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.

The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty

This author has a number of books written that are well known, and I am not entirely sure why I chose this one as a starting point with her. The main character is a hypnotherapist named Ellen who has a bit of a sparse and unfulfilling dating life. She’s finally given in and decided to try internet dating and she finds Patrick. His first wife died of cancer years back, he has a son (she has some hesitation about parenthood and it turns out she likes it) and he seems almost perfect. Except for one thing. Patrick has stalker. A former live-in girlfriend, Saskia, who hasn’t been able to let go. She’s not violent, but she spends a lot of the time just in the background watching. So it is creepy, and I kept waiting for it to escalate, but that is not where this is going. There is alot to unpack here about what love and loss is, and while the whole stalking thing had me on the edge of my chair in a bad way, which detracted from my enjoyment--I am not into thrillers, even less so now than ever before--there is a lot of good material here. There is also, as a side note, a lot of good information about hypnosis. One of my favorite therapists has been doing additional training in it, and this book gets it right.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

Kate Quinn is the master of historical fiction when it comes to under appreciated stories about the valor of women. Igenerally prefer a story that captures an era in history rather than the specific details of that event or time period as told in nonfictional works and the story of the women who ran networks during Resistance in France is no exception. I read Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynne Olson after reading about it in The Economist, and while it was factually correct and told about a a young French mother who led the "Alliance," the largest and most effective intelligence network in occupied France, this book, which is essentially a parallel story in an earlier war, was more riveting and in many ways more memorable that that. This tells two stories, that of women who spied in WWI and that of women who spied in WWII,and we swing back and forth between their stories. Underlying them is the bleak outlook for talented women in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case,while I wouldn't hold this up as great literature, I very much enjoyed it and it is great story telling.

The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage

This Reese's Book Club pick is on the lighter side. It is a bit of a mash up of The Princess Diaries with a dash of Hamlet on the side. Princess Alexandrina Villiers is a 29-year-old living in self-imposed exile in Tasmania, working hard as a medical resident. he thought she was free of palace constraints, as her twin brother and father stood ahead of her in the line of succession. She had renounced royal duties to forge a life on her own outside the spotlight that is honed on all things royal, and thought she was out of woods, with a brother to follow in her father's footsteps and a plan for her twin to sire an offspring or two. However, after a tragic avalanche claims the lives of her brother and father, Lexi is suddenly thrust to the front of the line of succession and there is her uncle vying for the crown--much like Princess Margaret, he thinks he is better suited to the job and with Lexi taking herself out of contention, that he will have control of the royal reigns when his mother dies. Lexi has other plans--she comes back for a year into palace life and shifts all the pieces about on the royal chess board, leaving the royal succession looking a bit tossed up in her wake.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection, and I am slowly but surely reading quite a few of them--she has a penchant for thrillers, which I do not share, but this one is sort of borderline in that category. It is set in the near future in a remote place that is largely uninhabited. As a result the characters only interact with each other, because there is no one else there. Dominic Salt and his three children live at Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica that is disappearing because of climate change and rising oceans. Here is the world’s largest seed bank, and while Shearwater was once full of researchers, it’s now just the Salts. And soon they will be leaving as well--largely abandoing the seeds they put there to preserve them for the future. But everything changes when, after a terrible storm, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. The Salts help nurse the woman, Rowan, back to health. And while the family is used to being on their own, they start to form a connection with Rowen. They all have secrets that gradually reveal themselves, and while this sort of literary thriller is not my usual fare, I enjoyed this.

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen

Well I have to say that this is more about the people within than the story it tells, which is not to say that there isn't a story here, there is, and the people are largely likeable and good. Polly Goodman is the center of this story. She is an English teacher at a private high school, a job she loves, and she has a group of close friends she has known a long time. After a brief marriage to a charismatic bad man, she’s found love with a good one: a large-animal veterinarian who makes adorable cameos on the Bronx Zoo’s social media platforms. She wants to have a baby but it is not happening for her. Her father is getting more cognitively impaired and her mother, a judge who takes that job quite seriously, is brusque and difficult. Then, added in to the mix she takes a DNA test and finds that she has a match with a relative unknown to her. This starts a slow but interesting thread about who in her nuclear family has a secret, and how to handle it. The best part of this book is the character development. There is a lot going on in a relatively short novel and I really enjoyed wending my way to the end.

In Her Defense by Phillipa Malicka

I am torn about this one. It raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of therapy combined with a hint about the training and regulation of therapists, but it ultimately did not answer the important ones, in my mind at least. The book opens with a court battle between a celebrity and an untrained therapist, but there are underlying mysteries that involve two other women. In London, the center of the trial is a woman named Mary. On one side is Mary’s mother, Anna Finbow, a beloved TV star but also not mother-of-the-year material, and Mary’s charismatic, controlling therapist, Jean Guest, whose unorthodox methods appear to be predatory and cultish. Neither are reliable witnesses, but least reliable of all is the book’s narrator, Augusta Bird, Anna’s former dog walker. She was coming off a bad breakup when she first found employment with Anna, but her loneliness and depression don’t explain some shifty behaviors. The timing was odd as well; the trial was approaching and Anna hadn’t seen Mary in years. Gus, poor and with no family support, is sympathetic and suspicious at the same time. And what does Mary have to do with it? Eventually, chapters go back in time to show these characters’ complex lives and the depths they suffer. But these portraits are keenly observed—and show why they are vulnerable to predation. As the book goes on, more and more questions arise about victimhood, power, perspective. Many are unanswered, and at no point is the issue of the power that therapists can wield and why training and regultion is so important, so as a mental health professional, I was ultimately dissatisfied with the outcome.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Daves

