Book Length Fiction: The Ones I Love

The Wedding People (2024)

For the first twenty pages I was mad at my Cambridge-based book club for choosing such a dark, twisty novel. But, Alison Espach brought home a smart, funny, and throughly enjoyable novel with her story of a woman’s journey from suicidal ideation to life, triumphant.

Fight Night (2023)

Miriam Toews made me laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously, in the beautiful, voicy novel told by an almost adolescent girl and prominently featuring her rapidly declining and yet hilarious grandmother, her revolutionary mother, and her as yet unborn younger sister. There is no book I have loved more in the past five years.

All the Little Bird Hearts (2021)

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s DEBUT, written in an intimate first person voice, explores the complexity of social dynamics through a quiet, lyrical story of mother, daughter, and the world that comes between.

Klara and the Sun (2021)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book got me thinking about the things we do to our children in the name of love.

Book Length Fiction: On Teaching

The Faculty Lounge (2024)

Jennifer Mathieu touches lightly on the difficult aspects of teaching both inside and outside the school. This collection of vignettes, loosely organized around the death of a beloved faculty member in the teacher’s lounge of a Texas high school, explores love in the storage room, sexual harrassment, and pushy parents.

#AmReadingCandy

A note: In an effort to quash the summer spread, my husband and I are doing a dry seventy-five. And a whole thirty. It’s not a whole lot of fun, so…I’m reading candy.

B.K. Borison’s Lovelight Farms is a pretty dang cozy book about a girl who is willing to lie and cheat to get her Christmas Tree Farm up and running.

D.L. Soria’s The Cottage Around the Corner is not my typical genre, but I enjoyed this romp through small town New England with witches turning into chickens, mages falling in love with witches, and a town tuned upside down by magic gone wrong.

Julie Soto’s new book Not Another Love Song, about a violinist who falls in love with a cellist was a two day read, even with three kids crawling all over me-just don’t let the kids peak inside.

Hats off to my little cousin for recommending Emily Henry’s joyful books (the woman understands how to raise the (gentle) stakes and keep the reader on the hook.

Book Length Fiction: Debut

Worry (2024)

Despite my uncertainty about whether the angst in Alexandra Tanner’s DEBUT is millenial angst or Gen Alpha angst, I enjoyed the voicy albeit downtrodden protagonist who both engaging and humorous by turns.

Amazing Grace Adams (2023)

Fran Littlewood’s DEBUT journey across London has a heartbreaking twist that left me yearning to hold my children close.

Really Good, Actually (2023)

Monica Heisey’s DEBUT made me laugh out loud while contemplating the absolute devastation of divorce.

New Girl in Little Cove (2021)

Damhnait Monaghan’s DEBUT relies on the charming dialect of Newfoundland to tell a bright-eyed story of a young teacher getting her start far from her urban home and simultaneously falling in love with teaching, small town life, and a bold fisherman.

All the Little Bird Hearts (2021)

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s DEBUT, written in an intimate first person voice, explores the complexity of social dynamics through a quiet, lyrical story of mother, daughter, and the world that comes between.

The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living (2016)

Louise Miller’s DEBUT, a well-constructed story about escapism, friendship, and pie, is the kind of cozy, immersive read that is meant to be read by a fire with a hot cup of tea.

Pineapple Street (2023)

Jenny Jackson, a vice president at Knopf, paints a vivid portrait of an elite cross section of New York Society.

Book Length Fiction: # Am Reading

Real Americans (2024)

Curtis Sittenfeld’s DEBUT (isn’t it funny to think about Curtis Sittenfeld as having had a debut?!) captures the painful insecurity of the high school exerience, amplified by the class disparities of a New England boarding school.

Real Americans (2024)

Rachel Khong’s second novel is an intergenerational story that touches on the Chinese Cultural Revolution while exploring extreme wealth, economic disparities and genetic manipulation in the United States.

Sandwich (2024)

Catherine Newman’s beach read paints vivid pictures of the Cape Cod National Seashore while exploring the joys of perimenopause.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (2023)

James McBride’s acclaimed story about the intersection of religion, race and class in a Pennsylvania neighborhood that shaped the life of one young black boy is a complex narrative that succeeds in it’s task of exploring intersectionality in pre-world war two America without passing judgement on a soul.

Covenant of Water (2023)

Abraham Vergese’s tome has a series of medical mysteries at its heart that showcase the complex identity of the author as well as the shifting nature of the world, medical and otherwise.

Amazing Grace Adams (2023)

Fran Littlewood’s DEBUT journey across London has a heartbreaking twist that left me yearning to hold my children close.

Really Good, Actually (2023)

Monica Heisey’s DEBUT made me laugh out loud while contemplating the absolute devastation of divorce.

New Girl in Little Cove (2021)

Damhnait Monaghan’s DEBUT relies on the charming dialect of Newfoundland to tell a bright-eyed story of a young teacher getting her start far from her urban home and simultaneously falling in love with teaching, small town life, and a bold fisherman.

All the Little Bird Hearts (2021)

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s DEBUT, written in an intimate first person voice, explores the complexity of social dynamics through a quiet, lyrical story of mother, daughter, and the world that comes between.

The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living (2016)

Louise Miller’s DEBUT, a well-constructed story about escapism, friendship, and pie, is the kind of cozy, immersive read that is meant to be read by a fire with a hot cup of tea.

All Our Names (2014)

Dinaw Mengestu’s book explores the love between Helen, a midwestern social worker, and Isaac, an expatriated African revolutionary, in the 1970s midwest.

Klara and the Sun (2021)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book got me thinking about the things we do to our children in the name of love.

Short Stories

What Got Into Us?

Read Jacob Guajardo’s gorgeous, daring prose in the 2018 collection The Best American Short Stories.

What Shines on It?

(My amazing) Grub Street instructor Sara Rauch’s book is full of gems, among which Kintsukuroi sticks with me for it’s beautiful imagery of flawed but painfully beautiful reconstruction.

Featherweight

This piece by author Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, appearing in the March 29, 2021 New Yorker, had voice for days.

Book Length Non-Fiction

Heavy

Kiese Laymon’s voice-rich memoir is as immersive as it is challenging. Read it, reread it, and listen to him read his own words in the audio version of his work.

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner’s book: oh the food, food, food.