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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the August 20th-27th double issue include:

Juliet, by Anne Fortier. Ballantine Books. Print length: 464 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...grafts a romantic thriller about a modern woman seeking clues to her past onto a historical yarn about the origins of the Bard's classic drama." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...a high-flying debut in which American Julie Jacobs travels to Siena in search of her Italian heritage - and possibly an inheritance - only to discover she is descended from 14th-century Giulietta Tomei, whose love for Romeo defied their feuding families and inspired Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Julie's hunt leads her to the families' descendants, still living in Siena, still feuding, and still struggling under the curse of the friar who wished a plague on both their houses. Julie's unraveling of the past is assisted by a Felliniesque contessa and the contessa's handsome nephew, and complicated by mobsters, police, and a mysterious motorcyclist. To understand what happened centuries ago, in the previous generation, and all around her, Julie relies on relics: a painting, a journal, a dagger, a ring. Readers enjoy the additional benefit of antique texts alternating with contemporary narratives, written in the language of modern romance and enlivened by brisk storytelling..." - Publishers Weekly.

Mentor, by Tom Grimes. Tin House Books. Print length: 200 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...refreshingly genuine and engaging." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A chance encounter between two writers, one young, one older, develops into a wonderful friendship neither expected. Frank Conroy, the author of the classic memoir Stop-Time, meets Tom Grimes, an aspiring writer and an applicant to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which Conroy directs. First as teacher and student - and gradually as friends - their lives become entwined, and through both successes and disappointments, their bond deepens. Exquisitely written, Mentor explores the writing life and the role of a very important teacher while offering an inside view of the most famous writing program in the world and the sometimes sordid business of publishing. Honest. Heartbreaking. Poignant. Grimes entered the Writers' Workshop with the dream of being a writer. Two years later, he left with that and much more." - Amazon.
"From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes's brutally honest and wonderful Mentor. - Michael Dirda for The Washington Post.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont, by Lauren Weisberger. Atria. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a haunting look at what might happen if your life became a reality show but you never signed off on the cameras." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Brooke was drawn to the soulful, enigmatic Julian Alter the very first time she heard him perform 'Hallelujah' at a dark East Village dive bar. Now five years married, Brooke balances two jobs - as a nutritionist at NYU Hospital and as a consultant to an Upper East Side girls’ school, where privilege gone wrong and disordered eating run rampant - in order to help support her husband’s dream of making it in the music world. Things are looking up when Julian finally gets signed by Sony. Although no one’s promising that the album will ever hit the airwaves, Julian is still dedicated to logging in long hours at the recording studio. All that changes after he is asked to perform on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno - and is catapulted to stardom, literally overnight. At first the newfound fame is fun—who wouldn’t want to stay at the Chateau Marmont or visit the set of one of television’s hottest shows? Yet it seems that Brooke’s sweet husband - the man who can’t handle hot showers and wears socks to bed -is increasingly absent, even on those rare nights they’re home together. When rumors about Brooke and Julian swirl in the tabloid magazines, she begins to question the truth of her marriage and is forced to finally come to terms with what she thinks she wants - and what she actually needs." - Amazon.

The Good Daughters, by Joyce Maynard. Harper Collins. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...less a pleasurably tense read than a tedious one." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (9 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Two families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are mysteriously entwined in this exquisite novel that centers on decades of life at a New Hampshire farm. Youngest daughters Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson, born on the same day in the same hospital, take turns narrating the struggles they face as children. Ruth feels a coldness from her mother; Dana is unsettled by her kooky parents constantly uprooting her and her brother Ray. Regardless, the Planks pay a yearly visit to the Dickersons no matter where they've ended up living. As the girls come of age, Ruth takes an interest in art, sex, and Dana's brother, Ray, with whom she later reunites, at Woodstock, in a swirl of drugs and mud. Meanwhile, Dana realizes that her desires are directed toward women and sets off to pursue agricultural studies at a university, where she meets Clarice, an assistant professor. As time goes by, the floundering Plank Farm is in danger of being seized by Ruth's former boyfriend, a man who has had his eye on the land for years. As Ruth and Dana pursue love, contemplate children, and search for home, the truth of what unites their families is finally - at long last - revealed..." - Publishers Weekly.

