The Secret of Clouds

 Fiction by Alyson Richman

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

In 1987, Katya and Sasha are a Ukrainian couple in the USSR. Katya's recent injury has stalled her ballet career, and Sasha knows he can find work in his field of biology anywhere, so when the Soviet Union offers a chance for some Ukrainian Jews to go to the USA, they take it.

In 1999, Maggie Topper is a young fifth-grade teacher with boundless enthusiasm who takes on the task of home-tutoring their American-born son Yuri whose heart condition makes it impossible to attend school.

This was a good story; I will look for more by this author.

What You Wish For

 Fiction by Katherine Center

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Samantha is a librarian at a private elementary school in Galveston, Texas, where she moved several years ago from a school in California. Since she's been in Texas, Samantha has begun to flourish in way she never has before, and she feels like life is good. She only vaguely remembers Duncan, the man she nursed an overwhelming crush for, and the reason she fled California. And maybe she might wish to see him again. But then, Duncan comes to her school in Texas....

This was a fun little straight romance.

I also read recently by this author: Hello Stranger

Hide Your Eyes

 Fiction by Alison Gaylin

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a fun story about a preschool teacher called Samantha who gets herself mixed up in a murder mystery, and meets a handsome policeman too.

I also read recently by this author: Never Look Back

You Could Be Home By Now

 Fiction by Tracy Manaster

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This story takes place in 2010, in an Arizona retiree community, one of those golf-course-centered condo developments where all residents must be over 55. Into this setting several characters converge: an attractive recent widow, a divorced man still hung up on his ex-wife, a grandmother struggling to make ends meet due to the recent recession, and a couple of visiting grandchildren, one of which has stayed too long and is now in violation of the community's strict no-kids policy. 

Also there is the owner/developer of the place, a man with an ego big enough to hold a festival on his birthday and call it Founder's Day, who has recently hired a couple of teachers from back East to try to give his upstart little community some culture and history.

This was a good character story that had a few small surprises.

The Stranger Diaries

Fiction by Elly Griffiths

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Claire is an English teacher at British high school that happens to be housed in an historic house once owned by a famous spooky Victorian author called R.M. Holland. Claire both teaches Holland's short stories (the most famous of which being "The Stranger," which is featured in this book as a story-with-the-story) and is working on a book about the author, so she likes working at a school with a connection to him. But then a fellow teacher turns up murdered!

This was a pretty good book, although it was a little slower moving than I would have preferred. I did like the variance of narrators; the author gives us not only Claire's perspective but that of also the lead detective on the murder case, and Claire's teenaged daughter.

The Teacher's Funeral

Youth fiction by Richard Peck.


https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Set at the turn of the century (that's the twentieth, not the twenty-first, by the way), this was a cute story about a one-room schoolhouse in the country.