I picked this up when I was in a slump. I hadn’t been finishing any books, I just kept starting new ones. I figured a psychological thriller might help, since they’re usually quick. It worked - I read this in one sitting.

This book is about a couple, Merry and Sam, who appears perfect, with their new baby, living in Sweden. When Merry’s best friend comes to visit, secrets start coming to light. Oh, also, none of the characters are likable at all or have any redeeming qualities. They’re all just bad and maybe bad things happened to them in the past but the story doesn’t really go much into that to let you feel any sympathy for any of them.

The writing in this book certainly isn’t perfect. The story isn’t entirely surprising (though be warned - parts of it are tough to read because of the subject matter - message me if you need the deets before you read). Yet, I still found it held my attention enough to want to see what happened next. Truthfully, I skimmed a little, which might have helped me read it in one sitting. Regardless, I still need to give this book some credit for breaking me out of a slump. It definitely has page-turner qualities. Also, I’ve finished two books since I read this one. Thrillers almost always do the trick... but I just can’t give this one three full stars. I’ll give it 2 which in my rating scheme, means “it was fine”.

This book flew under my radar til it won the Pulitzer. I read the synopsis and felt meh about it. So glad I read it anyway because I ended up loving it!

Less follows our protagonist Arthur Less, a moderately successful but not that successful almost 50-year-old writer who sees himself as a failure and others would describe as mediocre, as he journeys around the world to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding. His adventures (or misadventures) are hilarious and the writing is quite witty and clever - I laughed out loud a lot while reading this, which is rare!

Arthur’s naivety and innocence make him a heartwarming character. He gets in his own way, and is seemingly bad at everything - bad at writing, even bad at being gay. Bad luck seems to follow him around, which makes for some seriously funny scenes. The author really ties things together in funny but charming ways.

I keep harping on how funny and clever this book is, but it’s also sweet and there’s a love story that made me tear up. I really grew to care about what would happen to Arthur Less.

If you’re looking for a plot-driven book, I’m not sure you’d love this one. This one is character driven, but fortunately the main character is relatable - not in that he’s an older gay man (obviously I am not), but in that he struggles with mediocrity, and his observations on life are easy to sympathize with.

Overall this book is just really enjoyable and lovely. I plan to reread it, as I think knowing the ending would give me more insight the second time around. Also, I’m sure I missed a ton of the subtle humor throughout. I see why this won the Pulitzer, and I’d recommend most people give this book a try.

When Katie Met Cassidy turned out to be a great book for sitting on a beach because it’s something you can read in a day. Thanks to Putnam Books for sharing it with me!

This book is a straight up romance, but a lesbian romance. Well, kind of. Katie considers herself straight at first, until she meets Cassidy. And I’m sure you can predict how the story goes.

I definitely kept reading this for the cute cheesy breeziness of a love story - but, nothing really new to see here, except the genders of the lovebirds. However, I found no subtly in the writing. Lots of the book is dialogue. Lots of telling instead of showing.

I feel kind of bad not loving this book. After all... it’s pride month, and this book features a non-heteronormative couple. But, that was the only interesting thing about it. I feel like the LGBTQ+ romance world deserves more than this. Fortunately A Little Life, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Less are out there to fill the void - although they all feature male relationships, they are much better than this.

Overall, if you take this for what it is - a semi-steamy lesbian rom-com with flat characters but a fast paced relationship and plot, it’s a quick and kind of fun book. And it does make for a good beach read. If you’re into that kind of thing, maybe it’s for you. It wasn’t all bad, it just wasn’t really for me.

I picked up Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid (my first by her) because it sounded beachy and light. It was definitely both... but these types of books usually leave me wanting more, and this one was no exception.

Maybe in Another Life is about a 29-year-old, Hannah, who hasn’t felt at home in a city in years and moves around a lot. It has an interesting premise - what if one decision can change the outcome of your life? The book has two parallel storylines that happen at the same time. In one, Hannah leaves the bar her first night back in LA with her ex-boyfriend/high school sweetheart. In the second, she leaves with her best friend Gabby.

The parallel storylines are the most interesting part of this book. To me, the characters felt very surface level. Hannah wears her hair in a high bun and loves cinnamon rolls - we hear about these little adorable quirks over and over and over. Like we get it! She has preferences! I also felt like the attempts to make the characters deeper with somewhat sad backstories fell flat for me. They all came off as kind of a little too perfect.

Both storylines of this book are basically love stories. The book sends the message that no matter what choice you make, things will work out. Despite some planted hardships for Hannah in the storylines, the characters really have charmed lives and everything always just somehow works out so well for them - in just a couple weeks! The storyline is very short (and in both storylines, seemingly perfect men fall in love with Hannah in just a couple of weeks). It all seems too easy and wasn’t realistic to me.

