Summer of Love
by Kerri Maher
Summer of Love (4/24/2026)
This 3-generation dual-timeline family sage begins in 2015, when 40-something set designer Dawn Hartley is commissioned to design a release party for the last volume of a series of children's books known as Vineland. As she is reading a book in the series as research for the design she discovers that the plot and setting bear an amazing resemblance to the winery owned by her family and managed by her mother.The author of the book writes under a pseudonym, and Dawn sets out to discover his/her identity. The details she notes lead the reader into the family story, focused on Dawn's mother, Miranda, and Miranda's sister, Winnie, taking us back to 1967, the Summer of Love, and their lives in San Francisco and the Napa Valley. (That connection to the Summer of Love is the only thing that allows this book to be described as historical fiction; I think that descriptor is inaccurate,)
This family has lots of secrets, and the secrets get in the way of any of the 3 main characters -- Miranda, Winnie, and Dawn-- having a satisfying life. As the story switches back and forth between the two time periods (the 60s/70s and the 20-teens), we encounter story lines related to the damage done to both abusers and those around them by substance abuse, the impact of dishonesty in relationships, the impact of stress from a variety of causes, the healing powers of friendships and strong family relationships, and the value of rehabilitation and forgiveness -- lots of discuss-able issues for book clubs.
Henry Tudor Must Die
by Jillian Laine
What if....? (4/22/2026)
I'd classify this book as speculative revisionist historical fiction. Author Jillian Laine posits the following questions: What if, rather than dying, Catherine of Aragon faked her death by hiding behind the death of a friend. What if Anne Boleyn were a witch who managed to fake her own beheading? What if both Catherine and Anne were connected to a community known as the Hellebore Sisterhood, run by a French princess and empowering women with a variety of talents and skills. What if working together these women sought revenge on Henry VIII for his treatment of his wives?
That's where this fascinating and engrossing speculative history begins. Before the book ends, we hear the story from the point of view of each of Henry's wives. The wife characters are well-developed, very much individuals.The narration, directed by the French princess and head of the Sisterhood, is by turns grim and charming, providing lots of dramatic tension. Usually fantasy and witchcraft are not on my reading list, but I have to confess I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh
by James Lasdun
Excellent true crime reading (4/17/2026)
This is the third book I have read about the Murdaugh murders , the other two being Tangled Vines by John Glatt, a British investigative journalist and true crime author, and The Devil at His Elbow, by Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein. Both are pretty much straight investigative reporting, detailing the context of the murders, the investigation and the subsequent trial and conviction of Alec Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and youngest sun. James Lasdun, who is primarily a novelist, takes a slightly different, more personal approach. Tasked with writing an article on the murders for the New Yorker, he decided to conduct his own investigation of the investigation, to determine whether he personally would judge Alec Murdaugh guilty of the horrific crimes of which he stood accused.
Lasdun's research is extensive. Not only does he spend time in South Carolina, speaking to dozens of people who know Alec Murdaugh and tracking down the rumors about the murders in the community, he makes use of the information presented in media and in the other books I've referenced. He also digs into scientific and medical research on psychopathy, with a focus on what sort of person would even commit such a heinous crime against members of his own family whom he professed to love. He does reach a conclusion, and the last chapters of the book detail his thoughts on the results of the trial and the scenario of the murder. I leave it to the reader to discover what he decides. I found Lasdun's storytelling engaging. He weaves a compelling tale from a very complex fact situation and and creates a book that's really hard to put down.
An Infinite Love Story
by Chanel Cleeton
Not my favorite (3/19/2026)
I've read a number of Chanel Cleeton's books and enjoyed them, but this one missed the mark for me. It's a dual timeline story, with half the book tracing protagonist Vivian's life before her husband is lost in space, (literally - he's an astronaut) and the other half detailing her life after the accident. The early time line (1961-67) is enjoyable if a little over-hyped on the romantic front (i.e. reads like a bodice-ripper). The second story line is not as well done -- lots of "telling not doing" when it comes to how she's feeling about her life, NASA, the space race generally. There's also a speculative element to the story, since the space capsule which is lost simply disappears, so there is discussion of wormholes and time-space travel on a not-very scientific level. (Cleeton admits in the author's note she's not a scientist and it shows.) It was OK and had some good moments, but on the whole it is not comparable to her other books.
Fatherland: A Novel
by Victoria Shorr
A mixed bag (2/5/2026)
The central story line of Victoria Shorr's fifth book is the effects of a father's abandonment of his family, with most of the story focused on his oldest child, Josie, who is 6 at the time he walks out. Martin Brier is a prominent doctor with a beautiful wife, a lovely home and three children, the youngest just 8 months old. The story follows the reactions and impacts of Martin's behavior on his wife and his daughter (with some references to his sons, who were younger when he left) until after his death 50 years later, in 1996. Shorr does a good job of identifying the impacts, and of weaving them into a compelling story.
