Our Tomato readers have three books you’ll want to read this fall. Everyone Needs a Larry: Love with a Twist of Cancer, is a memoir filled with humor, poignancy, and hope. The Woman Under Water is a page turner suspense novel. And Take My Hand is a novel based on true events that rocked our nation.

A beautiful love story filled with humor, poignancy, and hope

Everyone Needs a Larry: Love with a Twist of Cancer is a memoir written by Jennifer Greenhut Tollin and her husband Larry Tollin. Meet Jenn and Larry, an ordinary couple who met on Match.com and dreamed of a life together with children, fun, and travel. Then Jenn noticed a lump under her arm. Within a week, she was diagnosed with stage IV triple-negative breast cancer. Life as they knew it would never be the same.

Told from both the patient and caregiver perspectives, Everyone Needs a Larry is a he-said-she-said quirky, romantic, and humorous survival story that shares the lessons, mistakes, and joys of a couple fumbling their way through cancer, love, and marriage.

Whether you face the challenge of cancer, or another adversity, Jenn and Larry demonstrate how our scariest times have the possibility to become our greatest chapters.  GET THE BOOK.

What I especially admire is that the lessons Jenn learned led her to create Zero Negativity which promotes love and positivity through accessories. A portion of the profits are donated to cancer research.

~Cheryl Benton, aka “the Head Tomato”

 A Gripping Suspense Novel

In The Woman Under Water Penny Goetjen really knows how to draw the reader into the story and  keep turning the pages.  The descriptions in this book are so well done and believable.

The story is about a woman, named Victoria and her husband who disappeared seven years ago.  She is now raising her two sons, Harrison and Jamison on her own.  She is trying to move on with their lives but is still holding out hope that one day he will return.  Her husband never returned home after work one day.  He simply vanished on a field trip with the private school where he taught.  Also, the same private school where their boys now attend.

Victoria now has a boyfriend, Vince who really wants to marry her.  She is still not ready to commit, even after just having her husband legally declared dead.  This does cause some tension in their relationship, and he decides to break up with her.

Victoria’s mother moves back into her home from an assisted care facility due to her progressing dementia.  She is trying to adjust to having her mother live with her and making sure to keep her safe. Her mother is very outspoken, and Victoria quickly realizes her mother needs constant care.

As the story unfolds more information about her husband, Robert’s disappearance comes to light. Other people in this story find clues and discrepancies.  I love the way Penny built the suspense throughout this book.  You begin to think early on in the book a few different characters could be guilty.

I loved this book.  I liked all the characters.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a great suspenseful mystery. GET THE BOOK.

~Francene Katzen, Richmond, Virginia, advocate for parents who have children with drug addictions

A Beautiful Story of Love and Longing

In Take My Hand author Dolen Perkins-Valdez paints a moving portrayal of a young black nurse at a family planning center in Montgomery, AL in 1973 as she encounters the injustices of racism and fights to uphold medical ethics.

Told through the eyes of Civil Townsend, this is a beautiful story of love and longing on multiple levels. The daughter of a doting father who is a physician and a mother who immerses herself in painting to avoid reality, Civil longs for the family connection. She becomes attached to an impoverished black family when she is assigned to deliver birth control shots to their two girls who are too young for sex. As she wages a self-directed campaign to improve their lives, she finds herself devoted to the girls, drawn to their father who is widow, and deferential to their grandmother. Always standing by, longing for her attention, is her childhood sweetheart with whom she cannot reconcile.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, the story plays out against a background of major issues of the Jim Crow south, government funded medical abuse, and the fight for justice in the courts of law. As Civil grapples with her own affairs of the heart, she never loses sight of the need for accountability and redemption for crimes against humanity. GET THE BOOK.

~ Joan Pagano, owner of Joan Pagano Fitness, NY