thoughts on books

Category: Literary Fiction

  • Long Island girls by Gabrielle korn

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    “Everything is changing all the time, regardless of our feelings about it.”

    One of my favorite quotes from the book is also exactly a perfect reflection of its best themes. The book follows Susan and has a few snapshots from her life. Sort of like how the memories on your phone hit you hard sometimes… it’s incredible how not much seems to change day to day but a snapshot from 2019 can really knock you off your stool.

    Starting in 2005, Susan doesn’t know who she is and has typical self-centered teen relationships. She comes across Eliza briefly but immediately loses track of her and sees her as the one that got away.

    The first chapter is rife with early 00s nostalgia, you’ll be surprised at things that have since faded away that were so entrenched in the every day. The Lancôme juicy tubes and downloaded punk rock.

    The subsequent chapters jump and while you miss Susan’s coming out, her career start, I love the way this book skips the “big event” scenes and just cuts to a sort of a normal day. Just as in real life, people who are main characters in one phase of your life become a forethought in the next.

    All throughout, Susan sort of romanticizes Eliza although she truly doesn’t really know her. It’s less of a Romance than a coming of age LitFic character study. It is solidly Susan’s POV and shows a jump in her maturity and a loss of innocence and a growth with each passing year.

    “Maybe love is trusting how someone feels about you.”

    You’ll highlight several sentences.

    Thanks to NetGalley and st martins press for the ARC. Book to be published June 22, 2026.

  • in her defense by philippa malicka

    WHOA. What a book. I just finished and I am totally shook. It is both suspenseful and terribly sad. Mood readers beware- it is hard to find a character to root for but it dives really deep into themes of identity and desire for acceptance. I was absolutely riveted and my mouth dropped open several times. Perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Laura Dave.

    SYNOPSIS
    Gussie is lovesick over Mary, her former friend and sometimes hookup. She is the key witness in a trial. Mary’s mother, Anna, is a beloved TV actor and Mary her estranged only daughter. Anna is suing Mary’s therapist, Jean Guest. Jean says that Mary’s parents are toxic and supports Mary in cutting off all contact. Anna says that Mary has been manipulated for money and Jean has inserted false memories into Mary’s mind. Gus is the one that brings the two together- a former client of Jean, Mary has cut her off too. But Gus is the one that brought Jean and Mary together.

    THEMES- heavy!
    Very bad therapy
    therapist as cult leader
    Art school setting
    The roles we play to each other- how our friends see us
    Unrequited love
    Estrangement of family
    Sexual promiscuity as a search for acceptance
    We are all simultaneously the groomer and the groomed, the villain and the victim, the unreliable and fiercely loyal.

    I have read so many books where I came away saying, “Sheesh, these people all need therapy. This book is practically an advertisement for therapy.” WHOA. NOT SO FAST. Did you know that in the UK anyone can register as a therapist online, like registering as a “life coach” it appears that this doesn’t have the level of regulation that it does in the states. Or at least it doesn’t in this universe.

    the characters are so sad and over time they appear to see themselves in both ways. The characters, particularly Gus and Mary, grow over time and begin to have a maturity to understand their past insecurities. Jean gave them hope, then made them dependent on her for this hope, but at least she gave them hope.

    There is a reason why people join cults- there are wonderful things about it that make one feel finally understood, feel like there is a story to their pain. If it was all isolation and hopelessness then no one would join a cult. But there is a desperation for identity that becomes fulfilled and feels wonderfully validating.

    this book is so suspenseful it practically feels like horror. Unbelievable story.

    Thank you to Netgalley and scribner for the ARC. Book to be published 2/24/26

  • no matter what by cara bastone

    Another stunning and poignant novel about grief recovery from Cara Bastone. Go into this one expecting 80% LitFic and 20% Romance. It’s only romance in the sense that being in love is a constant when life throws us some curveballs. The book is one woman’s journey to understanding that she is suffering from PTSD due to an accident that happened a year ago. Although Roz and Vin weren’t killed, they did have some physical recovery. But the mental and spiritual recovery is taking much longer.

    Roz is finding herself again through drawing. Not an artist, she wants to be able to learn about how she sees the world and signs up for a drawing class with nude models. Her husband Vin moved into the guest room months ago, and now she is blindsided by seeing a new lease. She inherently knows he has decided to move out.

    In many ways, this is the classic miscommunication trope, but in others, it is so so so much bigger. Roz and Vin are both suffering since the accident, and they can’t connect with each other. It’s another big old advertisement for therapy. Not even couples therapy, but they both need help individually.

    Another thing I really enjoyed was learning about Roz’s job and how she would try to make new recipes out of leftover food. The organization takes food that is being discarded from grocery, restaurant and farmers market and she tries to figure out ways to use it. There is something so purely symbolic about that, that she was an artist who chose to make sustenance out of trash. As someone who grew up thinking it is a sin to throw away food, seeing leftovers in my refrigerator is incredibly stress inducing. Roz, likewise, was taught young that wasting food is a sin. It is just very cool that she did something productive with that.

