The Quill & The Cross

BOOK

WINNER

The Lake House by Kate Morton

June 1933, and sixteen-year-old Alice Edevane is preparing for her family’s Midsummer Eve party at their country home, Loeanneth. But by the time midnight strikes and fireworks light up the night skies, the Edevane family will have suffered a loss so great that they leave Loeanneth forever.
Seventy years later, after a particularly troubling case, Detective Sadie Sparrow retreats to her beloved grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall. Once there, she stumbles upon an abandoned house, and learns the story of a baby boy who disappeared without a trace.
Meanwhile, in her elegant Hampstead home, the formidable Alice Edevane, now an old lady, leads a life as neatly plotted as the bestselling detective novels she writes. Until a young police detective starts asking questions about her family’s past, seeking to resurrect the complex tangle of secrets Alice has spent her life trying to escape…

RUNNER-UP

Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes

In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman submits a poem to a local newspaper: a rallying cry for hope, purpose . . . and rocks. Send me a rock for the person you lost, and I will build something life-giving. When the poem spreads farther than he ever intended, Robert Bliss’s humble words change the tide of a nation. Boxes of rocks inundate the tiny, coastal Maine town, and he sets his calloused hands to work, but the building halts when tragedy strikes. Decades later, Annie Sawyer is summoned back to Ansel-by-the-Sea when she learns her Great-Uncle Robert, the man who became her refuge during the hardest summer of her youth, is now the one in need of help. What she didn’t anticipate was finding a wall of heavy boxes hiding in his home. Long-ago memories of stone ruins on a nearby island trigger her curiosity, igniting a fire in her anthropologist soul to uncover answers. She joins forces with the handsome and mysterious harbor postman, and all her hopes of mending the decades-old chasm in her family seem to point back to the ruins. But with Robert failing fast, her search for answers battles against time, a foe as relentless as the ever-crashing waves upon the sea.

MOVIES

WINNER

Tron: Ares (2025)

When tech CEO Julian Dillinger brings a new super program named Ares off the Grid into the real world, Ares begins to question his directive and his creator. The only problem is: none of Dillinger’s programs can stay in the real world longer than 29 seconds. He believes that the original tech company, Encom, his rival, has found it. And they have. Eve Kim, the CEO of Encom, is racing to bring the code back to headquarters when Ares and his partner, Athena, intercept her. When Ares begins to “malfunction” and turn against Dillinger, Athena is made the new head of the grid, and she will stop at nothing to complete her directive. As Dillinger’s own creation goes wildly out of hand, it’s a fight for permanence as the real world and the digital one collide.

Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Gillian Anderson, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Jeff Bridges

RUNNER-UP

Arrival (2016)

Linguistics professor Louise Banks leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life and quite possibly all of mankind.

Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma

(Reviews coming soon.)