Made in Massachusetts

A selection of local reads.

Updated April 14, 2026
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Dana Hall School Dana Hall School Librarians
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Made in Massachusetts

A selection of local reads.

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1776
McCullough, David G
Paper Book
America's beloved and distinguished historian presents, in a book of breathtaking excitement, drama, and narrative force, the stirring story of the year of our nation's birth, 1776, interweaving, on both sides of the Atlantic, the actions and decisions that led Great Britain to undertake a war...
All souls : a family story from Southie
MacDonald, Michael Patrick
Paper Book
Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in "the best place in the world"--the Old Colony projects of South Boston--where 85% of the residents collect welfare in an area with the highest concentration of impoverished whites in the U.S. In All Souls, MacDonald takes us deep into the secret heart of Southie....
American Bloomsbury : Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau : their lives, their loves, their work
Cheever, Susan
Paper Book
The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The...
Another bullshit night in Suck City : a memoir
Flynn, Nick
Paper Book
"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he...
The art of scandal : the life and times of Isabella Stewart Gardner
Shand-Tucci, Douglass
Paper Book
The assist : hoops, hope, and the game of their lives
Swidey, Neil
Paper Book
Jack O'Brien, the impossibly demanding basketball coach at Charlestown High School in Boston, has led his team to five state championship titles in six years. Less talked about is O'Brien's other winning record: Nearly every one of the players who stuck with his program--poor kids growing up in...
Black mass : the true story of an unholy alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob
Lehr, Dick
Paper Book
This is a true story of violence, double-cross, and brutal murders involving Irish mobsters and corrupt FBI agents in South Boston. Two boys - John Connolly, and James Whitey Bulger - grew up together on the streets of South Boston. Decades later, in the late 1970s, they would meet again. By then,...
The Borden murders : Lizzie Borden and the trial of the century
Miller, Sarah
Paper Book
Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. Here's middle-grade nonfiction that reads like a thriller. With murder, court battles, and sensational newspaper headlines, the story of Lizzie Borden is...
The Boston girl : a novel
Diamant, Anita
Paper Book
New York Times bestseller An unforgettable novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, told "with humor and optimism...through the eyes of an irresistible heroine" (People)--from the acclaimed author of The Red Tent<...
Caleb's crossing
Brooks, Geraldine
Paper Book
A richly imagined new novel from the author of the New York Times bestseller, People of the Book. Once again, Geraldine Brooks takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native...
Cape Cod noir
Ulin, David L
Paper Book
"Youthful alienation and despair dominate the 13 stories in Akashic's noir volume devoted to Cape Cod. [It] will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side." --Publishers Weekly "David L. Ulin has put together a malicious collection of short stories that...
The Dante Club : a novel
Pearl, Matthew
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Before The Dante Chamber, there was The Dante Club: "an ingenious thriller that . . . brings Dante Alighieri's Inferno to vivid, even unsettling life."--The Boston Globe "With intricate plots, classical themes, and...
Dark tide : the great Boston molasses flood of 1919
Puleo, Stephen
Paper Book
Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that briefly traveled at thirty-five miles per hour. When the tide receded, a section of...
The departed
DiCaprio, Leonardo; Grey, Brad, 1957-2017; King, Graham; Pitt, Brad, 1963; Scorsese, Martin; Monahan, William; Damon, Matt; Nicholson, Jack; Wahlberg, Mark, 1971; Sheen, Martin; Winstone, Ray, 1957; Farmiga, Vera; Anderson, Anthony, 1970; Baldwin, Alec, 1
DVD
Legendary director Martin Scorsese takes the helm for this tale of questionable loyalties and blurring identities set in the South Boston organized crime scene and inspired by the wildly popular 2002 Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs. As the police force attempts to reign in the increasingly...
Faithful : two diehard Boston Red Sox fans chronicle the historic 2004 season
O'Nan, Stewart
Paper Book
A fan's notes for the ages, Faithful grew from an email exchange last summer. Filled with the heady mix of exhilaration and frustration familiar to all Boston Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan fired off a note to fellow Sox fan, Stephen King, who responded with his thoughts on Pedro, Nomar, Manny, Mueller...
Flour : spectacular recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe
Chang, Joanne
Paper Book
The original and beloved baking cookbook from Joanne Chang, owner of Boston's renowned Flour Bakery. Flour Bakery's motto is simple and perfect: Make life sweeter . . . eat dessert first. Every day, thousands of Bostonians and city visitors...
The Gardner heist : the true story of the world's largest unsolved art theft
Boser, Ulrich
Paper Book
"Boser cracks the cold case of the art world's greatest unsolved mystery." --Vanity Fair
Girl, interrupted
Kaysen, Susanna
Paper Book
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and...