However, the story is told in discreet chunks, with long time gaps between, so that while the reader learns how the characters have evolved over time, one doesn't have a good grasp on the "why" of the evolution and the characters come to feel rather shallow. There's also a lot of contextualizing -- stories about the decline of manufacturing in the Rust Belt -- that feels a little overdone. It's helpful in giving the story a sense of time and place, but detracts from the main theme . The book is an easy and quick read, and Martin makes a good villain, but on the whole I wouldn't give the book a strong recommendation.
The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
by Beth Ann Fennelly
Quick and inspirational (11/26/2025)
This is the kind of thoughtful book you leave on the night stand in your guest room or hand to a friend sitting in a waiting room. Author Beth Ann Fennelly calls the format a "micro-memoir." It's a collection of observations taken on her life, some as short as a sentence and others brief essays of several pages. Many focus on the untimely and surprising death of her older sister, and her mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease -- not exactly humorous content but delivered gently. The most upbeat and one of the most impactful sections deals with her ongoing relationship with her college roommate group (they are all now middle-aged), which presents an inspiring view of the value of friendship. It's a quick, enjoyable and at times emotional reading experience.
L.A. Women
by Ella Berman
Not my cup of tea (3/1/2025)
I did not enjoy this book. It's the story of two L.A. women, both writers and friendly with one another,, who find themselves engaged in a jealousy-fueled competition on the career front. All of the major characters - the women, their partners, their business associates -- seem broken, self-destructive, and totally unsympathetic. The book, set in 1963 and 1975 (dual timeline) is filled with drug-use, back-stabbing, and foul language-- f-bombs all over the place. The writing contains a number of grammatical errors. (With luck they'll be caught before the book is published.)
The book begins with the disappearance of one of the two writers, possibly in response to the actions of the other, and then switches between the two timelines to build their backstories. The only redeeming part of the book is the last 20, where some degree of normalcy appears and saves this book from a totally tanked rating.
The Adversary: A Novel
by Michael Crummey
NOT my favorite (12/28/2023)
I have such mixed feelings about this book. The writing, particularly the descriptive language, is powerful, and the character development is superb. The characters, however, are despicable. There are three "Avengers" in the story, which is set in the early 18th century in the fictional town of Mockbeggar Newfoundland: Abe Strapp, a sort of "town boss, who is lazy, evil, and power hungry; his older sister the Widow Caines, a jealous old lady who would do anything to take her brother's place at the top of the pile; and the Beadle, a religious leader who sides with Abe but works also to enhance his own interests, making him entirely two-faced. These three are in constant opposition to one another, to the detriment of their small fishing community and the individuals who populate it. The story is full of death, sexual immorality (Abe owns a large brothel), back-stabbing and revenge. The book is completely unpleasant to read, and I finished it only because I had promised BookBrowse a review.
Daughters of Shandong
by Eve J. Chung
A Study in Perseverence and Family Dynamics (11/1/2023)
A fictionalized version of the author's family history, Daughters of Shandong is set during the Chinese Revolution (1948 - 1960) and traces the story of the wealthy Nationalist Ang family. When their town of Zhucheng is threatened by the Communists, the father of the family and his parents leave for greener pastures, delegating the care of the family home to his wife and their three daughters -- less important because they were women. Communist forces seize the family home and "try" the oldest daughter, Hai, as a stand-in for her father, beating and torturing her in the process. The women escape on a cross-China journey in search of their family members, ultimately reaching Hong Kong, and then Taiwan. They face starvation, horrible living conditions, disease, and danger in their search. A consistent emphasis of the book is the status (or lack thereof) and treatment of women in the Chinese culture.The book is well-written; the story line is propulsive and the characters are well-developed.I learned a lot while enjoying a really good story.
Iron Curtain: A Love Story
by Vesna Goldsworthy
Culture Clash (1/13/2023)
Milena Urbanska is a "red princess," the daughter of the vice president of a Soviet communist satellite, enjoying relative privilege in her home country. When a friend asks her to serve as a translator for a British poet who is accepting a minor prize, she falls in love and ultimately follows him back to London. She is immediately thrown into a clash of cultures. At home, she was economically privileged, but politically , morally, and emotionally constrained by the political system. In Britain, the political, emotional and moral fronts are wide open, but Jason Connor, her poet husband, is a graduate student and economically times are hard. Her struggle to balance and adjust to this cultural dichotomy provides the storyline of the book. The tale is poignant, occasionally humorous, and ultimately a bit tragic. Well worth reading.
