Tag:

Women

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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Review

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

by Henrietta Thornton

A wonderful, moving stand-alone in which Sutanto, author of the Aunties series, is at the absolute top of her game. Sixty-year-old Vera Wong is lonely, although she’d never admit it. A widower, she’s the mother of a lawyer consumed by work—he rarely returns her texts, even though she offers such good advice!— and her days consist of a 6 am brisk walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown—she needs to get her steps in!—then opening her tea shop which, on the best of days, has only one customer. Extraordinarily opinionated, quite a bit eccentric, yet utterly charming, Vera’s voice is captivating. But readers will be completely beguiled after she comes downstairs one morning (she lives above the shop) and discovers a young man lying on the floor. She does call the cops, and tries her very, very best not to disturb the crime scene, but not before prying a flash drive out of the man’s very dead hands. Then the novel takes off as Vera—believing the cops are incapable of solving the crime—assumes the role of detective. In the process, she befriends several young people, including both the victim’s wife and his brother, and while Vera still considers them all to be prime suspects, she can’t help but care for them. Initially this protagonist may seem like the cliché of the dominating Chinese mom. But Vera, it turns out, is pretty damaged herself, much like her new, thirty-something friends. Come for the mystery, but stay for the healing. One of the best cozies I’ve read this year.

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Review

Bad Summer People

by Brian Kenney

Yes, it’s only October. But my money is on Bad Summer People as the best beach book of the summer of 2023. Set in Salcombe, a made-up community on Fire Island—not the like the gay Pines, more the reclusive and ritzy Saltaire—this book, in the great literary tradition of Peyton Place, has it all: adultery, fashion, tons of gossip, backbiting, lying, hot sex with the tennis pro, tasteful plastic surgery, alcoholism, and even a corpse. Plus the sort of casual racism and classism liberal one-percenters indulge in. It opens with a prologue, set at the end of August, in which a body is discovered face down off the boardwalk. The book then backs up to late June, as the all-white residents arrive from the Upper East side and Scarsdale for the start of a new season. From there we follow the tumultuous summer in chronological order, moving quite handily among a group of narrators, from the above-mentioned Stanford tennis coach to the Filipino nanny to the gay Yale student/bartender and many more. At the gravitational center of the book are Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker, the “it moms” who married into Salcombe—their husbands are best friends—and oversee the social action. Not another word from me, lest I spoil any of the fun, except to say the identities of both the victim and the murderer pack quite the punch. This book really hits the sweet spot for popular fiction and will appeal to a broad swathe of readers.

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Review

The Other Mistress

by Henrietta Thornton

In the introduction by Williams (The Wife Before, The Perfect Ruin), readers are forewarned, that child abuse and sexual assault feature in this novel; they should still be prepared for whiplash when this turns from a “girl’s night in” kind of story to something much, much darker. Black couple Adira and Gabriel are living the high life—at first appearance. Adira’s an entrepreneur, the successful owner of a luxury clothing brand, Lovely Silk. Gabriel isn’t as successful—Adira’s keeping them afloat—but she doesn’t mind. She’s crazy about her husband and is shattered to see an email pop up on his phone that makes it clear he’s seeing another woman, Jocelyn. Actually, make that two women, Jocelyn and Julianna, with the former woman, when confronted by Adira, offering to join ranks with the wronged wife to make Gabriel pay. Thus starts the darkness, with stalking, lies, and desperation taking turns with another story, of two little girls, one of whom is being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Williams ramps up the tension and the mystery from the first page so that as the stories converge and a terrible truth is revealed, readers will be both enthralled and aghast. One for all those who’ve done what they had to do and lived to tell the tale.

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Review

Gone Tonight

by Henrietta Thornton

Catherine Sterling’s personal and professional worlds are beginning to collide: she’s a nurse who cares for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother is starting to show classic symptoms. The two live together, making the forgetfulness hard to miss, with Ruth Sterling looking very confused when recent events are discussed and forgetting words—calling ice cubes “water squares,” for example. Ruth is reluctant to get any scans that could confirm the likely diagnosis—her mother died of Alzheimer’s, she says, and she knows what’s ahead. But then Catherine makes a discovery that causes her to doubt that her mother’s problems are real. As the point of view shifts between the two women, readers get Ruth’s first-person point of view; her odd behavior is hiding an explosive past that Catherine knows nothing about. Readers are in for a wild cat-and-mouse game as this tight duo (boundaries, what are they?) faces terrible odds when Catherine delves into her mother’s past and Ruth hides the pair from an encroaching threat. There are some very sad moments here, related to dire poverty and child sexual abuse. Overall, it’s an eye-opening look at how “our minds…talk us out of things we don’t want to know.”