Gone baby gone
Ladd, Alan, 1937-2022; Rissner, Dan, 1940; Bailey, Sean, 1970; Affleck, Ben, 1972-; Stockard, Aaron; Lehane, Dennis; Affleck, Casey, 1975-; Monaghan, Michelle; Freeman, Morgan; Harris, Ed, 1950; Ashton, John, 1948; Ryan, Amy; Madigan, Amy; Welliver, Titus
Paper Book
Ben Affleck's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel Gone, Baby, Gone stars Casey Affleck as Patrick Kenzie, a private investigator from working-class Boston who takes on a case involving a kidnapped girl. The girl's aunt begs Patrick to take the case because he has connections to criminal Boston that...
Good Will Hunting
Van Sant, Gus; Williams, Robin, 1952 July 21; Damon, Matt; Affleck, Ben, 1972-; Skarsga?rd, Stellan; Driver, Minnie; Miramax Films; Miramax Home Entertainment Firm; Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Paper Book
As director Gus Van Sant observes in the introduction to Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's screenplay Good Will Hunting, the two young actors somewhat resemble the characters they play in the film: they're best friends, and Affleck (who plays Chuckie) habitually chauffeurs Damon (Will), who doesn't...
Growing up in Boston's Gilded Age : the journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872-1874
Blackwell, Alice Stone
Paper Book
In 1872, when Alice Stone Blackwell was 14 years old, she began a diary. The only child of women's rights leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, Alice was a lively, wilful, intellectually precocious girl who tried to carve out her own identity while growing up in the midst of the strong...
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
The stunning graphic novel adaptation * A must-read and collector's item for fans of "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (New York Times).   Look for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale   In Margaret...
Home town
Kidder, Tracy
Paper Book
In this splendid book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home--into Hometown, U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable surface, a small town is a place of...
The Hotel Nantucket
Hilderbrand, Elin
Paper Book
"The queen of beach reads" (New York Magazine) and #1 New York Times bestselling author delivers an immensely satisfying page-turner in this tale about a summer of scandal at a storied Nantucket hotel. Fresh off a bad breakup with a longtime...
Improper Bostonians : lesbian and gay history from the Puritans to Playland
History Project Boston, Mass
Paper Book
"Drawing on newspaper accounts private archives, advertisements, and other sources, Improper Bostonians introduces us to men and women who flouted conventional gender rules, were unapologetic about their lifestyles, and tried to make sense of their sexuality - sometimes at great cost." "As Improper...
Jaws
Spielberg, Steven, 1946; Benchley, Peter; Gottlieb, Carl; Shaw, Robert, 1927-1978; Scheider, Roy; Dreyfuss, Richard; Gary, Lorraine, 1937; Hamilton, Murray; Universal Pictures Firm; Universal City Studios
DVD
Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first summer mega hit! Special features include: Steven Spielberg's retrospective on the making of Jaws, deleted scenes and outtakes, Jaws archive photos, storyboards, production drawings, and more.
The jinx
Sturman, Jennifer
Paper Book
The Jinx by Jennifer Sturman released on Nov 29, 2005 is available now for purchase.
Legally blonde
Platt, Marc E; Kidney, Ric; Lutz, Karen McCullah; Smith, Kirsten; Luketic, Robert; Witherspoon, Reese, 1976; Wilson, Luke, 1971; Blair, Selma; Davis, Matthew, 1978; Garber, Victor; Coolidge, Jennifer; Taylor, Holland; Larter, Ali; Richmond, Anthony B., 19
DVD
When a blonde sorority queen is dumped by her boyfriend, she decides to follow him to law school to get him back. Once there, she learns she has more legal savvy than she ever imagined. Based on the book by Amanda Brown.
Little women : an annotated edition
Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888
Paper Book
Little Women has delighted and instructed readers for generations. For many, it is a favorite book first encountered in childhood or adolescence. Championed by Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. K. Rowling, it is however much more than the "girls' book" intended...
Louisa May Alcott
Cheever, Susan
Paper Book
Susan Cheever's comprehensive and definitive biography sheds new light on of life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has inspired generations of women.
Matt & Ben : a new play
Kaling, Mindy
Paper Book
It's the story Hollywood has glamorized, publicized, and bombarded us with--how it all began for the two young men, now famous for the tabloid coverage of ther on-again-off-again romances, their big budget smashes and flops, and their "Project Greenlight." It started with a script for the film...
Mona Lisa smile
Goldsmith-Thomas, Elaine; Schindler, Deborah; Schiff, Paul; Konner, Lawrence; Rosenthal, Mark D; Newell, Mike, 1942; Roberts, Julia, 1967; Dunst, Kirsten, 1982; Stiles, Julia, 1981; Gyllenhaal, Maggie, 1977; Stevenson, Juliet; West, Dominic, 1970; Goodwin
Paper Book
An art history teacher in the 1950s, who has the admiration of her students at Wellesley College, instructs them on how to be independent women. This goes against the conservative views of the school and she is chastised by the faculty.
Mostly good girls
Sales, Leila
Paper Book
The higher you aim, the farther you fall.... It's Violet's junior year at the Westfield School. She thought she'd be focusing on getting straight As, editing the lit mag, and figuring out how to talk to boys without choking on her own saliva. Instead, she's just trying to hold it...
