Posts

Two super-fun, juicy, all-the-people-behaving-badly multi-narrator treats that will absolutely keep you turning pages. They’re not a total read-alike match, but they’ve both got a chatty, filling-you-in-on-all-the-gossip vibe that I loved and I think you will too.  

Outlawed is the Reese’s Book Club January pick–a driving, fast-paced story with a fascinating woman at its heart that’s–as Reese Witherspoon said–not really like any book I’ve read before. But there are echoes of The Giver of Stars, with some women protecting and empowering each other and others giving in to societal pressure to conform and betray, and some of the intensity and desperation of Scribe in its alternate history and in the way the circumstances and the rules of […]

The Big Door Prize has one of the grabbiest premises I’ve ever seen–a machine that promises to read your DNA and tell you “what you’re meant to be” appears in a quik-mart in a small town and upends everything and everyone–but underneath that flashy promise is a story with deep heart and lovable, fallible heroes trying to find their own places in a world that’s not been kind or easy. Multiple narrators tell an intricate story that still lands close […]

Stay With Me is the unexpected story of a marriage invaded–by family, by expectations, by culture–and a second wife, intended to provide the offspring wife number one has failed to produce. But no one has the full story (do they ever?), and even the people who claim to be playing by the rules aren’t. This book surprised me in many ways–the plot kept me guessing, and the characters were uniquely themselves. Like Outlawed, it’s a consideration of what it means […]

What do these three books have in common? A setting that really makes the story (I literally found myself missing WHERE I was going as I read the Shergill sisters as much as I missed the Shergills themselves). Complex characters that you have to be a little patient with as they grow on you, and people with some enviable opportunities making bad choices. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters has all the disastrous family travel of The Jetsetters in […]

I’m going to diverge from the norm and NOT compare this to Maybe You Should Talk to Someone–although it’s a fair comparison. But The Group, while it absolutely is about therapy, has a raw, tell-it-all, scraped to the bone quality that I didn’t find in Gottlieb’s book (and that it didn’t need, that’s not a critique). If your kind of memoir is one that pulls zero punches and never lets up, this is for you. One note–I’d hesitate before I […]

A round robin of a piece of historical fiction, from a moment before it was generally assumed that any literary person in pursuit of a proper English vacation would make a pilgrimage to the home of Jane Austen. This had a lot to love–village life, romance, Hollywood, people learning to take chances and stand up for themselves and to trust one another. I’d say you could safely give this to absolutely any book lover on your list.  

A true feel-good, multi-generation rom-com with serious emotional heft. An exhausted MBA consultant-type in London is sent on a forced sabbatical and trades places (literally, not Freaky Friday) with her grandmother, recently divorced from her no-good cheater husband and mainstay of an entire village. Our MBA will take over her grandma’s volunteer and village work while her grandmother tries out online dating from the MBA’s apartment in the city (with her roommates). There’s a lot going on and so many […]

Modern Jane Austen adaptation? Yes please. Set in the world of restaurants with a dash of reality TV competition? Tell me more. In Edinborough? With a much more self-aware and confident heroine than Persuasion’s Anne who shows everyone exactly what she’s made of? I am so there for that. Dont let the unfortunate coloring on the cover of this one (It says “All Stirred Up”) make you pass it by, it’s an absolute delight in a season when we need […]

His Only Wife has a literary feel, while The Ties that Tether is straight up glorious rom-com, but both explore the weight of (different) African culture on a new generation of women who want to honor and embrace their heritage–and please their mothers–while also finding their own way. Maybe it’s too obvious a comparison, but if you’ve begun to explore the African immigrant experience through novels (see also the amazing Transcendent Kingdom), The Ties that Tether offers a light-hearted, escapist […]

When I put this book down I felt… happy. I don’t know about you, but 2020 has been a rough year for happy around here. For a minute there I didn’t even recognize it. It was glorious, and all I want is to repeat it as often as possible. I should maybe have popped some Kristan Higgins into that comparison, or Jenny Colgan or (for those of you who are suckers for a good yarn shop romance as well as […]

If you’re in for a story of a young single mother trying to find housing, figure out the system and build a future for herself and her child–a la Maid–then Lauren Sandler’s This Is All I’ve Got is a #mustread. It’s not a memoir, and Sandler is acutely aware of the problem with her (a successful white journalist) telling this story–but it’s not a story that the person who is living it is going to be able to tell in […]

Bunny… is a WEIRD BOOK. Very Halloween-y. Think Heathers only with characters who can–I don’t want to ruin anything–use very strange powers to do very strange things in search of the perfect companions. It’s very much in the these–young-women-might-be-okay-if-only-they’d-never-met vein, with a lot of rather clinical gruesome stuff that doesn’t really touch anyone for most of the book, with an out-of-place narrator in a fancy-school setting that might be why I stuck with it. If you read it tell me […]

I have to put this out there for your October reading pleasure. Imagine a stronger Austen heroine, like Emma, trotting off to a supposed gothic manor a la Catherine in Northanger Abbey but determined to believe none of it–and then caught up, like the women in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, in a gruesome-but-real horror story she can’t evade. It’s MILD horror though. No nightmares. Promise.

The truth about why I ALMOST put both Writers and Lovers and Queenie down? I have a hard time with protagonists who don’t have their external shit together. If you’re stabbing yourself in the foot by cutting off all your friends, ruining your love life, struggling with your family–I’m there. If you’re sabotaging yourself by screwing up your education or career, I have less patience with you (“You” being the protagonist in the story). Transcendent Kingdom has many of the […]

A fun October romp in the “millionaire makes a game with prizes everyone wants” vein, with wildly atmospheric scenes and a “found family” that will make you want to have a beer with each and every character. Even the villain. A very careful beer. Tuesday is a protagonist with issues, but also one who does have control of some elements of her life–think Transcendent Kingdom rather than Writers and Lovers–and that makes her fun to follow as she tries to […]

This is my current total escape. There is absolutely nothing about this book that will remind you of anything real. It makes zero statements about anything. It has no overarching theme (well, ok: hubris is not good). Here is no work deciphering beautiful language or high-faluntin’ POVs. You just kind of open it, dive in and come up later, refreshed and ready to tackle 2020 again. (Ok, that’s a lot to ask of a book. But it helps.)

Caste is the read of the moment, and with good reason. I learned so much history that I wish had been a fundamental part of my education, especially growing up in Texas and Kansas, where there was a focus on American expansion. That said, it’s anything but dry. There are so many personal stories contained within it. It really is a #mustread—and I’d put Wandering in Strange Lands in that category as well. As a much more personal history, it’s an […]