Women and Children First: A Novel
by Alina Grabowski
Stellar storytelling (6/18/2025)
Grabowski's novel unpacks the events surrounding the sudden death of a teen in a small depressed MA town. The story is told through the voices of 10 women - young and old, who are adjacent to, part of, on the periphery, or deeply impacted by the young girl's death. The storytelling is circular - the individual narratives dip in and out of time, going backwards and forwards, moving the plot along while also retelling certain events from different perspectives.
There is nothing rudimentary about the very modern tragic story that Grabowski novel unspools, yet it is also a tale as old as time - young girls on the cusp of womanhood, older women reflecting back on their youth. Throughout, I wanted the girls to listen more to the mothers and the mothers to listen more their daughters! Highly recommend for lovers of women-first literary fiction.
Wild Dark Shore: A Novel
by Charlotte McConaghy
A perfect novel (6/18/2025)
All the stars. Charlotte McConaghy has written the perfect novel. She has created a beautiful and frightening elegy to our world in all its disarray and disorder and also done wonders to celebrate the unbreakable bonds between parent and children.
Hazel Says No: A Novel
by Jessica Berger Gross
Well crafted multi person contemporary novel (6/4/2025)
This is a well-crafted multi-person contemporary novel that jumps off from the question of what if Hazel said no - specifically to the lecherous small town principal who propositions her. And not just no, but no and then telling her community about it rather than sinking into shame for something wholly not her fault and likely happening to others.
The catch though - this happens on Hazel's first day of high school in her senior town in a small depressed town in Maine to which her Jewish Brooklyn based family has just moved so that her father can take a better paid and tenured teaching position at the local small liberal arts college. What unspools from Hazel's decision affects her, her younger brother, and her parents in ways foreseen and unforeseen. Jessica Berger Gross is a talented writer and I am eager to see what she writes next. Highly recommend.
What Kind of Paradise: A Novel
by Janelle Brown
What if the Unabomber had had a daughter? (5/29/2025)
Brown's latest is an excellent genre mash up - a dash of literary fiction, an achingly difficult coming of age story, a drop of romance, a compelling mystery and a frightening thriller. Brown's story asks the question, simplified so as not to give away too much plot - what would happen if the Unabomber had been raising a daughter while pursuing his ideologic reign of terror. The book is fast paced and so good that I often wished I could shut off all the notifications on my phone and keep the outside world out so I could race to the end - the irony of this is not lost on me given that the thrust of the book is whether technology is good or bad? harmful or helpful? Whatever the answer, Brown's book is an excellent read.
The Ghostwriter: A Novel
by Julie Clark
Another winner (5/22/2025)
When you approach a new Julie Clark mystery, you must accept that you will do little else until you finish it. You will ignore your work, put down your phone, and forget to make dinner, all in service of ripping through another well told, smart story. Clark specializes in strong women facing difficult choices and The Ghostwriter offers several such examples.
The Names: A Novel
by Florence Knapp
Stellar novel (4/17/2025)
Occasionally someone says, "you rate too many novels 5 stars." So I thought about this and attribute it to the following: 1) I am choosy about what I read and do my research so the odds are high it will have merit and be good; 2) as a lifelong voracious reader, I recognize and appreciate a novel that is compelling, well-written and says something new; and 3) what does a rating system even mean. Which brings me to The Names by Florence Knapp. This is truly an outstanding, compulsively readable, unique, five star read. Knapp offers us a sliding doors novel of three versions of one woman's life - but the sliding doors in this case is a name - how does a name - the 3 names Cora bestows on her newborn son in 3 different versions of her life - define someone and what happens to our life as a result? This book is harrowing - the 3 "lives" all deal with domestic abuse. But there is beauty in the horror and an understanding of what it means to have a life well lived despite the odds. The highest of recommendations.
The Eights
by Joanna Miller
Moving and Illuminating (4/16/2025)
Women know well the uncomfortable experience of being the sole woman in a hostile environment. Women also know well the validating experience of being surrounded by women who lift you up and support you during the good and bad times. Miller has written a universal story centering on four women (the "Eights") who are so bold as to choose to join the inaugural graduating class at Oxford in 1920. The women's varied experiences pre, during and post-WWI are still fresh and underly their determined efforts to become educated and independent women in a society that values neither unless you are a man. Highly recommended to lovers of literary fiction and historical fiction.
The Bright Years
by Sarah Damoff
Redemptive and hopeful (4/10/2025)
As readers, we all long for a well written story with a redemption arc; a book that tackles some of society's most heart-wrenching issues - addiction, adoption; a book that shares a viewpoint but does not hammer the reader over the head with dogma or ideology. The Bright Years is that book. While the content is challenging and at times, so sad as to be almost - but not quite - overwhelming - the prose flows, the inner lives of the 3 narrators are effortlessly conveyed; and the pace of the story makes it hard to put down. Highly recommend. Thank you NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the DRC
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
A clear eyed frightening behind the scenes look at big tech (4/10/2025)
When you can't stop thinking about a book, when it invades your dreams, when you ask everyone you know to read it ... you know it has had an impact. Even if Meta was not working so hard (and succeeding in part) to get this book and the author's voice quashed, I would be imploring everyone to read it. The book is fast paced, astonishing in its content, and clear minded in its view point. Kudos to Sarah Wynn-Williams for going where others dared not go.
Tilt: A Novel
by Emma Pattee
A wild dystopic but all too real ride (3/25/2025)
Pattee's novel is one of those read straight through in one sitting book. Actually, this book is one of those where you have to physically restrain yourself from reading the last few pages to find out what happens! Tilt tells the store of one day in the life of Annie, who is 37 weeks pregnant and at IKEA alone buying a crib when a massive earthquake hits Oregon.
As Annie tries to walk home through the destruction to get back her partner, her interior monologue is a frantic, ripped from the headlines searing indictment of climate change, the staggering cost of American healthcare and dental care, the pregnancy industrial complex, urban real estate prices, and the futility of making art in a broken world. In a taut 240 pages Pattee accomplishes so much. What a debut! What a voice!
Famous Last Words: A Novel
by Gillian McAllister
Buckle up - this one is a roller coaster (in the best way!) (2/25/2025)
Not going to lie, I am here for anything Gillian McAllister writes. But unlike some of my other long term mystery and thriller writers favorites, McAllister's novels just keep getting better and better and better. My recommendation for Famous Last Words is to read it as soon as it is released but do not - and I repeat do not - read any reviews that may spoil even a scintilla of the carefully crafted clever plot. Highly recommend.
Show Don't Tell: Stories
by Curtis Sittenfeld
Another winner from Sittenfeld (2/25/2025)
I often think of Curtis Sittenfeld as the author of short stories for people who don't typically read short stories (i.e. me!). Her stories are accessible, the world-building extensive, and the messages profound. This collection is no different. The protagonists - mostly female - feel familiar, and all canvas that liminal space between college and adulting.
Some protagonists are reflecting back on a significant time in the past with the benefit of hindsight; others have their contemporary worlds rocked by the appearance of someone or something from the past. The opening stories and the final story are the strongest.
I particularly recommend The Richest Babysitter in the World and Lost but Not Forgotten if you like to dip into and out of short story collections. Recommended for Sittenfeld and short story fans.
Tilda Is Visible: A Novel
by Jane Tara
Self help with a fictional twist (2/25/2025)
Tilda is a sweet fable about aging women who let themselves become invisible by society. Tilda is disappearing - she has been diagnosed with invisibility - slowly losing herself and disappearing to those around her. But as the spiritual guide to whom our heroine turns for help says, "If you don't see yourself who else will?" - Tilda, left by her husband, ignored by bartenders, bored in her job, must learn to really see herself - and not just see herself but see the mid-life mid-career version of herself. The version that needed more than she got from ex, more than she gets from her job, more than she is willing to ask for from her mother, and more than she is willing to acknowledge to herself. Only then, will Tilda really be seen.
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty
by Bonny Reichert
Superb memoir of food and family (1/14/2025)
Bonny Reichert grew up hearing her Holocaust survivor father telling her "Sweetheart, do you hear me? It's okay. It's over and we survived." But what Ms. Reichert comes to understand - through painful discussions with her father, travel back to Poland, and through the excavation of her own anxieties and fears, that physical survival does not necessarily equate with psychic survival.
When a parent survives a horror, how much is transmitted on a deep emotional level to the children? Reichert explores this issue through childhood memories and her adult life, but this is not a book about - or solely about intergenerational trauma. This is also a memoir about the centrality of food in families, in Jewish life, in an immigrant's life. Reichert's lifelong fascination with the creation of food and its ability to nourish runs parallel with her reckoning of her father's life and survival.
She learns "survival is not one thing - one piece of luck or smarts or intuition - but a million smalls ones. This choice not that one. This brave move, that good stranger. Careful here. Reckless there." Keeping with the food metaphor, I gobbled this memoir up in a day and highly recommend it.
