Linda Castellitto
Money, Love
by Brad Barkley
I try to avoid using the words "rollicking" or "romp" when describing the plot of a novel, but in this case I feel I must say: "Money, Love is a rollicking romp of a read!"

(Ack!)

It is, though -- 16-year-old Gabe takes us along on the adventure that is his life. He tells us about eternal-salesman dad Roman, and mom Gladys, who believes in love but also craves stability. Gabe both participates in and observes their struggle to find a middle ground. He joins his father in a wild scheme involving Death Cars of Celebrities, and begins to understand why his mom would want to start over by marrying another man, one who views guitar-playing as a series of tasks to be learned rather than something to be felt and enjoyed. The various characters that come in and out of Gabe's life are all hilarious -- Bill the fry cook's star turn is particularly laugh-inducing.

Jay Gesin
The Blue Diary
by Alice Hoffman
Ethan and Jorie Ford are in love and have been since he first walked into her small New England town 13 years ago. Their romance causes friends and neighbors to blush with envy, until a horrible secret is revealed. As Jorie discovers the price of her idyllic marriage, she must decide if forgiveness has a limit. What sounds like a steamy romance novel is actually a literary examination of truth, innocence, forgiveness, consequences, and identity. I loved the questions raised in this book: Can you become an entirely different person during a lifetime? Does loving another person mean you have to love their past? If you do reinvent yourself, what happens to the people you leave behind? Hoffman, author of the River King and Practical Magic, loves to deal with hard life experiences. I love her use of mystery combined with a very subtle touch of the supernatural.

Gavin Grant
Deepdrive
by Alexander Jablokov
Welcome to the future! One part Philip K. Dick, one part gritty adventure novel, about three parts wonder and amazement, Deepdrive is great fun from beginning to end. 11 different alien species have moved into our solar system, and humanity is frustrated: the aliens all have interstellar 'deepdrives' and no one's sharing. However, there is an alien outcast (or maybe refugee) on Venus who may have a deepdrive ... so a plan is put into motion to break them out of there. Make no mistake, while this is basically a caper novel, it is intricately built and rewards a higher level of attention than most books demand. Jablokov is a skilled writer whose verdant imagination is evident on every page. Give your brain a summer workout!

John Son
Life: A User's Manual
by Georges Perec
If you liked Eco's The Name of the Rose, Kurzweil's A Case of Curiosities, Pears' The Instance of the Fingerpost, or, for an entirely different set of reasons, Schickler's Kissing in Manhattan, there's a good chance you'll enjoy Life: A User's Manual. Structured around a single moment in time -- around 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 -- Perec, chapter by chapter, begins to describe the lives of the inhabitants of an apartment building in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris. What follows is one of the most enjoyable, intellectually stimulating, and deeply moving novels I've ever read. It's the most literary fun I've ever had. Room by room, through the stories and belongings of present and past inhabitants, Perec masterfully unveils an amazingly rich cast of characters and their intertwining lives in hundreds of tales that range in tone from bizarre to unlikely to touching to funny to sometimes just plain ordinary. If there's ever been one book to capture the myriad and elusive complexities of life, Perec, four years before his untimely death from cancer, achieved it in this brilliant, insanely imaginative, and endlessly re-readable book.

Scott Nafz
Underground
by David MacAulay
True to my unceasingly inquisitive self, here's yet another title having to do with what goes on where you are not invited to see for yourself. In this 'grown-up picture book' Mr. MacAulay peels back the layers of asphalt to give you an idea of how your average building is founded, how your average utilities are laid out under the street, and even how your average subway tunnel is cut. Unlike Underneath New York, Mr. MacAulay uses drawings to convey what the camera can't, with very interesting angles ... imagine being 1000 feet under the street, looking up at the ancient, wooden pilings under a city cathedral! Surrounded as I am by the joys of fine literature, I still can't help being nearly obsessed with how the material world functions. Let others wrestle with the dark psyche of humankind ... I need to know how the water gets to my faucet!