Tag:

Women

Review

He Said He Would Be Late

by Henrietta Thornton

Ready for a psychological game? Liz Bennett wasn’t, but that’s what her marriage has turned out to be—but is the game a one-sided figment of her imagination, or is her husband, Arno, an adulterer who’s playing her along? The backdrop to the maybe game is deep unhappiness and insecurity on Liz’s part. She and Arno are new parents, and motherhood is more difficult than she imagined. It’s not very enjoyable, with baby Emma looking at her “like she’s an elderly spinster I’m grooming for her banking information,” and no time or energy to write a follow-up to her semi-successful first novel. At least she has Arno, who’s worried about his wife’s happiness and shows love and support for her at every turn—a steadfast situation that she’s terrified to lose after she sees a text to him from an attractive coworker, a message that could signify a romance. Liz is soon spiraling into an abyss of fear and suspicion, one that’s incredible enough to keep readers turning the pages but believable enough to elicit real empathy for this broken soul. Sullivan has a way with characters, using dialog and Liz’s astute, cutting observations to bring Arno, crunchy-granola nanny Kyle, and bitchy-perfect sister-in-law Rose (“I’ve been up since 4 a.m.”) to gossip-worthy life. Fans of women’s fiction will eat this up.

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Review

The House Guest

by Henrietta Thornton

Alyssa, née Alice, Macallen, has changed her name and subjugated everything else about herself to please her unpleasable husband, Bill, who has left with no explanation. All Alyssa knows for sure is that he’s taking his wealth with him and she has no job and no prenup, which he insisted was unnecessary because he was going to love her forev—you know the rest. Anyway, Bill’s gone and Alyssa’s sitting in a hotel bar nursing her sorrows when she meets a woman who may be even worse off. Bree Lorrance is living at the hotel after getting away from an abusive boyfriend. She moves into Alyssa’s guest house, and soon readers and Alyssa are wondering how things have taken such a fast turn. Far from lonely and terrifying, Alyssa’s days are now taken up with helping her friend, who encounters a new tragedy that sets the women, and another player who becomes involved and moves in, on an exciting trajectory. We’re left wondering whom Alyssa can trust in her new life, if anyone. Are some of these strange new people part of Bill’s team or out to get her for some other reason? Or maybe Alyssa is making everything up and we’ve got an unreliable narrator on our hands…it’s impossible to know until Ryan brings all to a satisfying ending that readers will never see coming. The author’s fans will snap this up; it’s also a must for Liane Moriarty’s readers.

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Review

That Dangerous Energy

by Brian Kenney

This novel should come with a warning label: start this book at your own risk. It’s that suspenseful, that seductive. We meet our hero, Morgan Faraday, running through the NYC subway to escape from Sebastian, her ex-fiancé, and two armed rent-a-cops. How does love go so wrong? We then jump to ten months ago for the backstory that answers this question. Morgan—who identifies as Black, she has North African heritage via Moorish Spain, but is often assumed to be white—escaped from a poor Pennsylvania town for NYC and art school. A textile artist, she’s struggling when she meets billionaire Sebastian Reid, the CEO of one of the world’s largest energy companies. The answer to all of Morgan’s problems? Perhaps, but sleeping with a man you don’t love and barely find attractive is still work, and even with best friend Dashawna’s how-to-marry-a-millionaire advice, Morgan remains conflicted. Marrying white men for financial security, while necessary, was never a good decision for the women in her family. Worse, once she moves in with Sebastian, she discovers that his claim that his company is going green is just a façade, and he’s still responsible for several ecological disasters, with communities of color the most adversely affected. Encouraged by an oh-so-hunky environmental activist, Morgan begins to spy on Sebastian, recording his calls and filming his meetings. It’s incredibly anxiety-producing, and readers will be madly racing to the book’s surprising conclusion. Social commentary, feminism, racism, family history, courtroom drama, plenty of suspense, and a very hot love affair all come together for one powerful read.

