Isola by Allegra Goodman

Every once in awhile it is good to be reminded that in fact the fate of women has improved over time. This book introduces the reader to a real life person. Marguerite de la Rocque, a French noblewoman born in the 1500s. Orphaned in infancy, her inheritance was squandered by her guardian, the ambitious and cruel Jean-Francois de la Rocque de Roberval, leaving her vulnerable yet stubbornly dignified. Her noble lineage, a delicate reminder of her past, contrasted sharply with her precarious present. This contradiction—her inherent status versus her lack of tangible power—sets the stage for her transformative journey. Central to this narrative is the enduring bond between Marguerite and Damienne, her devoted nurse. Damienne, an older woman with an unwavering moral compass, served as Marguerite’s first teacher and a steadfast maternal figure. There are strong women who help make her life bearable, despite her lack of control over what happens. Throughout the novel, Marguerite learns to navigate a world that demands she restrain her true thoughts and feelings. This begins in her childhood, where societal expectations for a woman of noble birth require her to suppress her desires and opinions. As she grows older, this restraint is further compounded by fear—fear of the consequences should she dare to speak or act against the dictates of those in power, particularly her guardian. This enforced silence becomes a significant aspect of her internal struggle. However, she finds that she has hidden depths that her guardian under estimates.

American Fantasy by Emma Straub

This is a themed book where something happens that I would never ever do. Which is what Annie, the protagonist, thought as well. When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Many of them are repeats on the cruise and have developed relationships and rivalries . Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has fully changed her mind. It is an improbable story of redemption and renewal with the least likely source, and maybe what these nostalgia events tap into is recaptured youth in more ways than one.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

This has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which is how I came to read it. It is part magical realism, part a commentary on the persistence of trauma no matter how long ago it was and how far away you get from the source, and part a refelction on the toll of caregiving for a loved one with Alzheimer's disease. This is not a renovation gone wrong--which is that instead of getting a new bathroom, when Dilarah goes into her new bathroom it is instead a cell, and she is transported far away to a well-known prison in Turkey, the homeland she had left behind. Slowly, a past she was hiding from comes to light in flashbacks and shimmering sentences. The cell is part of a vast complex within Istanbul’s Silivri Prison, where women of all ages and classes are housed for their alleged conspiracies against an oppressive regime. Dilara had fled Turkey around a decade ago with her husband and mentally declining, dissident father to apparent freedom in the mountains of Italy. But try as she might, she cannot now conjure away the prospect of imprisonment; it has literally followed her. Then there is the trials and tribulations of caring for a loved one with dementia. Dilara’s husband takes the appearance of the cell as a sign the Turkish authorities are on their tail and abandons their home, leaving Dilara to care for her father on her own as he suffers from Alzheimer’s. Her father was once an outspoken professor and novelist; he now slips and falls easily, has lost his sense of humor, cannot recall basic words, and fails to recognize his own daughter, and Dilara herself is filled with anguish, anger, and sorrow watching him fade.

Country People by Daniel Mason

This author writes beautifully and his books are quite varied. This one is also set in New England, like Northwoods, but it has a far lighter tone. It is looking inward rather than the broad scope of that book. It is whimsical and relatable rather than sark and brooding. Miles and Kate have been together since their school days--Kate soared academically, getting tenure before she was 30, despite having MS. She has responded well to immunotherapy, and is in remission but it casts a shadow. Miles on the other hand, is stalled. He is 12 years overdue in finishing his PhD and he main responsibility is as stay at home dad to their two children. Kate gets a visiting professorship in a Vermont college and they move from the west coast and begin small town life. From the moment they arrive Miles is sure he will not finish his PhD and he goes about figuring out exactly where he belongs and what he is going to do going forward. As is so often the case, his failure to launch a meaningful life does not set him apart from many of his generation--but he is different in that he is not playing video games and seething in his beholdeness to his far more successful wife. Rather he sways back and forth in what he sees as the steps forward and settles in a very good spot.

Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

I read this to fulfill a Goodreads summer challenge, but I have read the rest of this series and did not realize there was a new installment. I am not an avid reader of fantasy or books featuring witches and vampires, which characterizes this book and the ones that precede it, but I have really enjoyed this ongoing saga of Diana Bishop, a witch, and her now husband Matthew de Clairmont, a vampire. This is the fifth installment in what is called the All Souls series. It is set several years after the events of the previous installment--Diana and Matthew are now parents to seven-year-old twins, Pip and Becca. The story kicks off with a formal demand from the Congregation, the organization that governs witches and their magical behavior, to test the magical abilities of their children, echoing the trials Diana faced in her youth, which were not just traumatic, but she had longstanding conflict with her examiner. This leads Diana to uncover a previously unexplored branch of her family, the Proctors, and explore the depths of her own magical heritage. As she delves into higher magic under the guidance of her great-aunt Gwyneth, Diana must confront her family’s dark past and her own fears, all while protecting her children from the Congregation’s scrutiny. There are hints at books to come in this series, and it would be best to read this series in order.

Front Desk by Kelly Yang

One of my kids gave me the American Library Association's book of 52 books that are targeted by book banning groups, and this book is on that list. I am working my way through it, and this one is aimed at a middle school audience, which is not a genre I read at all. I related to a review that I read that noted that she did not read younger than Young Adults (although I do like a good picture book on occasion and I do have grandchildren who are getting old enough to be covered in this genre and I will be doing more of it as a result). The reason that that this book is being targeted by angry white adults is that they are scandalized that a children’s book would dare talk about racism. The racism in this book is very much in your face rather than more subtle, which is what I would expect for a book aimed at a middle school audience, but which was a bit glaring and heavy handed to my adult ear. The story is about Mia, who helps her parents manage a low end motel where there are some long term residents. She faces prejudice at school and while she works, and it is quite recognizable. Mia sees that immigrants and Asians are not the only people targeted, and when she sees a favored hotel resident who is African American get treated unfairly, she sticks up for him in an anti-racist manner that is very appropriate and is a great example of how to do that.

Yesteryear by Caro Clair Burke

Well, this one left me thinking that I didn't initially know what to think about it. Natalie Heller Mills builds a multi-million-strong following by broadcasting an idealized, picture-perfect version of rural life and traditional womanhood. Behind the scenes, her idyllic farmhouse relies on nannies, producers, and industrial equipment. One morning, she wakes up in a harsh, 19th-century version of her farm without modern conveniences, forced to actually live out the old-fashioned values she preaches. She must figure out if she has time-traveled, suffered a psychotic break, or entered a sinister hoax. Here is the thing--Natalie shamelessly did what many a Tik Tok phenom does--they exploit themselves and those around them--including their children, all in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Which is as old as mankind, I get that--I am listening to the book 1929 right now, and a hundred years ago it was a different media and different gatekeepers, but fame and fortune was where it was at. The thing that really struck home for me was the memoir I just finished by Sally Mann, about how her life was blown up by a journalist who accused her of exploiting her children and how 25 years down the road that is just Tuesday, a nothing burger that is as common as days of the week and fast food. I really did not love this, but it is food for thought.

That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

I read this for one of the reading badges in a Goodreads challenge--I read incessantly but somehow two of the 12 summer badges did not have a single book that I had either read or was hoping to read, including this one, which was that the book had 'summer' in the title. The book has two Dianas. The first Diana we meet as a teenager where she works as a nanny for well-off family vacationing in Cape Cod. She loves the beach and the ocean and even her job. As the summer progresses she develops a crush on an older boy and when he invites her to a party with all of his friends, she happily accepts. But the boy betrays her and Diana is assaulted, which changes the trajectory of her life forever. The story fast forwards to 2019 and we meet the second Diana, called Daisy, who a stay-at-home housewife who is working on growing her cooking business. She married her husband Hal when she was very young and he 13 years her senior. She is quite financially dependent on him but also beholden to him--she dropped out of college intending to go back but never does. She wanted more children but only has one. She is isolated after the one friend she had that was hers dies. Otherwise he controls her life--what they do socially, where they travel, and what happens with their daughter. Everything changes for Daisy when she starts to receive misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Daisy gets a glimpse into Diana’s glamorous life and she begins to wonder, what if things were different for her? Eventually, the two connect, meet and become friends. But as you can imagine, this connection isn’t accidental. And you probably know exactly where the story is going from there--this is not a book with twists and turns. So that said, I liked but did not love this--it is a good story though, so I would recommend it.

Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

This book, when I read it as a kid, made it seem possible to be independent, brainy, and comfortable with all that. The author illustrated the book herself, and Harriet is a decidedly unfeminine character, and one who is comfortable in her own unconventional skin. I reread it probably 50 years after my first reading, thinking that perhaps it would be a good gift for our granddaughters. Harriet is a flawed but very relatable protagonist. She is dedicated to her routine of spying on her peers and her neighbors--she is an outsider looking in. There are a lot of things that are very relatable about her, and it is not a book for tweens where everything comes out okay in the end, which is much like life itself. Harriet tells it like she sees it in her journal of spy observations, and she is not one to sugar coat it. When her fellow students get ahold of her journal and find out all the unkind things she has said, they shun her, and her struggle to figure out what to do about that is so relatable. The person she listens to best writes her a letter and tells her that sometimes you have to apologize and sometimes you have to lie. Period. Harriet struggles with that mightily. What I did not realize before I reread this is that the author herself was gay and that Harriet the Spy has a gay cult following. There is not a hint of sexual preference to my ear in the book, but Harriet is an iconoclast and an outsider, she has tomboy vibes, and she is fine with all of that, so it makes sense, but I did not know.

On The Way To The Wedding by Julia Quinn

Yes, I finished the eighth Bridgerton novels, and at the end this one, all Bridgerton offspring are married! The challenge in a series of eight books, all romances and with stories that must be distinct and different from each other is that an author just runs out of gas on new and different ways to reluctantly fall in love. And so while this would likely shuffle to the bottom if I were to rank them, I very much enjoyed this book in much the same vein that I enjoyed the other seven, that is to say as light diversionary stories that kept my attention, I cared what happened, I was interested in the snippets of information about Gregory's siblings and their families, and overall I would give it a thumbs up. Gregory falls quite early on first for the obvious woman--the one everyone has their eyes on--but then settles on her best friend, which is the right choice for him. The unfortunate piece is that she is spoken for. Her uncle has promised her to another, much like a head of cattle, and so there are some shenanigans that ensue in order for him to wed her. The epilogue is a bit longer in this one, being the last as it is. And while I read right through this this summer, I won't be diving right in to the prequel just yet--though will likely get to it eventually.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

I read this debut novel because it was recently longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. The author is young, Irish, and interestingly, owns a tattoo business of some renown. This is a very gritty novel, which mixes toxic masculinity and a life of crime together and I wondered if tattoo artists hear a lot of stories that maybe other professions have less exposure to. In any case, this is violent and troubled, too much of both for my taste, but it is well paced and well written. On the run for five years after killing a man in a gang fight, Tony Ward has returned to west Dublin under the protection of a local crime boss. Teamed up with tall and sullen enforcer Flute Walsh, Tony is back on his home turf grafting a grim routine of collecting debts and drug dealer’s dues. Propelled through a world of old scores and hard knocks, our protagonist is a shark who has to keep moving simply to survive. But when he and Flute are called upon to kill a failing dealer, their brutal conspiracy becomes a visceral dance of desire and betrayal. Maybe part of my discomfort is connected with the overlap between these two poles of brutality and sexuality, but in the end, while I learned something, I liked but did not love this.

Dominion by Addie Citchens

Dominion means supreme authority, sovereign power, or complete control over something, in this case it is the dominion of men over women--it is exercised not only through violence, but through charisma, piety and the banality of male entitlement. Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfreys, a prominent Black church family whose putative grandeur conceals a deep and hereditary decay. Sabre leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church, dispensing wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts, exuding the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks exclusively in his register. The longsuffering Priscilla writes those sermons, raises their five sons and silently maintains the machinery of his authority without ever receiving credit for it. Their youngest child, Emanuel – known universally as Wonderboy – is beautiful, gifted and terrifying: a prodigious athlete with the voice of an angel. Unfortunately his true nature is dark and dangerous. The action unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy’s teenage girlfriend. This is neither light nor hopeful, but it does feel real. An impressive debut novel.