NEWLY-AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

Where the Money Went, by Kevin Canty. Vintage. Print length: 208 p. SHORT STORIES. EW's slant: "...powerful and poetic..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.


"Kevin Canty is a master of the short story whose work has been compared to that of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. In Where the Money Went, he surprises us with stories about love and the desertion of love, all written from a man’s point of view. A narrator struggles with his abiding loyalty to his ex-wife, even when he finds love with another woman. A newly divorced man learns more than he wants to know about his friends’ long-term marriages. In these nine stories, which incisively touch on the complex nature of love, we find men as fathers, as husbands, and as lovers, trying their best in a world that stubbornly refuses to make sense. Canty, whose writing has been praised as 'smart, gritty, unsentimental' (New York Times), 'lovely and unforgiving' (Boston Globe), and 'enchanting and painful' (USA Today), powerfully conveys both the bitterness that can afflict romantic relationships, and the moments of humor and tenderness that cut through it." - Amazon.

Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger's, by Tim Page. Doubleday. Print length: 208 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...quirkily appealing memoir..." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (19 reviews). Kindle edition $14.30. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In 1997, Tim Page won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work as the chief classical music critic of The Washington Post, work that the Pulitzer board called 'lucid and illuminating.' Three years later, at the age of 45, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome - an autistic disorder characterized by often superior intellectual abilities but also by obsessive behavior, ineffective communication, and social awkwardness. In a personal chronicle that is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Page revisits his early days through the prism of newfound clarity. It is the story of a child who memorized vast portions of the World Book Encyclopedia simply by skimming through its volumes, but was unable to pass elementary school math and science. And it is the triumphant account of a disadvantaged boy who grew into a high-functioning, highly successful adult–perhaps not despite his Asperger’s but because of it, as Page believes. " - Amazon.

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, by Janet Soskice. Knopf. Print length: 336 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: ...fascinating historical adventure." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (20 reviews). Kindle edition $15.37. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In 1892, two sisters, identical twins from Scotland, made one of one of most important scriptural discoveries of modern times. Combing the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, they found a neglected palimpsest: beneath an unprepossessing life of female saints, they detected what remains to this day among the earliest known copies of the Gospels, a version in ancient Syriac, the language spoken by Jesus. The Sisters of Sinai is the enthralling account of how two ladies in middle age and without university degrees uncovered and translated this text, bringing a great biblical treasure to world attention...Janet Soskice takes us, via the lives of Agnes and Margaret Smith, on a quintessentially Victorian adventure. It is partly a physical journey: when Westerners generally feared to tread in the region, the sisters Smith traversed the Middle East, sleeping in tents, enduring temperamental camels and unscrupulous dragomen, and facing uncertain welcome from monks deceived by earlier travelers. It is also a journey of the mind..." - Amazon.

That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo. Vintage. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (126 reviews). Kindle edition $9.69. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...a novel for people who are terrified of becoming their parents, which is to say for everybody. The misanthropic hero of That Old Cape Magic jitters with the anxiety of influence, repelled and attracted to his mom and dad like Woody Allen playing Hamlet. The book's two-part structure is simple and elegant: two weddings, a year apart, the first on Cape Cod, the second in Maine. Russo's focus in both parts is on Jack Griffin, a 57-year-old English professor who's having a 'middle-age meltdown.' Even while the wedding march plays for members of the younger generation, he's busy fumbling his own 34-year marriage. Griffin loves his wife, but 'his dissatisfaction had become palpable.' He's bored with teaching, and he hankers after the excitement of his Hollywood writing days. His bigger problem, though, is that he still harbors enough 'pathological resentment' toward his parents for a therapists' convention. He's been carting his father's ashes around in the trunk of his car for nine months, waiting for just the right moment to let go of the mortal remains of the man who drove him crazy. And meanwhile, his 85-year-old mother keeps heckling him from her nursing home. It's a sign of Russo's comic genius that these two hilariously acerbic parents - one on the phone, the other in an urn - just about steal the show..." Richard Russo for The Washington Post.