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Review

You’re Invited

by Brian Kenney

Murder at the wedding of one of Sri Lanka’s one percent? I initially imagined this to be a cozy affair, with lots of chatter about couture, gossip about affairs, and the body of one of the bridesmaids—the one no one likes—being discovered in the shrubbery, poisoned. Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, no extravagance is spared or undocumented—Vuitton is the bag of choice—but this crime novel is far darker, far more terrifying than I had ever imagined. It’s super-perfect Kaavi’s wedding—she of the billionaire family, the foundation devoted to girl empowerment, the perfect blow-out—and she’s invited her former best friend, Amaya, to the wedding. Not only were the two besties all throughout childhood, they were college roommates in the U.S., until an epic falling out involving Amaya’s boyfriend—whom Kaavi is now set to marry. Though they haven’t spoken in five years, Amaya flies to Colombo with one goal: stop the wedding, by any means necessary. Jealous much? Oh, if only it was mere jealousy in this nothing-is-what-it-seems narrative. Perfectly paced, rich in Sri Lankan culture, witty in its descriptions, and well aware of gender and class disparities, Jayatissa’s creation is that rare bird: the perfect thriller. By the author of My Sweet Girl, this book will appeal to fans of Julie Clark, Samantha Downing, and Lucy Clarke.

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Review

A Dangerous Business

by Brian Kenney

Few know that one of Jane Smiley’s earliest works, published in 1984, was a mystery called Duplicate Keys set in contemporary Manhattan. Here, Smiley returns to crime fiction, although now we are in a completely different locale: Monterey in the mid-19th century. Eliza Ripple moves from Kalamazoo to Monterey with her husband, who promptly gets killed in a bar fight, leaving her broke and unemployed—but hardly sad at her piggish husband’s demise. Days later she’s recruited by Mrs. Parks to join her brothel, and with no other resources, agrees. Mrs. Park runs a tight ship: the women see only one or two clients a day; have physical protection, in the form of a bouncer; and are able to ban men they deem risky. Throughout the book, it’s women who keep each other safe, whether through friendships or the environments they create. And for the first time in her life, Eliza has financial security. All is as well as can be expected until Eliza realizes that young women in Monterey are disappearing, and discovers their bodies in a creek outside of town. She pairs up with her buddy Jean, also a sex worker and quite likely a lesbian—she’s got a terrific wardrobe of menswear—and the two women use every resource they have, from their clients to Edgar Allen Poe’s stories of detective C. Auguste Dupin, to discover who is murdering the women of Monterey. Smiley takes time to describe the wild west and the magical beauty that surrounds her characters. But ever present is the vulnerability that women face and the need to take matters into their own hands.

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Review

The Storyteller’s Death

by Henrietta Thornton

Fraught connections between different worlds hold together this coming-of-age tale: connections between Puerto Rican families in the United States and their homeland; between the past and the present; between the real world and one made of stories. As the book opens, its shy protagonist, Isla Larsen Sanchez, is visiting her mother’s native Puerto Rico. Back in New Jersey, “everyone [looks] so colorless, like the underbelly of a fish,” but at least there she can do her own thing. The island, however, is overflowing with color but also with cheek-pinching aunts who expect proper behavior from a young lady with “not one drop of blood…that is not European.” Over the years, as she spends every summer in Puerto Rico, Isla comes to realize that her oh-so-pure blood may have given her…well, she’s not so sure it’s a gift. She sees visions of tales the cuentistas, storytelling women in her family, have told her—but only after their deaths. When one story involves a murder, and Isla finds that she can be physically hurt by weapons in the visions, readers find themselves dropped into a combination of magical realism, terror, and mystery, all wrapped in a shroud of family secrets and dubious honor. This rich story about stories can work as a crossunder, meaning it can be enjoyed by young adults as well as adult readers; Toni Morrison fans will particularly enjoy the otherworld-tinged drama