    Thank you NetGalley and Dial Delights for the ARC. Book to be published March 17, 2026.

  • town and country by brian schaefer

    A sparkling, intensely readable debut novel about a small town’s gentrification, the politics involved in a congressional election, and families on the brink. There are many families who have always lived in the tight knit community, but recently the “duffels” have descended on the town with their money. Typically gentrification stories are about white people flush with cash coming into a poor community populated by people of color who soon find themselves unable to afford the communities they are from…. Harlem, Hawaii… but in this case, it is the “fancy gays” from the big city who come with a duffel bag for the weekend who decide to buy a second home or relocate to the small town to make their dollar more powerful.

    And hence comes the push and pull…. the bigoted folks, the hard workers, the closeted, the farmers, those who would take advantage, those caught in the opiod crisis….and all in all, the capitalists. There are no “white hats” vs. “black hats” in this story- no one is the evil villain. The book challenges the way we see the world today, the polarization of literally everything. It zooms in on the families of Chip and Paul who are running for congress- one a townie, one a duffel, one straight and one gay, one salt of the earth and the other born to a certain privilege. The scope of this novel is extremely ambitious, there are a lot of characters introduced quickly. It is shining a light on issues in a broader way. It is a character driven novel, rather than a twisty plot.

    That said, there are so many layers to uncover- each person is always a little more nuanced and each person is a bit more complicated than they seem. There is a heavy handed lesson in that for all of us.

    A high recommendation from me on this book.

    Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC. Book to be published November 4, 2025. Election Day.

  • dominion by addie citchens

    Complex black southern family drama in the baptist church. The story is about the Winfrey family, Pastor Winfrey not only leads the church but also has a grip on most of the business in the area. To say that their influence has significant local reach is an understatement. Soon we discover that this is too much influence. The narrative focuses mainly around the “first lady” of the church, Priscilla Winfrey, the wife of the pastor. The church has long depended on the free labor of pastor’s wives, and it is clear in this story that she is doing 90% of his job.

    The man is the head of the family but the woman is the neck that holds the head up and turns the neck in any way she needs to.

    Long narratives and so many layers of understanding. You are going to want to read this multiple times and you will pick up on symbolism and the meanings you miss the first time around. The themes are both obvious and subtle, sometimes in the same story. It is a book that could (and probably should) be studied by college students studying books with themes of 20th century patriarchy within black culture.

    Audiobook review- the performance in the audiobook is simply outstanding. I loved all of the narrators, and the internal dialogue really made the characters come alive to me. That said, I want to read slowly, once I read this book, I almost immediately went back to the beginning to read a second time. In order to fully appreciate this book I want to annotate/study the physical copy.

    Themes
    Patriarchy, how powerful men in communities lose moral compass
    Leadership in the black community
    Strong women and how they lie to themselves and each other
    How the late 20th century black protestant communities became perpetuators of internalized racism
    The offshoots of patriarchy- spiritual trauma, purity culture

    Thank you to NetGalley and macMillan Audio for the ALC. Book to be published August 19, 2025.

  • dandelion is dead by rosie storey

    This book definitely changes a lot throughout the narrative. At around 50%, I thought this would be a 2 star read, even a DNF. The story becomes a very dark, dramatic and deep one as the plot progresses. So if the first half is 2 stars, the second half is 4 stars. I also changed my category on this from a romance to a litfic, as this is truly litfic with some triggering content and some deeply unlikable characters.

    Jake and Dandelion match on hinge, Dandelion never responds. She then passes away, unbeknownst to Jake. He is recently divorced single dad. Dandelion’s sister Poppy inherits her flat and all of her information, and one day, she breaks her phone and picks up Dandelion’s old phone. Out of grief she goes through the phone and finds Jake’s message to her, “I can feel your heat.” I find that incredibly icky, but Poppy did not, and she started messaging him as Dandelion. Soon starts dating him as Dandelion, although she has a terrible boyfriend Sam.

    That is about as much as I can tell you spoiler free.

    Again, the ending is disturbing in a very dark/litfic way. The challenge here is that there is no one in this book you like, that you are rooting for. In a romance, you would be rooting for the couple to get together, and you aren’t. Jake is really immature for his age and doesn’t have a ton of redeeming qualities. Poppy is pretty conflict averse and her dishonesty comes from this. Once she gets honest with herself she uncovers a bit of growth. Even what we learn about Dandelion is really….complicated. By the ending, these characters are really very complex. If you like thorny family dramas, you may really love this one.

    Thanks to Netgalley and Berkeley for the ARC. Book to be published January 13, 2026.

