnapped. This is not a regular, straightforward kidnapping; rather, the woman who kidnapped Kylie did so in order to free her own son from a “chain” of kidnappings. Each new person in The Chain must pay a ransom, then kidnap another person to replace their own loved one... Read The Chain Summary

The Changeling (2017) is a fantasy/horror novel by American author Victor LaValle. LaValle was inspired to begin writing the book after he became a father. Using the genre approaches that have characterized much of his work, he wanted the book to show the ways that raising a child in the modern age can be both a joyful and terrifying experience. The novel received multiple awards after publication, including the 2017 Dragon Award in the Horror... Read The Changeling Summary

In 1989, police officer Marius Larsen drives to a remote farm on the Danish island of Møn. Inside, he finds the farmer Ørum's two teenage children shot dead and Ørum's wife hacked to death with an axe. In the bathroom, Larsen discovers a young boy barely alive beneath a shower curtain. Remembering the boy has a twin sister, he descends to the basement and finds the girl cowering in a room used as a prison... Read The Chestnut Man Summary

The Chicken Sisters, written by K. J. Dell’Antonia, is a contemporary fiction novel that was published in 2020 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. In the novel, an omniscient third-person narrator switches between the perspectives of two sisters, Mae and Amanda, as they attempt to help their families’ rival fried chicken restaurants win a reality television competition, Food Wars. The novel explores how the medium of reality television manipulates personal narratives to expose and frame certain... Read The Chicken Sisters Summary

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin is an account of a devastating natural disaster that took place in 1888. Affecting multiple Midwestern states, the blizzard claimed the lives of many people, including children. The loss of lives to the blizzard laid bare the vulnerabilities of isolated immigrant communities in the Great Plains and marked a watershed moment in American history regarding disaster prediction and mitigation. The author, David Laskin, is a well-known historian who has... Read The Children's Blizzard Summary

The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling (William Morrow, 1957) is a retelling of the King Midas myth in which (instead of everything a man touches turning to gold) everything a young boy eats turns to chocolate. The book won the Massachusetts Children's Book Award (1989), the Utah Children's Choice Honors Award (1983), and the Beehive Award from the Children's Literature Association of Utah (1983). Patrick Skene Catling currently lives in London, where he writes... Read The Chocolate Touch Summary

The Christmas Box (1993) is a holiday-themed, loosely autobiographical novel by American author Richard Paul Evans. It tells the story of Richard, a workaholic who learns important lessons about the meaning of Christmas and the importance of family. He makes these discoveries with the help of an elderly widow and an angelic entity who visits Richard in his dreams. Evans was a 31-year-old advertising executive and had no formal writing experience when he self-published The... Read The Christmas Box Summary

The Christmas Pig is a 2021 children’s chapter book by British author J.K. Rowling. In the story, a young boy named Jack is struggling with major life changes after his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage. When his stepsister destroys his beloved toy, a stuffed pig named DP, Jack goes to the Land of the Lost with a replacement toy, the Christmas Pig, as his guide. The only real boy in a world inhabited by... Read The Christmas Pig Summary