That being said, this was a super easy, light and fluffy beach read. If you’re looking for light and easily digestible with happy endings, this might be for you.

I love Kent Haruf. I’m a huge fan of his books. Granted, I’ve only read two of them (this one - Plainsong - and Our Souls at Night) but both were so well done and moving, I just want to savor everything he ever wrote.

Haruf’s books, including this one, are set in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado. Plainsong tells the stories of some of the town’s characters, including twins and their dad who were abandoned by their mom, a pregnant teen with nowhere to turn, and a couple of old farmers. Their stories come together in such a lovely way.

Haruf’s writing gives you such a strong sense of place, and the feelings of both desperation and hope. It is unassuming yet so moving, and manages to be both bleak and hopeful. The story has ugly parts, but is so beautiful overall. I just absolutely love the town of Holt, Haruf’s modest and almost sparse way of telling a story, the way he includes the perfect amount of detail so that you aren’t bogged down yet you can picture Holt so clearly, the bleak feelings created, the sanguine feelings created... all of it.

If you like reading about small town America, I highly recommend this book. Our Souls at Night is also set in Holt, and slightly more forgiving than this one, and also has a bonus Netflix movie with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. I recommend both!

I finished Fruit of the Drunken Tree a couple nights ago (thanks to @doubledaybooks for gifting me a copy!) and I loved it much more than I expected I would! So glad I prioritized it because it was fantastic.

This book follows a girl, Chula, growing up in Colombia in Bogota during Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror. When the book opens, she’s 15 and has fled to the US with her mom and older sister. The story then jumps back to the beginning, and we follow Chula to see how her family ended up here.

Chula’s family lives in a wealthy neighborhood and can afford to hire a maid, and Chula is fascinated with her mom’s latest hire Petrona, who starts with the family when she is just 13 years old. The perspective of this book is told from the eyes of a child, so the reader catches things that Chula does not, like red flags from Petrona’s boyfriend. Chula trusts Petrona, and has a hard time knowing when things may not be safe. All the while, Petrona is struggling under the weight of providing and caring for her family, and getting in over her head with dangerous people.

The writing in this book is really good - I would not have guessed it’s a debut! It’s also one of those books where I found myself googling things about Colombia constantly. I love books that share an experience from a different perspective, especially when it’s so different from my own.

This book is both moving and engrossing. I was rooting so much for both Chula and Petrona. The characters feel authentic and genuine. I was captivated by their story, and even more intrigued knowing it is autobiographical. Highly recommend this one to anyone who likes historical fiction, family dramas, or stories that help you empathize with refugees or people different from yourself.

Late to the Lauren Groff party but I finally read Fates and Furies and... her writing is undeniably beautiful.

Fates and Furies is about a marriage. It’s about Lotto, a spirited charming happy-go-lucky tall kid, and Mathilde, a mysterious quiet but beautiful also tall girl. Lotto comes from privilege in Florida, but his dad dies when he is still young and his mom becomes reclusive. Mathilde doesn’t have a family. When Lotto and Mathilde meet in their last couple weeks of college, they get married shortly after.

The book follows their ups and downs and trials and tribulations as they move to NYC, Lotto is cut off from his fortune, Lotto struggles to get acting gigs so Mathilde has to make ends meet, Lotto finds his gift and voice as a successful playwright, and Lotto never loses his charming innocence. Mathilde is sort of in the shadows for the first half of the book. As the story goes on, powerful secrets about what holds them together are slowly revealed.

What worked for me: the writing. The lyrical prose, the brilliance of her words. What didn’t work for me: the way the characters spoke to one another did not seem realistic. The book kind of felt like watching the characters from a murky distance. I didn’t feel the connection until very late in the book.

My favorite part was probably a description of an opera Lotto worked on about Antigone. This short vignette, and conversations with some of you, have made me super interested in Groff’s short fiction, which I hear is where she is the most skilled.

By the end of this book, I decided I really enjoyed it. It was sticking with me, I was thinking about it a lot, and I wanted to know more. I do like slightly pretentious writing in general. But that needing more, the weird distance between the reader and the characters, and the some slightly overwritten parts that made me say “for real” and feel like she was trying too hard held this back from being five stars for me. However, I will definitely return to Groff’s writing.

Let me know if you’ve read this and what you thought of it, or what you think of Groff’s other books!

I cannot say enough good things about this book. The writing, the way she weaves together the stories of the characters so that you feel like you got to read 10 different stories (even though they're all anchored together with our main character, Daniel), the way she writes about relationships, and the story. The STORY! The characters! I just fell so in love with this book, I immediately went out and bought two more of her books after finishing it.

