3.5 stars. By the author of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, I Was Told It Would Get Easier (brilliant title) is a hyper-realistic contemporary mother-daughter story, whereas Nina's tale is more like a geeky, almost-manic-pixie near-rom-com. Very different but both very good, with unique characters and familiar techniques to pull the reader into the story. If you've read Other People's Houses, you'll find a familiar voice/tone here.

Successful lawyer and single mom, Jessica, isn't sure why things seem so strained and awkward between her and her 16-year-old, Emily. She tries to give Emily space but would like to recapture some of their earlier closeness and hopes that signing up for a tour of top East Coast colleges will give them a chance to reconnect. Emily would just like to take a break from school drama and school work and, well, school really. She isn't stoked about college touring, isn't really sure she wants to go to college at all, but she's happy to get away. And maybe even happy to have her mom to herself a little (if she can actually pull herself away from her work).

The dual (and sometimes dueling) points of view of mother and day, the tour itinerary, and some past and present relationship/colleague/friend drama provide the structure of the story. The heart, however, is found in the way Jessica and Emily navigate the pull of their strong moral compasses and society's pressures while trying to know each other anew and relearn how to communicate with each other. Woven throughout are themes of work vs. life, women in the workplace and how even #metoo moments can be manipulated into tools against them, generational divides, and parenting teenagers.

Quietly humorous, sweet but realistically fulfilling, and full of both teenage angst and parent-of-teenager angst, "I Was Told It Would Get Easier" is the well-written mother-daughter contemporary fiction road-trip book I never knew I needed.

"Every telling of an event is a portrait of the teller and not the event itself." And in that case, "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau," with all its many tellings, is a vast portrait gallery. Of the eponymous Dominicana science fiction author, yes, but also of her pirate husband, and physicist son, and a Jewish immigrant, and his grandson, and their friend the freelance foreign correspondent, and a women who combed the desert to recover the bones of people "disappeared" under Pinochet, and a bookseller in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and others. And the events they tell as they paint their portraits! Hauntingly beautiful tales of the multiverse, of stories lost and never written, of lives lived and rarely spoken, of identity and immigration and warfare and survival and wandering and stars and unexpected connection.

Or, if you'd like, this is a literary saga about a book that was written and destroyed in 1929 and yet somehow, in 2004, ends up with a Chicago hotel worker who tries to return it to the author's son in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katerina.

But, really, it's the portrait thing.

Content notes: loss of parent, colonialism, racism, war, displacement, natural disaster, death, torture