For Patrons of Mechanicsville Public Library
  • Top Picks

    Review

    So Very Small

    Not much about the COVID-19 pandemic could be called "lucky," but the fact humanity faced it in the 21st century—with all modern medicine's tools at our disposal—has made a ...

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    Beyond the Book

    Plague in the 21st Century

    Thomas Levenson begins So Very Small, his history of the development of germ theory, with an account of the Great Plague that struck London in 1665. Although this was the last major outbreak to hit ...

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    Review

    When the Harvest Comes

    Breathtaking in its simplicity and elegance, When the Harvest Comes is a story about love, rejection, and queer identity. The novel opens with Davis and Everett about to be married in the privileged ...

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    Beyond the Book

    Fathers. Gay Sons. Silence.

    The night terrors began when Davis Freeman was five years old, after his mother died of lymphoma. While he lay in the dark, his body felt like straw. His screams, catastrophic and haunting, echoed ...

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    Review

    Don't Sleep with the Dead

    Fitzgerald evoked his most iconic character from the novel's title, but took a while letting him out on stage. For about 50 pages, the reader only knows about Gatsby what others say about him. Nghi Vo...

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    Beyond the Book

    Reimagining The Great Gatsby

    In 1925, a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for The Waste Land—described the ...

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    Review

    America, América

    The origin and development of the United States is usually explained primarily by looking back east towards Europe, but in America, América, historian Greg Grandin shifts the focus south to Latin...

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    Beyond the Book

    Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought

    In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two ...

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    Review

    The Dry Season

    Two years after the chaotic, self-imposed implosion of her most significant romantic relationship (an affair and breakup she dubs "the Maelstrom") and on the heels of yet another anxiety-provoking bad...

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    Beyond the Book

    Painter Agnes Martin

    In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One ...

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    Review

    Great Big Beautiful Life

    Love, often couched in other themes or squeezed between ideas and concepts of apparent greater effect in literary fiction, rarely enjoys exploration for its own sake in its naked simplicity. However, ...

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    Beyond the Book

    Romance Novels with Complex Themes

    In many ways, Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life is about the complex bond between mothers and daughters that prompts mothers to act in strange, counterintuitive ways. While the novel is quite ...

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The BookBrowse Review

June 04, 2025

This issue of The BookBrowse Review contains reviews and "beyond the book" articles for 14 titles, including When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris, The Dry Season by Melissa Febos, and My Friends by Fredrik Backman. We also bring you our list of June Books We're Excited About, previews of upcoming books, the latest book news, and more.

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New In Paperback

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.