No gods, no monsters
Turnbull, Cadwell
Paper Book
Named a BEST BOOK OF 2021 by the New York Times, NPR, the New York Public Library, Audible, Tor.com, Book Riot, Library Journal, and Kirkus! Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award "Riveting...[A] tender, ferocious book."--New York Times "Beautifully fantastical."--NPR<...
Our house : a tribute to Fenway Park
Smith, Curt
Paper Book
Relates the history of the Red Sox and their home, Fenway Park.
The Peabody sisters : three women who ignited American romanticism
Marshall, Megan
Paper Book
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters -- and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day -- has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era...
The Penderwicks : a summer tale of four sisters, two rabbits, and a very interesting boy
Birdsall, Jeanne
Paper Book
With over one million copies sold, this series of modern classics about the charming Penderwick family from National Book Award winner and New York Times bestseller Jeanne Birdsall is perfect for fans of Noel Streatfeild and Edward Eager. A PARADE BEST KIDS BOOK OF ALL...
Prep : a novel
Sittenfeld, Curtis
Paper Book
Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition. Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her...
Remain : a supernatural love story
Sparks, Nicholas; Shyamalan, M. Night
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A one-of-a-kind novel that grapples with the supernatural mysteries of life, death, and human connection--an unprecedented collaboration between the globally bestselling author of love stories like The Notebook and the renowned writer and director of...
Run
Patchett, Ann
Paper Book
"Engaging, surprising, provocative and moving...a thoroughly intelligent book, an intimate domestic drama that nonetheless deals with big issues touching us all: religion, race, class, politics and, above all else, family." -- Washington Post From New York Times bestselling author Ann...
The Salem witch trials : an unsolved mystery from history
Yolen, Jane
Paper Book
In this spooky book from the nonfiction An Unsolved Mystery from History picture book series, tragedy strikes Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 as the community is torn apart by accusations of witchcraft. When a group of girls came down with a horrible, mysterious bout of illness,...
The scarlet letter : a romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him...
Show me a sign
LeZotte, Ann Clare
Paper Book
Don't miss the companion book, Set Me Free CRITICS ARE RAVING ABOUT SHOW ME A SIGN Winner of the 2021 Schneider Family Book Award * NPR Best Books of 2020 * Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020 * School Library Journal Best Books of 2020 *...
Since we fell
Lehane, Dennis
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Year Bookpage Best of 2017 Booklist Best Crime Novel PopSugar Best Book of 2017 The new novel from New York Times bestseller Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island "Lehane is...
Small mercies
Lehane, Dennis
Paper Book
Instant New York Times Bestseller "Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can't-put-it-down entertainment." -- Stephen King The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival...
The summer of broken rules
Walther, K. L
Paper Book
A romance novel inspired by the songs of Taylor Swift! *NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* This BookTok sensation is perfect for fans of Jenny Han's The Summer I Turned Pretty and Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride. Meredith's family's annual game of assassin at Martha's...
Summer sisters : a novel
Blume, Judy
Paper Book
No writer captures the seasons of our lives better than Judy Blume.  Now, from theNew York Timesbestselling author ofWifeyandSmart Women,comes an extraordinary novel of reminiscence and awakening--an unforgettable story of two women, two families, and the friendships that shape a lifetime. When...
That old cape magic
Russo, Richard
Paper Book
Following Bridge of Sighs--a national best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as an astounding achievement and a masterpiece--Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth. Griffin has been...
This land is their land : the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the troubled history of Thanksgiving
Silverman, David J.
Paper Book
Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story.In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief),...
This Pats year : a trek through a season as a football fan
Glennon, Sean
Paper Book
A fun and engaging look at what it is to be a fan, This Pats Year highlights fans of the New England Patriots during the team's 2002 post-champion season.
Thoreau at Walden
Thoreau, Henry David
Paper Book
I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely. So said Henry David Thoreau in 1845 when he began his famous experiment in living on Walden Pond. In this graphic masterpiece, John Porcellino...
The trial of Lizzie Borden : a true story
Robertson, Cara
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY BOOK AWARD In Cara Robertson's "enthralling new book," The Trial of Lizzie Borden, "the reader is to serve as judge and jury" (The New York Times). Based on twenty years of research and recently unearthed evidence, this true...
Waiting for Teddy Williams
Mosher, Howard Frank
Paper Book
In "one of the funniest and most heartfelt baseball stories in recent memory" (Publishers Weekly), Howard Frank Mosher returns to Kingdom Common, Vermont, to spin a touching coming-of-age tale in an America that has almost disappeared. From this remote village, noted for its fervent devotion to the...
Walking to Martha's Vineyard : poems
Wright, Franz
Paper Book
In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death...
The witches : Salem, 1692
Schiff, Stacy
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the #1 national bestseller Cleopatra unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. "The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692, and no one else could tell it with the otherworldly flair...
Writers & lovers
King, Lily
Paper Book
#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection "I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice...
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