Fin and Lady by Cathleen Schine

Really enjoyed this book - the second one by Schine I have read.
From Westchester Library System Synopsis:

From the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport , a wise, clever story of New York in the '60sIt's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady-giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free-is as much his responsibility as he is hers. So begins Fin & Lady , the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport . Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the '60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War-Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself. From a writer The New York Times has praised as "sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting," Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

This is the story of four slave mistresses, known as "wenches " who become friends at Tawawa House in Ohio.  Tawawa is a resort that "masters" travel to for a few weeks each summer with their "slave wives," leaving their actual wives home on the plantation with the kids. Of course, some of the kids are the offspring of the wench and the master, rather than the wife and the master. It's a tough book but very interesting and enlightening. I was not aware of this place Tawawa, but it really existed and later became a Wilberforce University, attended mainly by African Americans, some of the first students being the offspring of these wenches and their masters! And  W.E.B DuBois taught there.

The women contemplate freedom, learn each others' stories and deepest fears. Some stories are brutal, but the main character, Lizzie, sleeps in the same bed with her owner, the father of her two children, and thinks herself in love with him. And he with her.

I enjoyed this book even though some of it was brutal. 

The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

Three great books in a row! I am on a roll.
I  have read another book by Julia Glass before and enjoyed it, so downloaded this from the Library onto my iPad (the way I have been reading lately, now that I know  how to work "the system.")
The novel opens as Percy Darling, the widower, returns from his daily run. While he is 70 years old, he keeps up a fitness regime of running and swimming. He lives in a big old house, where he lived with his wife who he lost 30 years ago in an accidental drowning (more about that later.)
He has two daughters who  he has raised by himself; one is a successful oncologist and the other a not-so-successful mother of two divorcee, who is just starting to work for a prestigious nursery school in the barn on Percy's property that used to be his wife's dance studio.
The plot has many disparate elements and characters that all end up related and interwoven. Percy is very close to Robert, his grandson, who is a student at Harvard (Percy used to be a Librarian at the Widener Library on that campus), and who falls in with an ecoterrorist group through his roommate, Turo.  Percy also falls for a local artist, Sarah, and helps in her discovery that she has breast cancer.
A lot of "bad" things happen in this bucolic suburban community on the outskirts of Boston and the novel deals well with the social issues, the gulf between the classes and our excessive modern society. It's really a very satisfying and thought-provoking novel.