Moonrise Over New Jessup
by Jamila Minnicks
A Different View (12/4/2022)
Jamila Minnicks's new novel looks at the Civil Rights Movement from a different perspective. Set in an independent all-Black town in Alabama, Minnicks posits the arrival of Alice Young, a young woman fleeing an abusive white landlord in another town whose bus ticket runs out when she reaches New Jessup. Alice falls in love with and marries Raymond Chapman, who is secretly working with an "agitator" organization, while she thrives in the protective atmosphere of an all black community that she perceives as "separate but equal." The story line weighs and balances the two viewpoints and their impact on the lives of the Chapmans and other citizens of New Jessup. It's an interesting perspective, and one I've not heard or read about attached to the Black community during late 50s/early 60s Civil Rights era.
The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise
by Colleen Oakley
Road trip! (10/4/2022)
Colleen Oakley's Thelma-and Louise-tinged road trip novel involves two quirky characters -- 58-year-old Louise Wilt has just been released from rehab after hip surgery, and needs some help around the house. 21-year-old Tanner Quimby, a Northwestern University women's soccer star out of school because she broke her leg falling off a 2-story deck at a party, needs a job, so she can save the money she needs to return to school.
Louise is a stereotypical crotchety old lady, at least in Tanner's eyes, and Louise sees Tanner as a thoughtless, cell-phone and video-game=obsessed, junk-food-eating millennial. Then Louise gets a phone call out of her past, and she needs to get out of town. She offers Tanner a substantial bonus to drive her to California, and off they go. Over the course of an extraordinary road trip, these two characters evolve in dimension and understanding of one another in touching, humorous, and engaging ways.
The light mystery that underlies their trip has a big surprise ending, but it is not really the focus of the story, which is at heart a tale of true female friendship and commitment.
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
by Lea Ypi
Defining "freedom" (11/9/2021)
In December 1990, when the "Velvet Revolution" came to Albania (the last of the Stalinist socialist governments in Eastern Europe), Lea Ypi, now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, was 11 years old. She experienced the transition from authoritarian socialism to a "western" multi-party democracy, complete with economic chaos which led to the Albanian Revolution:of 1997. On one level this book operates as a family history and memoir of the time period, reflecting on how changing conditions affected her family's life and her own experiences as a teenager. On another, more macro plane, Ypi explores the concept of :freedom" in all its complexity and its differing manifestations: freedom of religion, of movement, of thought, of speech. She argues that freedoms in one situation can become strictures in others, with a number of personally- experienced supporting examples.The book provided a useful first-hand look into a rapidly changing society in a time of great turmoil..
Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob
by Russell Shorto
Smalltime (2/23/2021)
Author Russell Shorto, whose oeuvre is narrative history, accomplishes three things with his latest work. First, he presents an engaging narrative history of a small town mob unit operating in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, from World War II until the 1960s. The star of this story is another Russell Shorto: his grandfather, a second generation Italian immigrant. The story also focuses secondly, on the Italian -- specifically the Sicilian -- immigrant experience and its attempt to merge itself into US culture. Finally, Shorto presents a fraught family history. He explores the relationship of his father and his grandfather. and his grandfather's relationship with his grandmother,as they say, warts and all. The book is short, reads easily, and draws excellent and interesting characters. I enjoyed this one!
The Big Finish
by Brooke Fossey
THe BIg FInish (10/11/2019)
Eighty-eight-year-old Duffy Sinclair and his roommate Carl Upton consider themselves lucky to live at Centennial Assisted Living -- it sure beats the less upscale nursing home across town. Staying there depends on good health and good behavior. The behavior part gets challenged when Carl's granddaughter (who, it turns out is an alcoholic with a nasty boyfriend) climbs in the window of their room and asks to stay for a few days. With no overnight guests allowed, helping her out offers a challenge -- and they accept it. Adventure ensues, and the resulting story, narrated by Duffy, redefines family and friendship, and ends with the titular Big Finish. The book is a fast read, written in a casual vernacular with lots of quirky characters and a good bit of rather dark, age-related humor. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised by all the 5-star reviews. It's quick and entertaining, but not THAT fabulous.
Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant
by Anne Gardiner Perkins
First Steps (7/5/2019)
In the fall of 1969, Yale admitted its first women - 575 of them - to its undergraduate college.The pressure came from male students who were selecting coed universities in preference to the all-male Yale, and the school feared losing its preeminence to other elite schools. Then Yale though it had done enough. So women were admitted -- and Yale thought it had done enough. As author Anne Gardiner Perkins (who entered Yale in 1977 herself) notes at the end of her book, the story typically told of what happened next was "... a sanitized tale of equity instantly achieved, as if all it took to transform these villages of men into places where women were treated as equals was the flip of an admissions switch. That is not what happened."
Perkins, as research for her doctoral dissertation, interviewed 51 of the women in that first class, with particular attention to five of them, 2 black and 3 white. Using their stories she traces the first three years of Yale's coeducation experience from the women's point of view -- and it was not an easy life. They were discounted, disrespected, ignored, excluded and harassed --but they involved themselves in the life of the school in spite of all that and fought for increasing the number of women and improving the conditions under which they lived and studied.
