Rend Lake College Staff Recommended Reads

Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college. Except, now, they aren’t. They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the...

"For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times--the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University...

Mysterious wealthy newcomers, the Richardsons have bought a lavish house. But when it burns to the ground and their employee goes missing, the island is in for plenty of drama.

Widowed Tova Sullivan works the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium where she befriends Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened to Tova's 18-year-old son, who disappeared on a boat in Puget Sound over 30 years ago. Now he must use every trick he can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Crissy Dowling has created a world that suits her perfectly. She passes her days by the pool in a private cabana, she splurges on ice cream but never gains an ounce, and each evening she transforms into a Princess, performing her Las Vegas musical cabaret inspired by the life of the late Diana Spencer. Crissy's estranged sister, Betsy, unexpectedly arrives in town with a teenage foster child and a new boyfriend who works in a mysterious branch of...

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life, including the story of her seven husbands and the true love of her life. She calls in journalist Monique Grant to write her coveted biography. Stunned and thrilled to be given such a big project, Monique begins recording Evelyn's secrets, but she soon wonders if Evelyn's past comes closer to her own than she'd realized.

When Eban, the scion of a wealthy North Carolina family who brutally attacked Rebecca Pratt, leaving her on life support, gets an early release from prison, brilliant state prosecutor Kate Lennon asks former Super Bowl MVP quarterback--and Rebecca's ex-husband--to make an impossible decision for justice.

"1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride...

"Amber Patterson Parrish has come a long way from being an invisible wallflower. Her hard work and immaculate planning have paid off now that she's a prominent socialite, but that doesn't mean she's had it easy along the way. Less than a year since her husband Jackson's tax evasion scandal, Amber is still at the top of the Bishops Harbor community pecking order, free to do as she wishes while Jackson sits in prison. But that freedom is quickly coming...

One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college...