New Edelweiss E-galleys (7/5/23)

Hello e-galley readers! Check out some of the exciting e-galleys that were recently added to Edelweiss for your downloading pleasure:

EVERYTHING IS FINE VOLUME TWO by Mike Birchall
9781990778797 | 10/17/23

Sam and Maggie are a normal couple, in a normal house, in a normal neighborhood. There is nothing strange about their heads, their neighbors, or their sweet little dog. Everything is fine.

In fact, after a mild disagreement and a tiny bit of unpleasantness, things for Sam and Maggie are
back to being more fine and dandy than ever before!

This is the story of a couple doing their best to get by in a world where things are absolutely, totally, and unquestionably fine.

Collecting episodes 17–29 of the hit WEBTOON comic EVERYTHING IS FINE.

ONE IN A MILLENNIAL: ON FRIENDSHIP, FEELINGS, FANGIRLS, AND FITTING IN by Kate Kennedy
9781250285126 | 1/23/24

Kate is a pop culture commentator and host of the popular millennial-focused podcast Be There in Five. Part-funny, part-serious, Kate navigates the complicated nature of celebrating and criticizing the culture that shaped her as a woman, while arguing that great depths can come from surface-level interests.

With her trademark style and vulnerability, ONE IN A MILLENNIAL is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.

THE GUEST by B. A. Paris
9781250289421 | 2/20/24

Iris and Gabriel seem to have it all: a beautiful country home, a daughter taking a gap year in Greece, and their good friends from Paris, Laure and Pierre, always up for a holiday weekend away. But when a young man on his bicycle careens off the path of a nearby quarry to his death, Gabriel is the one to find him and hear his final words. When the boy dies, Gabriel is left behind with a guilty burden.

As Iris tries to help ease her husband’s trauma, they acquire an unexpected house guest. Their friend Laure has seemingly moved in, her marriage in crisis after her husband’s reveal that he has had a child with another woman. Happy to help their friend, Iris and Gabriel insist Laure stay as long as she needs. But Laure keeps wearing Iris’s clothes. Following everywhere she goes. Asking her all about the now-closed quarry and the recent tragedy. And Pierre is refusing to answer Gabriel’s calls.

Their only respite from the increasingly tense atmosphere in their own home comes in the form of new neighbors—a couple new to town and expecting their first child. But with them comes their gardener, who has a checkered past.

With broken relationships and hidden motives piling up around them, Gabriel and Iris are forced to reckon with whether their life has in fact been a happy one—or if it has all been an illusion.

THE BURNING by Anna Todd
9781990778551 | 8/1/23

Anna Todd’s Brightest Stars trilogy continues the contemporary love story of Karina, a young woman who “grew up military” and is living and working for the first time on her own, and Kael, a 21 year old soldier now home after two deployments, profoundly scarred by his time in Afghanistan. THE BURNING picks up from the sudden and shocking disruption of Karina and Kael’s developing romance at the ending of THE FALLING: their attraction to one another is undeniable, yet the trust they’ve placed in each other has been traumatically broken. To resolve what may be difficult, or impossible, to repair, Kael’s closed off past (a past that unknowingly links him to Karina’s family) must be opened and reconciled, demons and all. And Karina must decide whether loving someone she doesn’t want to live without is worth the pain and risk of it all.

DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA by Venita Blackburn
9780374602826 | 1/23/24

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles —and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.

THE HOUSE OF LAST RESORT by Christopher Golden
9781250285898 | 1/30/24

Across Italy there are many half-empty towns, nearly abandoned by those who migrate to the coast or to cities. The beautiful, crumbling hilltop town of Becchina is among them, but its mayor has taken drastic measures to rebuild—selling abandoned homes to anyone in the world for a single Euro, as long as the buyer promises to live there for at least five years. It’s a no-brainer for American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi. Both work remotely, and Becchina is the home of Tommy’s grandparents, his closest living relatives. It feels like a romantic adventure, an opportunity the young couple would be crazy not to seize.

But from the moment they move in, they both feel a shadow has fallen on them. Tommy’s grandmother is furious, even a little frightened, when she realizes which house they’ve bought. There are rooms in an annex at the back of the house that they didn’t know were there. The place makes strange noises at night, locked doors are suddenly open, and when they go to a family gathering, they’re certain people are whispering about them, and about their house, which one neighbor refers to as THE HOUSE OF LAST RESORT. Soon, they learn that the home was owned for generations by the Church, but the real secret, and the true dread, is unlocked when they finally learn what the priests were doing in this house for all those long years…and how many people died in the strange chapel inside. While down in the catacombs beneath Becchina…something stirs.

