Community Life Fall 2025 | Page 9

Lose yourself in a nook with a book

With the kids back in school, it’ s time to catch up on quiet time with a good book. Here then are several must read suggestions from the Times-Review staff to help you get started.

FICTION“ THE WITCH OF WILLOW HALL” BY HESTER FOX

Something has awakened in Willow Hall. Eighteen-year-old Lydia Montrose can feel it. But she has no idea what it is.

Rocked by rumor and scandal, Lydia, her parents, and her sisters, Catherine and Emeline, fled their sparkling life in Boston for the sleepy country estate. But bone-chilling noises in the night have Lydia convinced their idyllic new home wasn’ t exactly vacant when they arrived.

The Salem witch trials cast a long shadow over the Montrose family as the cloying heat of summer in Massachusetts mingles with something sinister in the air. The sprawling history of Willow Hall is no stranger to secrets, and its dark past soon calls to Lydia, igniting ancient magic she never knew she possessed.

FICTION“ TOM’ S CROSSING: A NOVEL” BY MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines.

For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.

As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

FICTION“ MY FRIENDS” BY FREDRIK BACKMAN

I have loved all his books, but this is hands-down my favorite. This story is so deep, yet is lighthearted in spots, like the sun shining on the teen boys that summer. This is literary fiction at its finest. Backman is the best at exploring the human condition of love, belonging and navigating life’ s joys and sorrows.

— Rachel Matthews Cleburne Public Library associate

THRILLER“ FORGET ME NOT” BY STACY WILLINGHAM

Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’ s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist... until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.

With the entire summer now looming ahead— a summer spent with nothing to do in her childhood home, with her estranged mother— Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. At first glance, Galloway is an idyllic escape for Claire. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard’ s owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary’ s contents … as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister’ s disappearance may be somehow tied to it all.

The Published Page Bookshop

Historic Downtown Cleburne

The“ Old School” Bookstore

More Books Than, WOW!

10 E. Chambers St-On the Square • 817-349-6366 • publishedpage. com

Community Life 9