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Review

After We Were Stolen

by Henrietta Thornton

Avery lives outside in a tent while her family sleeps inside. Over the years, she’s learned to start her own fires; sometimes it doesn’t work and she’s freezing and hungry, but things aren’t much better for her nine siblings inside. Their parents, cult leaders preparing the family for when they’re the only ones left on Earth, emphasize toughness over all else. The children get their hopes up when the parents announce a buddy system, but it turns out that your buddy is the one who will be punished if you leave, so escape seems unthinkable. Avery finds a way out, though, accompanied by her little brother Cole, only to discover that they’re famous in the outside world as victims of years-ago child abductions. What happened the night the pair escaped and how they will navigate notoriety and society’s expectations are mysteries that will keep readers rapt. Also engrossing are the overwhelming emotions involved with both staying and going, the realization that just because the biggest problem is over doesn’t mean everything is rosy, and the ways tormented people treat one another even when survival is no longer at stake. Avery has grit and attitude to spare and will stay with readers long after the last page.

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Review

Such a Good Mother

by Henrietta Thornton

Rose O’Connell’s never been confident. At her downmarket English school, she was bullied as “Rotten Rosie” after her father was publicly disgraced. While her life has since improved, her husband struggles to find work and they’re deep in debt. Then she gets her son, Charlie, into The Woolf Academy, an exclusive school in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood she grew up in. In fact, it’s her old school, but it’s now completely unrecognizable, as is the house she grew up in, where Amala Kaur, the CEO of the new school, lives. Woolf Academy seems too strict with Charlie yet indulgent of the other children, and while Rose is determined to do whatever it takes to help her son, she quickly finds that the mean girls she faced years ago have nothing on the circle of snooty women in charge here. It’s complicated and confusing when things begin to thaw and Rose is invited into the inner circle after the mysterious death of one of its members; slowly readers will begin to wonder if there’s anything she won’t do to please Amala and her ice-queen clique. By the time Amala wants something that made me gasp out loud—just the first of several gut-punching twists—it seems too late for Rose to salvage her marriage, her career, and even her sense of self. For readers of mean-girl titles and those who enjoyed The Hawthorne School by Sylvie Perry.

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Review

The Nurse’s Secret

by Henrietta Thornton

Una Kelly is a pickpocket in 1883 New York City, artfully dodging the police and turning her loot over to the head of her pickpocket ring, the quietly ruthless Marm Blei. Una is saving her pay to leave this miserable life, but it’s slow going, so she chances a side gig—selling a trinket she steals rather than turning it over to Marm. This puts her at the site of a murder, and now she’s accused and on the run. Her unusual hiding place—one of the country’s first nursing schools, at Bellevue Hospital—is the intriguing, politics- and emotion-laden setting for most of the book. Only educated ladies are accepted as nurses, but Una is neither schooled nor genteel, and faking both. Her nervous, always-on-your-toes code switching will be familiar to immigrant readers as well as anyone who’s reached for something out of grasp, and heavy doses of realism are thrown in as Una fights bullies while making a great friend and even finding romance. Skendandore’s (The Second Life of Mirielle West) intrepid heroine continues investigating the crime she’s accused of, too, making the book a thoroughly enjoyable and compelling medical history, mystery, and romance. Side benefit: a look at attitudes toward the then-emerging science of blood transfusion.

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Review

Good Husbands

by Henrietta Thornton

Bath, England strangers Priyanka, Stephanie, and Jess each receive the same letter telling them that their husbands together raped a woman decades before, with the letter writer, Holly, claiming to be the daughter of one of the men. The women think that confronting their husbands will be the end of the story. (That’s if they decide it’s true and if they can bring themselves to tell the men that they know about the rape, neither of which they find a given at all.) The husbands, too, think their troubles are over. They’re still members of the same upmarket social club where Holly says the crime took place, and still lead fine lives, unlike the victim and her daughter, with the mother now dead and the daughter near death from alcoholism. As the women meet one another and move from emotional paralysis to action, we’re brought to what seems like a definitive showdown. But it’s not the end at all. Ray’s U.S. debut reminds readers, through her storytelling and her portrayal of the women’s undulating emotions, that sometimes what we think will be the end might not even be the most significant part of the story; these women make their own ending, and it includes a startling closing twist. The sadness of lives destroyed is palpable here, but so is the healing force of friendship, not to mention determination. Psychological thriller fans who enjoy strong women characters should add this to their reading plans.

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