Part romance, part mystery story-within-a-story, Sarah Pemberton Strong's The Fainting Room will charm readers with its wistful account of three lost souls who find each other.
Partially-tattooed lady Evelyn escaped her old life as a circus performer with an abusive ex-husband and married wealthy architect Ray Shepard, but she's now feeling out of place and under pressure to fit in with Ray's upper-crust friends. Ray, meanwhile, is struggling in a job that suppresses his creativity. When they hear about Ingrid, a blue-haired 16-year-old with nowhere to go for the summer, Evelyn suggests they take in the girl, secretly hoping the distraction will help her marriage.
At first, Ingrid charms them both, giving Evelyn the companionship she's been missing and putting Ray back in touch with his long-lost passion for writing noir detective fiction. However, the idyll begins to fall apart when Ray realizes he's falling for the too-young Ingrid, and Ingrid begins to fall in love as well--with Evelyn. As she ferrets out the secrets her hosts keep--the truth about Evelyn's first husband and the trouble at the heart of the Shepards' marriage--Ingrid discovers her alter ego, Detective Slade, a tough-talking identity that allows her to protect her vulnerable heart.
Strong (Burning the Sea) gently explores the dysfunction of a marriage with too many secrets through a story about the entangled lives of damaged people who cannot help each other until they heal themselves. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads