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.
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.
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!
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.
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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