  • the tortoise’s tale

    This book is going to make a lot of people happy. It is really a five-star premise- the book is the internal dialogue of a tortoise who lives around 150 years. It is an essential imagining of how nature views humanity. The themes are seeing how quickly human culture changes, how we communicate with nature, and is a warning against capitalism-driven climate change. The tortoise outlives every human she interacts with, and makes interesting observations about human behavior.

    Clearly the author was definitely trying to emulate the Octopus narrator portions of Remarkably Bright Creatures or the Pony narrator portions of Pony Confidential. Those chapters I found to be polarizing- some people found them cheesy- really hated them and other really found them endearing. The narrative, as you can imagine, is slow paced and deliberate as you would imagine a tortoise’s thoughts to be. She says things like “I slept by the large rock for 300 suns” and then we can tell that the time period has jumped.

    I found it rather clever that she would make references to music that the humans were playing or singing, so this would be your clue as to what the time period is. The humans were unnecessary to her survival and yet she had a connection and passing interest in them.

    I liked it, I didn’t love it. I really wanted to love it, based on the great premise. But in execution, it was a bit… slow. (lol)

    Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the ARC. Book to be published November 4, 2025.

  • finding grace by loretta rothschild

    This may be an unpopular opinion- the blurb and other reviews are treating the fact that the narrator- Honor- is deceased as a spoiler. Therefore I am hiding my entire review for spoilers. I do not think that something that happens in the first or second chapter is a spoiler- I think the fact that the narrator is the main character’s deceased wife is the main aspect that makes this story unique. I am not a book marketer, nor an author, so perhaps this is a business or artistic decision.

    Honor and Chloe are tragically killed in a violent senseless act, after Tom and Honor have done 3 rounds of IVF and having fertility struggles. They have used an egg donor and a surrogate to see if they can give Chloe a younger sibling and expand their family. This puts stress on their family, as does Tom’s heavy work schedule.

    Most of this narrative is Tom’s story, but told through Honor’s eyes, it is a beautiful way to look at moving on after loss, owning our own story, and the grief process, which never ends. Tom is a flawed individual but wonderful father, and his girlfriend Grace is emotionally mature and strong. This is a great story for those that enjoy; complicated love stories, finding love again, forgiveness and secrets.

    The audiobook narrator is female, has a wonderful performance, british accent and subtle emotional context in her performance.
    I was very fortunate to receive an advanced ALC/Audiobook from NetGalley and MacMillan Audio. Thank you. I have not been compensated for this review. Book to be published July 8, 2025.

  • the girl I was by jeneva rose

    What a lovely and heartwarming time travel novel! This is a departure from Jeneva Rose’s other books, not exactly a romance but reads a lot like a romance, this is a very well done time travel book. I was completely surprised and touched by this book. It’s less about finding love and more learning to love yourself.

    I never end up eating a book 5 full stars unless I get a little choked up at the end. If you eye roll at schmaltz, maybe skip this one. But I ate it up.

    Alexis is at a rock bottom in her life, it’s 2017, she hasn’t really accomplished anything, her boyfriend dumped her, and she has been let go from her job. That’s when she wakes up in 2002. Unlike other time travel stories, she interacts with her 2002 self and they work together to find out what it’s going to take to get her back to 2017.

    The ending is really satisfying. The characters are great! The pop culture references are outstanding. It also is amazing that the 2002 characters have never heard of things that feel like they have been around forever- like Taylor Swift, the kardashians, and iPhones. They’ve never heard of an iPhone! Wow! 2002 doesn’t seem like that long ago but it really was.

    If you are in the mood for something heartwarming and lighthearted, you should pick this one up.

    Thanks to NetGalley and Mira for the ARC. Book to be published July 15, 2025.

  • like family by erin o white

    Blue Sisters, but way more gay. This year’s “Sandwich.” A great debut family drama.

    This book follows 3 couples in upstate New York, with young kids. If you are confused reading the blurb, you aren’t alone. It is kind of difficult to keep the characters straight (lol) but in the ARC I have read there is a helpful chart in the beginning of the book to tell you who the couples and their children are.

    The characters are not perfect, but definitely not boring. This is slice of life, tackling themes such as; “what makes a family? What makes someone family? What do you do when you have everything you ever wanted?” The couples in this book are in their late 30s/early 40s, they are interconnected and have strong family vibes. Their inner dialogue is sometimes kind of self-indulgent. They are exhaustingly liberal, the kind of liberal where you feel like you have to care A LOT about everything all the time.

    Critics may say this book lacks plot, but it really focuses on character development, and there are so many characters that it becomes very well rounded. Everything kind of builds to the couples counselor’s advice in the final act. It’s only a couple of paragraphs but it ties it together nicely.

    Thanks to NetGalley and Dial Press for the ARC. Book to be published Nov 4th, 2025.