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Review

I Have Some Questions for You

by Brian Kenney

This book is centered on one question: back in 1995, did Omar Evans, then a twenty-five-year-old Black man and athletic trainer, murder high school student Thalia Keith? And it’s narrated by one woman, podcaster and Thalia’s roommate, Bodie Kane. From there this novel extends in myriad directions, covers over twenty years, takes us across the country, and dives into Bodie’s past and present, as well as the questionable memories of a whole cast of characters. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s also brilliantly successful and absolutely riveting. In 2018, Bodie was invited back to teach for two weeks at The Granby School, the elite New England boarding school she attended over 20 years ago. Her students are creating podcasts, with one choosing to revisit Thalia’s murder, a topic Bodie has kept at arm’s length. But gradually Bodie wonders if the police arrested the wrong man and the murderer is walking free. Ultimately convinced of Omar’s innocence, she reaches out to classmates for memories, photographs, any records that could help piece together that evening over twenty years ago. In many ways, what Bodie does is reopen a cold case, without any help from the cops, one that’s rich in newly found details, tacitly informed by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. While addressing much of the book to a suspect we never meet, over the next several years, Bodie and her students raise enough questions to be taken seriously. Overlaying all this is Bodie’s personal life, including trauma from her past and a break-up with her husband, an artist accused of sexual harassment. Add to this the murders of other women that Makkai tucks around the main narrative, giving Thalia’s murder ever greater context. This is one of the books I’m most eager to share with a book group. It demands discussion.

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Review

The Personal Assistant

by Henrietta Thornton

@UnapologeticallyAlex is Alex Hutchinson’s wildly successful Instagram account, one that is moving toward a million followers until she and her personal assistant AC hit the booze and the next morning her following has turned rabid. Through her hangover haze, Alex sees that she has fifteen thousand notifications that give her in ALL ANGRY CAPS the information she dreads: last night, she trashed another online celebrity in a three-paragraph-long diatribe that might or might not have used the words “attention-seeking slut.” And that’s only the beginning. Alex and her handsome, financial-guru husband, Patrick, who has a successful TV show, along with their twin daughters, find themselves suddenly locked in a spiral of misfortune. Alex’s personal assistant—the one person who could fix this Insta nightmare—is missing. The police discover evidence of a crime in their carriage house. And the normally well-behaved twins are in trouble at school for drinking. Can it get worse? Oh yes, it can. Join Alex for this wild ride—you won’t be sorry!—and get ready for a look at the real world of online fame, which is made to seem both frighteningly exposing and frighteningly isolating by the masterful narrative and especially the inner dialogs of Alex, AC, and Patrick. While this is a thriller with tech as a catalyst, anyone who likes a great story will eat it up (the heaping spoonful of schadenfreude doesn’t hurt).

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Review

A Mother Would Know

by Henrietta Thornton

Remember We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver’s dark novel about a mother’s fraught efforts to understand her violent son? Here, neighbors believe Valerie Jacobs has set up her own version of Shriver’s book: her son, Hudson, suspected years ago of a violent crime, is back home and seems eager to live off mom. Valerie’s daughter, Kendra, is against the arrangement. Valerie has always spoiled Hudson, Kendra says between snapping at her mother’s attempts to be a new grandma and pushing miracle cures for Valerie’s seemingly encroaching Alzheimer’s disease. Then a shock crashes into the setup: a young woman is found murdered in the neighborhood and Valerie’s neighbors immediately point the finger at her home. Even Valerie herself suspects Hudson, except when she’s suspecting herself and her memory gaps. Garza (When I Was You) excels at making our heads spin as facts emerge, some from the present and others the past, adding to both the murkiness and the drama. This tale is constructed on a scaffold of slights, family grudges, deceit, and quiet love, all of which build to an out-of-the-blue reveal. This isn’t—thankfully!—as dark as We Need to Talk about Kevin, but it’s every bit as gripping.

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