Tag:

Women

Review

My Murder

by Brian Kenney

Brilliant writing. Clever plotting. And a work of speculative fiction, set in a near-future world, that is totally fascinating. Lou is the fifth victim of a serial killer, leaving behind a lovely toddler and bereft husband. Until she—along with the other four victims—is brought back to life through a government program, the “replication committee,” that clones victims. Celebrities and women advocates, who took to the streets with a red gash painted across their necks—mimicking how the victims were murdered—drew attention to their plight. But understandably, adjustment to her old/new life isn’t easy, although a support group with the other women helps. Then Lou learns some things about her murder that raise some serious questions, making her wonder whom, if anyone, she can trust. Much of the beauty of this book lies in the details; Lou works as a touch therapist in a franchise in a strip mall, dispensing hugs to the emotionally needy. These sorts of facts build on each other slowly, creating a fascinating world, when all of a sudden the book takes several sharp turns that will leave the reader gasping. Addictive, fast, and smart.

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Review

Don’t Forget the Girl

by Henrietta Thornton

First, there were three. Now only two women are left, estranged but still desperate to know what happened to their college friend Abby, who disappeared years ago. They might never know, as serial killer Jon Allan Blue, who killed other young women in the area around the same time, is about to be put to death. The two remaining friends can’t be more different. Bree is a college professor who’s having an affair with an underage student, which sets in relief the unending turmoil caused by Abby’s death. Chelsea is an Episcopal priest whose collar and steadfast demeanor hide an inner longing to break out of her marriage to a man who “looks like a photo of himself that [has] been left too long in the sun.” The two must interact again when a true-crime podcast covers Blue’s killings. The producer tries to convince Bree and Chelsea that their friend’s case deserves to be investigated, but with the show breathlessly feeding the media frenzy with comments like, “Friends don’t let friends get murdered” and Blue himself relishing the spotlight, participation seems counterproductive, not to mention tacky. While Abby’s fate is debated, we flash back to the three friend’s lives in the run up to her disappearance. This and the carefully posed exposé of podcast politics will leave readers looking differently at the spectacle that is the true-crime world, especially when it comes to women victims.

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Review

Dirty Laundry

by Henrietta Thornton

An unnamed village in Cork, Ireland, is a social-media-fueled soap opera in Bose’s suspenseful debut. Ciara lives for her own camera, with her rich husband and three perfectly-dressed-at-all-times children supporting actors in an Instagram fiction. The mostly fawning comments from the neighbors include some from her Indian neighbor, Mishti, who left love in India for an arranged marriage to cold, miserly Parth. Her only joy is her daughter, Maya. Decidedly not fawning is neighbor Lauren, who inherited her home in the wealthy enclave that Ciara rules. Lauren doesn’t fit in and doesn’t care to. She carries a child in a sling almost constantly, while Ciara’s Instagram-approved parenting involves virtually no contact. Lauren’s house is dirty, her clothes are too, and her husband is the furthest man from Parth imaginable. The women’s sniping relationships with each other and their families build to a boiling point, one whose violent outcome is revealed near the beginning of the story in a scene that lingers mysteriously in the background as the drama festers. Mishti’s struggles are a highlight here, sad though they are, with Bose’s writing of a desperate character sadly reminiscent of Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queen.

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Review

Everyone Here is Lying

by Brian Kenney

It’s Tuesday afternoon in suburban Stanhope, and all is as it should be. Family man Dr. William Wooler is at a local motel with one of the hospital volunteers. Except it turns out that today she’s decided to dump him. Furious, he heads home, only to discover his nine-year-old daughter, Avery, in the kitchen, having skipped out on choir practice. As “difficult” as she is mouthy, she’s sucking down Oreos and doing a good job of pressing her father’s buttons. But when Wooler strikes her with a blow to the head that knocks her to the floor, it’s still a shock, to both of them and the reader. Dad-of-the-year hightails it out of there—he goes for a drive to cool off—and when the Woolers’ son gets home from basketball practice, he finds the house empty. Where’s Avery? Thus begins this intense domestic suspense novel in which an entire community is taken apart and turned inside out. Families are interviewed, oftentimes iteratively, histories are resurrected, houses are searched, motives are examined, and what the cops don’t expose, the media does. All the pieces come together brilliantly in a shocking finale.

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Review

Without Saying Goodbye

by Henrietta Thornton

Cerys and Lily have fled their homes for very different reasons, but they end up in the same place, both emotionally and physically: at their wits’ end in a miserable Wales park, where together they embark on restarting their lives.

Lily might be the most terrified young mother Cerys has ever seen. She grew up in foster care and had only a drug-addicted mother as a role model before that. That doesn’t explain her terror, though, but Cerys sidesteps the whys—she has enough to deal with, having left her husband and grown children and attempted suicide the day before. The pair, along with Lily’s little boy, finds housing with a curmudgeonly old lady who threatens to shoot them if they steal anything, but becomes their refuge, and slowly build a new family.

All isn’t rosy though, and readers will remain in suspense, always waiting for the danger that Lily ran from—a verbally and physically abusive husband—to reappear. Jarratt maintains the tension throughout and does a superb job of portraying a victim who’s on the edge. If you enjoy a tale of triumph, along with perhaps throwing a book across the room when a character is that much of a bastard, this one’s for you.