This book was of particular interest to me because I graduated from college in 1970, the same school year in which this story begins. I was in graduate school at University of Virginia in 1970/71, the first year women were admitted to the undergraduate college there, and taught at UVA in 1972/72, the first year a full class of women entered through the normal admissions process.The situations Perkins describes are familiar. She tells the story well. This book does an excellent job of charting the path women have followed over the past 50 years, at least with regard to academics. But as the end of the book indicates,while we have in fact come a long way, baby -- but we aren't there yet.
House of Stone
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
House of Stone (12/15/2018)
Narrator Zamani, an orphan himself, attempts to attach himself to a family (Abednigo and Agnes) with whom he boards and whose 17-year-old son has recently disappeared. His approach seems to be to collect the family history and adopt it as his own, so he becomes a surrogate son. He collects this history through all kinds of trickery and manipulation, playing on Abednigo's alcoholish, plying him with drugs, and emotionally manipulating Agnes, although I was never clear on why he felt the need to take this approach. Since the family story is tied to the downfall of Rhodesia and the rise of Zimbabwe, there's a good bit of historical (and unpleasant) information contained in those stories. The telling of them is scattered , not chronological, and confusing. There are extraneous characters and complicated flashbacks, including a strange emotional relationship between Zamani and his vision of Abednigo's first wife. I found reading this book to be a pretty unsatisfying experience, and although the general topic of the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe revolution is of interest to me, this is not the way I would chose to experience it.
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls
by Anissa Gray
Family dynamics (10/6/2018)
Anissa Gray's family drama focuses on the Butler family. When their mother dies and dad, a traveling evangelist, is largely absent, oldest sister Althea takes over. Then Althea and her husband Proctor are imprisoned following a food stamp and charity swindle, and younger sisters Viola and Lillian have to take over the management of Althea's daughters, Kim and "Baby Vi." Trouble is they have problems of their own, as do both daughters. The novel walks the reader through a complex set of family dynamics as the whole family tries to sort out its problems. The characters are wonderfully drawn, with the story told in the alternating voices of the three sisters, and the resolution of the story is satisfying without being corny or cloying. My only frustration was a sense that Gray was attempting to be so sure she had left no potential problem or issue unrecognized -- there's gay marriage (on the rocks, yet), bulimia, OCD, prison life, bullying, extramarital affairs, and more, but in the end the story feels like it's about people with real problems, not a catalog of potential issues.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
by Cherise Wolas
Not My Favorite (5/27/2017)
This was not the book I expected based on the First Impression description. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby tries to do too much,employing too many stylistic devises. The writing is confusing, inconsistent, and wordy. Part 1: Joan of the title is a writer, author of two unique and successful short story collections, who is determined to focus on her craft - but instead (with a promise of support in her goal, which includes no kids) - marries, has children and loses her way as an author. Just as she is about to get back on track a significant bit of family treachery derails her. Part 2: We learn the story of the treachery. Part 3: We see Joan find her way back. In all three parts of the story, Joan's (and in part 2, son Daniel's) story is interlaced with samples of Joan's writing. The interweaving is incredibly awkward; the transitions between the third person story and the writing excerpts are flat and unimaginative ("and then he read." "the story continued"). And the writing samples serve mostly to lengthen the book -- it's over 500 pages -- rather than advance the story. The final section the resurrection story (which also contains some of Joan's work, with the same problems) struck me as a Eastern-spirituality-based version of books like The Shack and The Celestine Prophesy, both of which I despised. I guess you either love this one or you hate it. I finished the book only because I promised to review it.
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
by Kathleen Rooney
Lillian Boxfish is one cool lady! (9/18/2016)
Kathleen Rooney's novel-styled-as-a-memoir tells a story inspired by the life of poet and ad-woman Margaret Fishback, who was in fact the highest-paid female advertising copy manager in the world in the 1930s, during her career at R.H. Macy's in New York City. Lillian Boxfish is a compelling protagonist - feisty, ambitious, creative, independent, yet deeply flawed. On New Year's Eve 1984, 85-year-old Lillian takes a walk around Manhattan, visiting places important to her in her life in the city where she has lived since 1926. The visits allow her to tell the story of her life - her career, her marriage and divorce, her aging - as well as describe the changes in the city that she loves.
Lillian is both an adventurer and a philosopher, and her 10.4 mile walk (there is a map on the inside front cover of my book) gives her ample opportunity to demonstrate proficiency on both scores. Rooney's writing is wonderful; both the character and the setting pop off the page. There's dramatic tension on several levels : Will she ever get married? have children? What was "the Incident"? Will Lillian survive an after-dark walk around Manhattan? Every time one question gets answered another appears. What fun this was to read!