Sandwich: A Novel
by Catherine Newman
Funny and nostalgic (11/4/2024)
A fast read about important topics that will resonate if you are a middle aged woman living in her “sandwich” era - balancing growing and grown kids with aging and aged parents, all while being in a long loving and long suffering marriage. It will also resonate if your family is lucky enough to have a happy place where it vacations and where you’ve watched your kids grow. I don’t often seek out books that hold up an uncomfortable mirror to whatever I’m experiencing at the time, but Newman’s prose is so funny, so wry, and so moving,
I made the exception and was glad I did.
The God of the Woods: A Novel
by Liz Moore
Moore has done it again with another fantastic novel (11/4/2024)
This book is 10 out of 10. Moore does her magic with a multi perspective multi decade story of two disappearances separated by about 10 years, the first in the 1960s and the second in the 1970s. Saying anything more about the story gives it away. Best to enter this one cold and let it sweep you away till the well thought out and moving denouement.
Wanted: Toddler's Personal Assistant: How Nannying for the 1% Taught Me about the Myths of Equality, Motherhood, and Upward Mobility in America
by Stephanie Kiser
Compulsive, silly and profound (11/4/2024)
Compulsive. Funny. Profound. As our world gets more divisive, not less, it is critical to read memoirs that offer windows into worlds not our own. Sure Kiser shows us how the ultra ultra wealthy live in NYC as she nannies, with all its liberal values, absurdities and glam. But she also lays bare the hard and hidden parts of her life growing up in a Republican, working class, complicated family and what it means - and doesn’t mean - to try to want a different life than the one you come from.
Long Island Compromise: A Novel
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
An outstanding novel from Brodesser-Akner (11/4/2024)
Every now and then a book comes along that is so good that it is also so hard to read. This is one of those books. This book has possibly the best propulsive opening scene I have ever read, followed by one of the hardest chapters dealing with sexual transgressions and drug use that I could barely stomach. Then we veered back into a chapter that was so funny that I actually laughed and laughed.
Brodesser-Akner is a gifted writer. I enjoyed Fleishmann is in Trouble, but perhaps not as much as my peers. But her NYT article on attending a Taylor Swift concert was one of the best pieces of non-fiction narrative writing I have read. This book contains multitudes. The kidnapping of a family patriarch based on a similar incident of someone Brodesser-Akner knew when she was a child. The story of Jews in America - how they got there, what they did when they arrived, and where they are now. The story of unlikable adult siblings managing their scarred and traumatic upbringing. And bigger questions - about how money corrupts and soothes, how generations evolve and adapt, and more.
The Sequel: The Book Series #2
by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The Sequel is a worth sequel (11/4/2024)
The Sequel is as much fun for voracious readers as The Plot. Sprinkled throughout a solid mystery thriller, Hanff Korelitz slyly winks to the peculiarities of the book business. She saves her sharpest knives for book signings, the idea of sequels, agents and editors, book festivals, and those deluded souls who read the Goldfinch and decided they too can write a novel about a boy who was in a museum explosion and hung onto a priceless painting. But this is only back drop to the real mystery - which is how is Anna, the widow of author Jacob Finch Bonner, going to extricate herself from clutches of someone (or someones) who know her real identify and deepest darkest secrets.
Remarkably, Hanff Korelitz (sort of) makes you root for Anna, despite the body count piling up in this novel. This is not a spoiler. If you read The Sequel as a sequel to The Plot, you know you are in for some dastardly and unexpected twists and turns. The Sequel does not necessarily have to be read after The Plot because Hanff Korelitz gives us lots of sign posts and information and reminders about how Anna has found herself the widow of a famous author in the first place, but it is a much better book read as a sequel.
I Hope This Finds You Well: A Novel
by Natalie Sue
Surprisingly compelling and moving office novel (11/4/2024)
I am not usually one for office novels (maybe my time as an office drone is so far in the past and so poorly remembered that I don't want to revisit it?) but Natalie Sue takes the office novel to remarkably compelling and captivating new heights. The premise is simple - unhappy office worker Jolene, stuck in a terrible job, hiding from her parents, running from her past, gets in trouble with HR for improper use of email. But through a tech mistake, rather than have her email restricted, she unexpectedly gets access to all her co-workers emails and messages. What ensues is anything but simple however - Jolene comes to understand that she is not the only one hiding her misery behind her keyboard and she also recognizes the work she will need to do to overcome her past hurts and fully embrace the world around her. A cute HR professional assigned to her case adds some spice, as does a fellow Iranian-Canadian co-worker. Highly recommend.
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