Serious summer reads

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir that recounts how she and her siblings survived their parents’ dysfunctional style of living. This is a story of childhood neglect-turned-motivation for Walls to outlive her flawed home circumstances.

An autobiographical account of a life lived through an unstable childhood, the spotlight, addiction, and its cost to opportunities comes through the late Matthew Perry’s comedic voice in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

In Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash, eleven-year-old Bea is shipped overseas away from World War II London where her biological family lives. After the war, her life story is detailed as she navigates living with sentimental ties to both the families that raised her.

Western novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry follows a group of retired Texas Rangers as they journey from Texas to Montana to start over with a new cattle ranch. (Violence throughout the book.)

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow is a fantasy story following the character January as she finds a strange book that tells of secret doors to other worlds. Borrowing Harrow’s words from a passage: “I hope you will run through every open door and tell stories when you return.”

A two-perspective historical fiction, Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner starts with teenager Roseanne’s story in the 1930s. The second half of the book focuses on Helen, whom Rosie knew from childhood. In 1947, after returning to California from Austria, Helen finds out what happened to a pregnant, displaced Rosie and the cruelties that extended back home.