By Rachel Burt

Summer’s almost here!  Whether you are vacationing or staycationing this year, you’ll need some good reads to have by your side.  Here are some great titles for summer that will keep you engaged without being too heavy.  Contact your local library to check the availability of these or any other titles!

Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perotta

Tracy Flick is back and, once again, the iconic protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s Election–and Reese Witherspoon’s character from the classic movie adaptation–is determined to take high school politics by storm. Tracy Flick is a hardworking assistant principal at a public high school in suburban New Jersey.  Still ambitious but feeling a little stuck and underappreciated in midlife, Tracy gets a jolt of good news when the longtime principal, Jack Weede, abruptly announces his retirement, creating a rare opportunity for Tracy to ascend to the top job.  Energized by the prospect of her long-overdue promotion, Tracy throws herself into her work with renewed zeal, determined to prove her worth to the students, faculty, and School Board, while also managing her personal life: a ten-year-old daughter, a needy doctor boyfriend, and a burgeoning meditation practice. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be.  In classic Perrotta style, Tracy Flick Can’t Win is a sharp, darkly comic page-turner, and a pitch-perfect reflection on our current moment.  Flick fans and newcomers alike will love this compulsively readable novel.

Counterfeit by Kristin Chen

For fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this is the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise—an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship.  Ava Wong is a straight-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home—she’s built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling.  Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, 20 years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend.  But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods.  The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business.  But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is back, doing the thing his readers have come to adore: offering up wry, moving, punchy stories about his  family.  This batch also touches on some of the more tumultuous moments of our past two years, sometimes pretty irreverently.  In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

The Lost Summers of Newport

Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White are all writers of historical fiction. The three have come back together for their latest collaboration: The Lost Summers of Newport. This novel covers money and secrets set among the famous summer mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, spanning over a century from the Gilded Age to the present day.  Three stories elegantly intertwine in this clever and stylish tale of murder and family lies.  This page-turner of a novel offers three mysteries for the price of one.

Alias Emma by Ava Glass

In this breakneck, race-against-the-clock thriller, a British spy has 12 hours to deliver her asset across London after Russia hacks the city’s security cameras. Can she make it without being spotted or killed?  New secret agent Emma MakePeace’s first assignment will take all of her skills and everything she’s learned if she’s going to pull it off.  Her assignment is to bring the son of a Russian dissident into protective custody. To do this, she’ll have to travel with him by foot through the world’s most surveilled city and avoid the hundreds of thousands of cameras present in the streets.  A misstep could mean both of their lives.  And when her only contact suddenly goes dark, Emma is left on her own to navigate the streets and make it to safety.

Rachel Burt is the Director of the Hackettstown Free Public Library.