Son of Nothing by Yann Martel

I think this book, which is composed in an unusual manner, benefits greatly from the recent release of Christopher Nolan's movie retelling of the Odyssey. This is set before that, during the Trojan War, but the revisiting of Homer's work overall and the linked epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey have been revived for a greater audience. a Canadian classicist, Harlow Donne, has been offered a year’s fellowship at Oxford University. His wife, Gail, has a full-time managerial job, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, Helen. Who will pour out her breakfast cereal and pick her up from school while Harlow is away? He and Gail quarrel. He leaves for England, and Gail tells him to not come back (unlike with Penelope, who waits Once Harlow gets to Oxford, the narrative shifts its form and becomes odder and more interesting. His prescribed task is to help sift through and translate a hoard of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, in upper Egypt. It’s that he comes to believe are a long-lost epic poem. It relates the story of the Trojan war, but not, as Homer tells it, from the viewpoint of princely warriors and gods. The protagonist is a common soldier, a “son of nobody” named Psoas. This is a novel that contains the actual poem. The Psoad makes up half of the book in terms of word count--the poem’s fragments are printed across the top half of the pages, while below the line are footnotes, in which Harlow sets out to comment on the text, but is soon finding in it prompts for reminiscences about his relationship with Gail, and reflections about his home life addressed to his daughter. The two narrative strands – the ancient epic and the modern domestic drama – tug at and distort each other, until finally they merge in a doubly mournful conclusion.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

I finished this book a couple of days ago and am still not sure what I think of it. I read several reviews and there is a sense that this is a book that you love or you hate--and I think for me it is a mixture of both, which is maybe the hallmark of psychologically successful story telling. In broad strokes, this is a book about parenthood, white privilege, and the thin line between right and wrong. It is set in Shaker Heights, a planned community in the greater Cleveland area, and in Elena Richardson there is a holier-than-thou attitude that they are just that much better than everyone else because their community is set up to win. She has a spouse with a successful law practice, Trip is a star athlete, Lexie is popular and smart, Moody is shy and smart, and then there is Izzy, who nobody understands--and here is where it gets weird--everyone marginalizes. She is a stranger in her own home. The Richardson's have a rental property which is also in Shaker Heights--they provide affordable housing in a good neighborhood and Mia, an artist who works odd jobs to get by and her teenaged daughter Pearl. Their arrival shuffles the deck for the Richardson family. Moody has a crush on Pearl, Pearl has a crush on Trip, Lexie befriends Pearl in the way that all popular girls who need something do--she uses her and sees herself as helping her, Izzy finds a kindred spirit in Mia, and Elena becomes obsessed with discovering Mia's secrets, of which there are many. At the end of the day, I didn't know quite what I thought about all this, and then two days later decided that was in fact the point, and any book that makes me think this much has something going for it.

Quartet In Autumn by Barbara Pym

Someone asked me recently where I get ideas for the books that I read, and I gave what was probably too long an answer for what the asker was looking for, and quite sparse for the reality of the myriad of pathways into getting on my reading list, but one of them is Ann Patchett's If You Haven't Read It Is New To You Friday vlog series, where she and various authors who come to her store to do events offer up books that you m ight have overlooked--which is often the case for me, and this is one such book. If you ever start to think you are well read, check this series out, it will tether you back to the earth immediately. I am more or less immune to those thoughts because I live in a UNESCO City of Literature, where practically every third person on the street has read more than I have, and that is bolstered by the undergraduate population, who are young and haven't yet had the time. In any case, this gem from 1968 comes from that source. The book centers on Letty, Edwin, Marcia and Norman — four ageing clerks working in the same unspecified London office, all on the verge of retirement and all living alone. This book is not cluttered up with unrequited love, or indeed any love at all. The four main characters’ lives are drained of love. That one of them once offered to make a cup of tea for one of the others is what counts for kindness and warmth in their desiccated lives. Yet we gradually develop an affection for them as we watch them live out their isolated existences — especially over Christmas, when they somehow get through the dreaded day alone or foisted on charitable relatives or neighbours. Very gradually we realise that, really, they have no one in the world there for them but each other. Every scene in this novel manages to be simultaneously hilarious and almost unbearably bleak. And yet, here I am, recommending it to you.

A Far Flung Life by M. L. Stedman

The author's second book was worth the wait. It is also set in Western Australia and is as steeped in moral ambiguity as her first. It is also deep in calamity, careening from one to another throughout the book and across the years, and once again (as with her first) there is a big secret that propels a lot of decisions and events that follow. It begins in 1958 and follows several generations of the MacBride family on their million-acre sheep ranch, Meredith Downs. Here, small decisions have vast consequences: when the patriarch, Phil, swerves to avoid a kangaroo while driving home from the market, he and his eldest son, Warren, are killed. Matt, the youngest son, only just survives. Lorna, suddenly a widow, takes over the reins of the ranch, now the sole parent not only of Matt, whose amnesic head injury forces him to redefine who he is and the life he had once hoped for, but also of her spirited daughter, Rosie. The book has loss and regret at it's core, and is preoccupied by what governs our understanding of right and wrong, as well as how we define our sense of family and identity. It is atmospheric, deep, and unsettling, all in a very good way.