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Review

Girls and Their Horses

by Henrietta Thornton

The Parker family started off as regular Texans, but now financier Jeff just can’t fail and they are Rolling. In. Money. His wife, Heather, seems unaware of how he makes such a fortune, but who cares? Home is now a California mansion where they have a few shelves of books in an otherwise empty library; the rest of the house is almost empty as well, but with Heather determined to spend their fortune as fast as possible, the minimalist look won’t last.
Daughter Piper, 18, misses her old friends and hates her mom’s relentless efforts to live through her children, primarily by making them into champion horse riders. Piper has rejected that life and Heather’s focus is now on younger daughter Maple, who’s terrified of the huge horses she’s forced to ride and a terrible equestrian, but desperately trying to improve. Her tortured lessons quickly become a cash cow for Kieran Flynn, the cult-leader-like boss of the $10,000 per month (PER MONTH!) stables near the Parker’s behemoth home.
What starts as dysfunction becomes much more serious when a body is found at the stables. Stories of Mable’s horse-obsessed, mean-girl acquaintances and their horse-obsessed, mean-girl moms alternate with interviews by the steely Detective Perez, who wants none of these characters’ nonsense. Get ready to enter another world and a perplexing puzzle: we don’t even know who’s dead till near the end of the book, let alone who the killer is. A great summer read

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Review

The Spare Room

by Brian Kenney

It’s the early months of the pandemic, and Kelly Doyle—who has recently moved to Philadelphia to live with her fiancé—finds herself with few friends and no job. But when her spouse-to-be calls off their wedding, Kelly hits a new level of despair. Her one bright spot is her childhood friend Sabrina; the two recently renewed their friendship thanks to the socials.

Sabrina has it all: a career as a best-selling romance author, a Virginia mansion right out of Elle Decor, and a handsome albeit hyper-masculine husband. So when Sabrina invites Kelly to move in with them—yes, it’s a little weird—Kelly is desperate enough to say yes. Before you can say “throuple” (why wasn’t that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year?) the three are in bed together—this ain’t no cozy—and quickly establish a threesome. Until Kelly comes across the naked photos of another woman, who could well be her doppelganger, and learns that she is a former lover of the couple who has mysteriously vanished. Will Kelly be next?

A sexy read in which no one is right, no one is wrong, and everyone is lying. By the author of We Were Never Here, this is the ultimate summer read.

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Review

Cutting Teeth

by Henrietta Thornton

I had a moment of “yuuuuup” when I read that Baker’s debut adult novel, Whisper Network, was chosen as a Reese’s Book Club Pick, because more than one of the characters here strongly telegraphs “unhinged woman played by Reese Witherspoon.” The women are uber-mothers at the martyrdom competition that is a private preschool. Everyone’s life is perfect, thank you, no sacrifice is too great, and the mom committee has everything very much under tight control. There is one problem. The four-year-olds like to bite. Not little bites, either. Their parents and siblings are the victims of vicious, prolonged attacks that draw copious blood that the biters seem to enjoy swallowing. Then their teacher is found dead outside the classroom, with a pool of blood surrounding her that has little footprints in it. Everyone knows that their child didn’t do it, but Ms. Ollie is dead, and the investigation is on. This book is at times as funny as it is strange, with Baker hilariously skewering modern parenthood and its obsessions, while also giving us behind-the-plastic-smiles looks at parents’ inner thoughts. (I think we can all agree that “just a month or two break from giving a shit” isn’t much to ask for). Did you like Big Little Lies? This one’s for you.

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Review

Life and Other Love Songs

by Brian Kenney

A brilliant and moving telling of a Black American family’s struggle to survive despite traumas both old and new. It’s 1981 Detroit, and the Armstead family is celebrating Ozro’s 37th birthday. Treated to lunch by his brother, with a large celebration planned for that night, Ozro heads back to work. Except he never gets there. Ozro disappears, leaving his briefcase and suit coat in his office, abandoning his wife Deborah, his young daughter Trinity, his family and friends. Shifting between the perspectives of Ozro, Deborah, and Trinity, Gray reaches back to Orzo’s time as part of the Great Migration, traveling from the south to Detroit in the 1970s; to his early courtship with Deborah, an aspiring singer; and to Trinity growing up in a world that’s been shattered. Ozro’s disappearance is like the sun, with the other characters as moons, forever circling around it. “I wondered about him all the time because absence was not the same as death,” says Trinity. “It was worse, given all the not knowing.” But it turns out that the mystery of Ozro’s vanishing is only one in a series of traumas that extend from his childhood to his death. Beautifully executed and tremendously poignant, this book is absolutely perfect for reading groups.

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Review

The Wrong Good Deed

by Henrietta Thornton

Clemmie and Muffin, friends in an active senior community (it’s not a retirement home!) are attending church together, content in their matching jackets and cozy friendship. Then Clemmie spots someone she knows from the past and is terrified and desperate to get out NOW. In flashbacks to the 1960s, when Clemmie was married to a man from their small South Carolina town’s most prominent family, we find her in a quandary. The men in her husband’s family are violent racists, but she’s too afraid of them to do anything about it…until she must take action and then run away forever. In the present, things are heating up as a white reporter makes an incendiary claim about something that happened to him in the town and a Black resident wants answers on her nephew’s disappearance. Then there’s a death among the seniors and history can’t be swept under the rug any more. This is a compelling read on many levels. The senior community’s friendship, backbiting, and the everyday indignities of growing “less active” are portrayed with wry accuracy by Cooney; Muffin’s disdain for Clemmie’s casual racism is a highlight. The author raises important questions: Can people really change? What is the responsibility of the bystanders to a crime? How can small-town residents from opposite sides of the fight for Civil Rights deal with one another today? For those who like a controversial mystery and fans of Richard Osman’s retirement-community-set The Thursday Murder Club.

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