FAMILY FAMILY by Laurie Frankel
9781250236807 | 1/23/24

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards (which, torn into pieces, also function as make-shift confetti) and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to tv star.

But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do — she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India’s an adoptive mom herself and knows there’s so much more to her family than tragedy. Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her daughter Fig knows they need help – and who better to call for help than family?

Because India’s not just an adoptive mom. She also had a baby she gave up for adoption her senior year of high school. That baby is now sixteen, excited to meet her birth mother and eager to help, but she also has an agenda and secrets of her own. It turns out what makes a family isn’t blood and it isn’t love because no matter how they’re formed, the hallmark of true family is this: it’s complicated.

LATE BLOOMER by Mazey Eddings
9781250847089 | 4/16/24

Winning the lottery has ruined Opal Devlin’s’s life. After quitting her dead-end job where she’d earned minimum wage and even less respect, she’s bombarded by people knocking at her door for a handout the second they found out her bank account was overflowing with cash. And Opal can’t seem to stop saying yes.

With her tender heart thoroughly abused, Opal decides to protect herself by any means necessary, which to her translates to putting almost all her new money to buying a failing flower farm in Asheville, North Carolina to let the flowers live out their plant destiny while she uses the cabin on the property to start her painting business.

But her plans for isolation and self-preservation go hopelessly awry when an angry (albeit gorgeous) Pepper Smith is waiting for her at her new farm. Pepper states she’s the rightful owner of Thistle and Bloom Farms, and isn’t moving out. The unlikely pair strike up an agreement of co-habitation, and butt heads at every turn. Can these opposites both live out their dreams and plant roots? Or will their combustible arguing (and growing attraction) burn the whole place down?

THE DIVORCEES by Rowan Beaird
9781250896582 | 3/19/24

Lois Saunders thought that marrying the right man would finally cure her loneliness. But as picture-perfect as her husband is, she is suffocating in their loveless marriage. In 1951, though, unhappiness is hardly grounds for divorce—except in Reno, Nevada.

At the Golden Yarrow, the most respectable of Reno’s famous “divorce ranches,” Lois finds herself living with half a dozen other would-be divorcees, all in Reno for the six weeks’ residency that is the state’s only divorce requirement. They spend their days riding horses and their nights flirting with cowboys, and it’s as wild and fun as Lake Forest, Illinois, is prim and stifling. But it isn’t until Greer Lang arrives that Lois’s world truly cracks open. Gorgeous, beguiling, and completely indifferent to societal convention, Greer is unlike anyone Lois has ever met—and she sees something in Lois that no one else ever has. Under her influence, Lois begins to push against the limits that have always restrained her. But how much can she really trust her mysterious new friend? And how far will she go to forge her independence, on her own terms?

Set in the glamorous, dizzying world of 1950s Reno, where housewives and movie stars rubbed shoulders at gin-soaked casinos, THE DIVORCEES is a riveting page-turner and a dazzling exploration of female friendship, desire, and freedom.

LUMINE VOLUME ONE by Emma Krogell
9781990778773 | 12/5/23

In a world where weredogs, witches, and humans live side by side, Lumine is a down-on-his-luck weredog with nowhere to turn…until he meets Kody.

One causes trouble wherever he goes, and the other attracts trouble like a magnet. So of course, the two end up colliding.

Lumine has a big, fluffy secret—he is a werewolf, a rare and powerful type of magical being thought to be extinct. Except…he can’t transform properly. When robbers attack the two boys, Lumine shifts into his other form: a tiny, fierce, and ridiculously cute puppy dog. How is he supposed to instill fear in their enemies like that?!

Impressed with the small but mighty pup, Kody’s dad hires Lumine to be his son’s bodyguard. Lumine is determined to both protect Kody and become his friend, but the mysterious witch does everything in his power to keep Lumine at arm’s length.

Without realizing, Lumine has stumbled paws first into a family full of their own secrets. Kody can’t control his magic and is being haunted by an evil spirit, and his father’s motivations for hiring Lumine aren’t nearly as simple as they seem. Things are far more dangerous than Lumine bargained for, and this is only the beginning.

This volume collects episodes 1 to 14 of the charming WEBTOON comic.