Here are three books from our Tomato reviewers, to add to your summer reading list. “End of the Hour” is a candid memoir by psychotherapist Meghan Riordan Jarvis, that explores trauma and healing. “From the Files of Filomena Devlin: Reporter and Nazi Hunter” is a riveting WWII mystery that uncovers espionage, murder, and secrets lurking in the shadows of 1939 New York City. “Klara and the Sun” is a poignant novel that explores love, loneliness, and the complexities of artificial intelligence.

A Book That Shows Us How to Heal from Grief

Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a well-known trauma therapist.  She has helped her patients process grief for almost twenty years. When her father passed away after a year-long battle with cancer, then her mother’s unexpected death during a family vacation, Meghan found herself falling apart.  She also realized she had not dealt with a childhood tragedy.

When it became apparent Meghan could not help herself with her own grief, she checked herself into the same trauma facility where she had sent her own clients.  She was now the patient, instead of the therapist, she began her own healing journey.

Meghan’s book, End Of The Hour details her experiences, while revealing the lasting power of grief.  Her story will show how trauma from childhood can have an impact on us as adults.  This story will resonate with anyone who has faced loss and thought about how they will get through the grief process.  She tells her story with raw emotional honesty.  You will be rooting for this beautiful soul to heal and recover.

I highly recommend this wonderful memoir. This is a tough topic and grief is hard to talk about, but Meghan shows us how we can heal from grief.  This is a five star read for me. GET THE BOOK.

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

Amazon Readers are Raving About This Book

“It isn’t often that I cannot put down a book. Agata Stanford has created a story, based on the political situation in the 1930’s, that is both intriguing and historically accurate. My book group will be reading it next month. Agata Stanford wrote the Dorothy Parker Mysteries series. Will we be reading about Filomena Devlin’s adventures again?”

“Agata Stanford has written an absorbing mystery replete with twists and red herrings that provide the reader with a classic page turner. One is totally immersed in the year 1939 and the events that happened as a result of Nazi Bund activities in New York.”

It’s 1939 and the specter of Nazi Germany has the world on the edge of war. Filomena Devlin, the smart, inquisitive, and beautiful women’s editor at The Morning Sun, the New York City broadsheet managed by her father, Archie, is determined to graduate from writing about the length of women’s hemlines to the challenge of investigative reporting. She is a woman in a man’s world. While not assigned to cover the German-American Bund Rally at Madison Square Garden, she decides to take matters into her own hands and attends.

As the rally unfolds, her journalistic instincts lead her to an astonishing revelation when she spots the famous movie star and notorious lothario, Montgomery Chase, who happens to be her father’s godson, in disguise at the rally. Could he be a Nazi spy? Little does she know she is about to step into a Nazi espionage ring and multiple murders that put her own life in peril.

With a cast of gritty newspapermen, she is determined to hunt down a cell of Nazi spies that takes her on a dangerous journey from the labyrinth streets of the “city that never sleeps,” to the coast of Long Island, as she realizes that things are not always as they appear to be.

I admit being totally biased, since we published From the Files of Filomena Devlin, but it’s a terrific mystery.  And while it takes place in NYC in 1939, there are eerily similar connections to what’s happening today. GET THE BOOK.

~Cheryl Benton, aka, the “head” tomato

What Does It Mean to be Human

In his book Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro creates a future world where children study at home alone on their “oblongs” (screens), meet other children in arranged group meetings called “Interactions,” and sometimes have AFs (Artificial Friends) as companions. There is a technique used called “being lifted” (genetic editing) for kids to make them more intelligent, to be “higher ranking.”

Klara, who narrates it, is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid machine distinguished by exceptional powers of observation and a curiosity about emotions. Designed to be a child’s companion, she is displayed in the window of a department store where children go with their parents to select their own AF. A teenager named Josie is drawn to Klara and convinces her mother to buy her.

Her ostensible purpose is to help get Josie through the lonely and difficult years until college. They are lonely because in Josie’s world, most kids don’t go to school but study at home using “oblongs.” They are difficult because Josie suffers from an unspecified illness, which varies day to day from being mild to severe.

Before she was bought, Klara had never been outside, ridden in a car, been out in nature. But like the great outdoors, she runs on solar power, and she ventures deliberately into the natural world at critical points in the story, communing with the sun to try to help Josie. When Josie becomes seriously ill, Klara pleads with the sun to make her well again, upholding “him” as a godlike figure whom she can pray to and negotiate with.

Unbeknown to Josie, there is a covert back-up plan among the adults in case her illness prevails, and she dies. This plan is eventually shared with Klara who plays a central role in assuming Josie’s identity. Since she can imitate Josie in all respects, she may continue to provide an avatar of her; however, this does not deter her from seeking the sun’s help in curing Josie.

Klara’s perception is at once mechanical and deeply subjective. The non-human perspective reveals what it really means to be human, exploring issues and behaviors that we associate with the human being. It offers a vision of humanity and raises the question of whether we can ever see into the uniqueness of the human heart – that unreachable part inside every person that is the hardest to learn. GET THE BOOK.

~Joan Pagano, NYC, Joan Pagano Fitness