Now Reading: Alumni Books
Delve into recent books penned by Rice alums.
Winter 2025
Summer Fridays
Suzanne Rindell ’10
Dutton, 2024
Forbidden romance blossoms during a steamy New York summer in Suzanne Rindell’s fifth novel, “Summer Fridays.” In the era of AOL Instant Messenger, Sawyer, a 20-something publishing assistant, is engaged to her college boyfriend, but she worries that he’s getting too cozy with one of his colleagues. The colleague’s boyfriend, Nick, shares her suspicions, and they meet up to compare notes. But as they get to know each other better, Sawyer begins to wonder whether her fiancé is the right man for her. She and Nick spend their Fridays exploring Manhattan together, and these rambles take on increasing meaning for both of them. But their paths in life seem predestined, leaving no room for a shared future.
Rindell, who has a Ph.D. from Rice, worked for several years at a New York literary agency, where she wrote her first novel, “The Other Typist.” In this lighthearted romance, the city is a backdrop for the witty banter and intense longing of new love at a crossroads in a young woman’s life. — Jennifer Latson
The Madstone
Elizabeth Crook ’82
Little, Brown and Company, 2023
Fans of Elizabeth Crook’s “The Which Way Tree” will be delighted to find its narrator, Benjamin Shreve, at the heart of her new novel, “The Madstone.” Set in the Texas Hill Country in 1868, the novel follows 19-year-old Benjamin on a series of misadventures after he agrees to provide transport to a treasure hunter eager to offload some unusual jewelry, as well as a pregnant woman named Nell, with a 4-year-old son and a backstory that makes her getaway a matter of some urgency.
Early in their journey, when they encounter a stranger on the road, Nell shoots the man in the face but won’t explain why. In his endearing, guileless way, Benjamin slowly puts the pieces together. “Who ever shoots a man they just laid eyes on but half a second before, I asked myself,” he narrates. “There was something about how that scene had played that did not appear like a accident.” The truth sets Benjamin on a hero’s quest to deliver Nell to safety against perilous odds. — Jennifer Latson
Hawker Dreams: A Vietnamese American in Singapore
Oanh Ngo Usadi ’95
O&O Press, 2024
The longing for home is universal, but what does “home” mean: where we were born, our ancestral homeland or the place where we feel we truly belong? Oanh Ngo Usadi explores this question in her new memoir, “Hawker Dreams.”
The book chronicles Usadi’s move to Singapore with her husband and teenage son in 2019 — and their disorienting experience navigating the COVID-19 pandemic in a foreign land. It’s not Usadi’s first time moving to a new country under difficult circumstances, however. In the 1980s, she and her family fled Vietnam by boat, settling in a small Texas town where they opened a banh mi shop, which Usadi wrote about in her first memoir, “Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches.”
Food is at the center of Usadi’s quest for identity and belonging. Hawker markets — open-air food courts — are a fixture of Singapore’s street food scene, and they’re where Usadi goes in search of comfort and connection. She meets another Vietnamese native at the Chicken House cafe, which strikes her as Singapore’s answer to Houston’s House of Pies. She shares a box of durian with an Italian tourist at a Chinatown market. She receives a gift of papaya from a neighbor and delivers fried mackerel for her favorite food vendor’s cat. Breaking bread — or mangosteen — with others enhances her sense of community; each gift of food is a taste of home. — Jennifer Latson
At Mather Lodge
James Fowler ’79
Through the valley gap
range upon blue-gray range.
An occluded winter sun
firing the western sky
precisely silhouettes the trees
along a nearby ridge.
The scene is set for
sleights of light and glass.
There: pendant Craftsman lamps
process like Chinese lanterns
in the solemn gloaming.
Fixtures on this side,
celestials on that.
— From “Postcards from Home: Poems,” James Fowler, Kelsay Books, 2024.
Published by permission of the author.