-
See Our Best Book
Club Books of 2026!
by Carolyn Chute
Since her astonishing debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, best-selling novelist Carolyn Chute has been heralded as a passionate voice of the underclass, earning comparisons to Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. Her first novel in ten years returns to Egypt, and is a rousing, politically charged portrait of a group of lives on the margins of our society. The School on Heart's Content Road spirals out from the story of Mickey Gammon, a fifteen-year-old dropout who has been evicted from his home and introduced to the secretive world of the Settlement.
Run by "The Prophet," the Settlement is a rural cooperative in alternative energy, farm produce, and locally made goods. Falsely demonized by the media as a compound of sin, the Settlement’s true nature remains foreign to outsiders. It is there that Mickey meets another deserted child, six-year-old Jane, whose mother is in jail on trumped-up drug charges. "Secret Agent" Jane cunningly prowls the Settlement in her heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining that her plans to bring down the community will reunite her with her mother. As they struggle to adjust to their new, complex surrogate family, Mickey and Jane witness the mounting unrest within the Settlement’s ranks, which soon builds to a shocking and devastating crescendo.
"[A]n undeniable talent for depicting humanity at its most impassioned and impoverished." - Publishers Weekly.
"[A]ll too soon, the reader loses faith amid a jumble of diatribe, stereotype, repetition, plot dead ends, and the relentless hero-worship of Gordon St. Onge." - Library Journal.
This information about The School on Heart's Content Road was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The Sister's Curse
by Nicola Solvinic
The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes
by Chanel Cleeton
The Vanishing Place
by Zoë Rankin
 (1).gif)
Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