It's In His Kiss by Julia Quinn

I am going to have to stop saying that I don't much read romance novels because here I am, seven deep in the Bridgerton novels, and I am still going strong. i am going to have to go with I dabble in romance, and when I do, I tend to enjoy it. The suspension of belief is no more central to this genre than the murder mystery genre, which I read deeply and widely in (like all my life, every day, year in and year out for over 50 years kind of serious). Hyacinth comes in to her own--finally. Of all the Bridgertons I have the least sense of her, up until now at least. She has a close relationship with Lady Danbury, which is a great plot line--we know Lady Danbury well and she is famous for not suffering fools and being completely up front about it, damn the consequences, so we know that when she loves both her grandson Gareth St. Clair and Hyacinth with equal zeal that they will find their way to each other. Gareth is loathed by his father because he is not his own child--there is a pretty happy story behind that that they discover much later, so he is left to fend for himself. He will inherit the estate but it is in ruins because his haughty father has a gambling problem and is a terrible estate manager to boot. Hyacinth is the opposite--her family is big and loving and it is the perfect unbrella for Garth to shelter under and thrive. This is a fun story, one with some unexpected turns, and I am more sad that the series will soon splinter into something else because we have only one Bridgerton sibling left to marry off.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

This is an unusual book. It is part memoir, part fiction, part essay and the lines between them are blurry at best. The author says that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last installment of a writing career that spans 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction (much like fellow Booker Prize author John Banville). Another is the author's own mortality--he has been diagnosed with a chronic blood cancer, something permanent and disabling but probably not leading to his ultimate demise. So now for the fiction--at the center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse Julian of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Julian's defense is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true that the author has spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth. So this is a fitting end but a less than usually satisfying Barnes novel.

John of John by Douglas Stuart

This is a cautionary tale of what not to do as a parent. The prodigal son, 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, returns to his childhood home, where his father is not just unhappy to see him, but detests everything about him, all the while expecting him to stay and take over the croft. There are undercurrents of domineering ownership that are not just distasteful, they are suffocating even for a straight man, much less a closeted gay one. Set within a tight-knit Free Presbyterian community of farmers, weavers and fishers in what appears to be the 1990s, John of John tells the story of Cal’s uneasy homecoming. It’s an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence. Wearied by his ultraconservative environment, where connection feels out of reach, Cal takes a fancy to his dad’s sole friend, confirmed bachelor Innes MacInnes. Cal is struck by Innes’s “gentleness, his benevolence--but it cannot be, because his father and Innes have been lovers since they were teens. The irony in this intimate yet epic tale, with equal parts drama, familial fracture, love and inquiry into various forms of loneliness: the loneliness that can reside between fathers and sons, between lovers, between man and God, and between a small place and the big world. Do not miss this, it is alarming and telling.

The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez

These books are on the level of a murder mystery for me--only nobody dies and there is almost always a happy ending--so while the murder mystery will always be my preferred light reading material, the romance has become more frequent on my book shelf in recent years, and this author is one of my preferred writers. This is the classic love triangle with an actual starting point. Larissa made a choice after a concert. She chose to ride home with a guy who became her boyfriend, Mike—passing up the chance to ride with Mike’s quiet, steady best friend, Chris. Larissa started life in the hole, and her father chose to dig it deeper for her, taking out credit cards in her name and running them up to their limit with no intention of paying her back. So she has a job, a second job, a side hustle and then some--she is smart and creative and ambitious and hard working. Mike is none of these things and he does not appreciate all the good that Larissa is. Chris on the other hand is every mother's dream date for their child--he has a good job, he is kind, and he notices absolutely everything, including Larissa. You see where this is going--Chris can't date Mike's girlfriend, but then again, there is a little bit of the Cyrano De Bergerac thing going on, because many of the things Larissa likes about Mike are Chris' idea and the things she doesn't like Chris has covered up about Mike. You see where this is going, slowly but surely.