This Must Be the Place is about a marriage, and a family. It's also about a man, the man in the marriage, Daniel Sullivan. Daniel is a New Yorker who went to school in England and now lives in a remote home in Ireland with his wife Claudette and their two children. Daniel has two older children from a previous marriage that he never talks to or get to see, but not really by choice. Claudette also has one older son from a previous marriage who is off at boarding school.

Claudette, as it turns out, is an ex-movie-star turned recluse. She disappeared, just straight up ghosted society, in the middle of filming a movie by running away with her son, and nobody knows where she went. Daniel stumbles upon Claudette when he journeys to Ireland to collect his late grandfather's ashes, and voila, they fall in love and he moves there to be with her.

When Daniel heads back to the US for his father's 90th birthday, he hears a radio program speaking of a long lost lover from his past as if she's been dead for awhile. He looks into it, and she has, and he had no idea... as Daniel spends more time away from Claudette, he tries to confront some things from his past, including his far away children, and gets caught up uncovering the truth about his ex-love's death.

This story is told from multiple perspectives and jumps around in time. I just LOVED the structure of this book. For example, one of Daniel's kids loves footnotes. A chapter focused on him is full of footnotes. Another chapter is entirely full of descriptions of items to be auctioned off that used to belong to Claudette. It's so unique! And, each character has their own story, all related to Daniel or Claudette in some way, but their own so that you feel like you got to read many more books than one by the end, somehow. Maggie O'Farrell's language is entirely readable but also nerdy? Somehow? Is that a thing - nerdy language? It helps that Daniel is a linguist.

For a story about a marriage, this book is so gripping. I didn't want it to end. It was an immensely satisfying book, without a contrived intentionally satisfying ending. The way the story built, the realness of the characters (even those you only spend a little time with) - O'Farrell is so talented. So many times entire books will be about a character and I'll never feel connected or invested in them. With these characters, I was immediately invested. They immediately felt real.

This book tells a story of a complex relationship, and of a man coping with grief and confronting his demons. I highly recommend this to, well, everyone! I can't wait to read more of O'Farrells writing, and This Must Be the Place is going down as one of my favorites

Do you ever have books where the whole time you're reading them, you're just thinking about how great they would be as a movie? Or even, how much better the movie would be? The Banker's Wife by Cristina Alger is one of those books for me. This review is going to be half review, half dream movie casting.

The Banker's Wife is about, well, a banker's wife, but also a journalist and the banker's assistant and the journalist's fiancé. When Matthew Lerner's plane crashes in the alps (he is the banker, at the bank Swiss United) with one of his female clients that his wife Annabel had never heard of, she just has a gut feeling that it wasn't an accident. Meanwhile, journalist Marina Tourneau is engaged to Grant Ellis, the son of a powerful businessman who is about to announce his run for president. Marina's mentor leaves her with information about the shady dealings of Swiss United before he is found dead in his home. Her findings tie a lot of powerful people to some unethical and illegal to Swiss United.

Annabel races to uncover the truth about Matthew, while Marina must decide how much of the Swiss United story to expose. Meanwhile, Matthew's beautiful young assistant Zoe must hide from the powerful forces at Swiss United who want to make sure she doesn't know too much.

This book is a fast paced thriller, and I enjoyed it, but the lack of place and character development kept me from really loving it. However, I can totally picture it as a movie! So, I'm going to give you the movie cast you never asked for. First up, our main lady, the banker's wife herself, Annabel. She's described as a redhead, and beautiful, Matthew only has eyes for her, yadda yadda. But she's also a little bit smarter than the other bankers give her credit for, and she loves art. My choice: Emma Stone!

Next up, we have Marina. Marina was recently engaged to golden boy Grant Ellis, and struggling with her decision to leave her budding career behind and play trophy wife. Her description said black hair and blue eyes, and referred to her being pale so... basically everyone in this book is supposed to be white (of course, the usual), but I don't care so I'm going with Kerry Washington because she would be perf for this role. Serving up some Olivia Pope fierceness as a badass woman journalist crumbling the patriarchy and exposing hideous acts of powerful men.

Zoe is beautiful, young, French, and as is a trend with these women, smarter than men expect. I don't know many blonde French actresses (pretty sure it said blonde? Going with it) but I do think Clemence Poesy would be great.

And the last person I'm going to cast is Jonas. Head of Swiss United, mastermind of schemes. I think Steven Weber would be great for this. Pretends to be nice but secretly (or not secretly) an evil villain, head banker, asshole extraordinaire.

Most of the rest of the cast would be sleazy bankers, golden boy politicians, and crooked businessmen. I don't really care to cast them.

So what do you think? Do I have a future as a casting director? I think Hollywood would be silly not to hire me. They'd really miss out. Also, if you've read this book, let me know if you agree with my choices!