This is what I would call a deversionary novel. It is certainly not cut from the typical murder mystery cloth--and no one dies--but it is close to that in terms of not too much going on beneath the surface of the story. I enjoyed it, I read it quickly in a "hard to put it down" kind of way, but it is light and fluffy. The story and how it rolls out is a little unusual, and held my interest. Hannah Hall’s adoring husband, coding genius Owen Michaels, vanishes on the same day that his company is raided by the FBI for massive securities fraud. He leaves behind a suspiciously large duffel bag full of cash for his 16-year-old daughter, Bailey. And for his bewildered wife, who is Bailey’s stepmother, he leaves a cryptic note with a single directive: “Protect her.” Hannah desperately wants to fulfill his request, but she also wants answers. As she searches for the truth about her missing husband and contends with the legal troubles caused by his disappearance, she also tries to nurture a stepdaughter who barely wants anything to do with her. As these events unfold in the present, flashbacks show how Hannah’s relationships have developed and offer clues about her husband’s story. Along the way, her own history also comes into play. Deep-rooted abandonment issues shape her choices in the present, and the attorney she reaches out to for help navigating these treacherous waters is her ex-fiancé. It all comes to a somewhat unexpected ending, which is a nice twist--and possibly done to set up a sequel, but that did not detract from my experience.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan

This is a bit of a story within a story, which seems to be cloaked in some kind of back story related to the author. As the title states, Cate Kay has lived three lives. Now it’s time for her to open up and reveal the truth--at least some of it. We never quite see what makes Cate tick, just the things that drive her to change her identity. The book starts in 1991, in her early youth. Gradually, we learn more about her and why she adopted three different identities and how now, in 2013, she lives a reclusive life. The book goes on to more or less unravel the layers of Cate’s life, revealing the aspirations of a young dreamer who once envisioned Hollywood stardom alongside her best friend and the love of her life, Amanda. Their plans, brimming with hope and ambition, are derailed by an unnamed tragedy that sends our protagonist fleeing into a life of aliases and secrets. Throughout Cate’s life, she experiences several relationships, maybe love and definitely manipulation, yet her one true love remains elusive. I would also say that the deceptions also leave Cate Kay as more two dimentional than is ideal in a character we are meant to at least sympathize with if not identify with--she doesn't come out of it with much in the way of depth, and it was a disappointing read from the Reese Book club oeuvre for me.

Heiress Takes All by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

I have generally enjoyed the YA books that Reese Witherspoon has picked for her book club, and this mat very well hit the spot for the target audience, but I did not love it. A daughter, Olivia, who's father is marrying his 3rd wife has invited her to the wedding--she is a product of marriage number one, and when that ended, she and her mother were left penniless, withouth health insurance, and in dept. he mother has worked multiple minimum wage jobs, and Olivia is out for revenge. Ok, that is all understandable, but what I do not get is why her crew agree to help her with the plan to get the codes to her father's off shore bank accounts and transfer the fortune she sees as her birth right, but why would the rest of them aid and abet her? So once that disbelief is suspending we can move on. With the help of an eclectic crew of high school students and one former teacher, Olivia has plotted her mid-nuptial heist down to the second. But she didn't plan for an obnoxiously nosy wedding guest, an interfering ex-boyfriend intent on winning her back, greedy European cousins with their own agenda, or a vengeful second wife. When everything seems like it's going wrong, Olivia has to keep her eyes on what really matters: getting rich. It is slow going and a few plot twists along the way--which set us up for a sequel--and all does not turn out as hoped.

All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett

I have spent some time during my recovery from shoulder surgery getting further along in one of my long term reading goals, which is to read most of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club selections. This is a pretty classic rags to riches romance--sort of. Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. She has an absent father and her mother recently died, so she is running on a mixture of adventure and grief. Her father is unsupportive of her plan to do a master's degree in British Literature in London. When she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach. Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Anna is sependent on tutoring for income, and she has happened upon a sweet gig, which is preparing students who want to study in the US for the SAT. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna's struggle to outrun her past. As any experienced reader of this genre could predict, there are some obvious pitfalls, but never fear, there are people in Anna's court who aren't put off by her impoverished past and who will help her.

The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

This was another miss for me from the Reese Witherspoon book choices--which is not the norm at all, but I am on an unfortunate streak. The Phoenix Pencil Company is essentially told via diary entries, whether electronic, handwritten, or magically recorded, split primarily between two perspective characters. One is a contemporary computer science student, working with a professor to code an app that connects people based on common interests expressed in social media posts and diary entries. The other is her grandmother, who had worked alongside her mother, aunt, and cousin at a magical pencil factory during World War Two before immigrating to Taiwan and eventually America. When the app puts one of the leads in contact with another university student who had met her grandmother’s cousin, it triggers frantic remembering on the part of her grandmother and a bit of romance on her own part, with both stories heavily seasoned with difficult questions about the ethics of privacy and preservation. There are a lot of good points about the story, and it is written competently, but it just didn't hold together for me.

City Of Night Birds by Juhea Kim

I would not have found this book without it being a book of the month choice, and it is books like this that keep me reading the Reese Witherspoon choices. This is a story of what it means to be a performer, what might motivate those who choose that life, and what happens when it all comes crashing down. The added layer in the case of a ballerina in a culture that has many restrictions on it is the privledge that such talent afforded the performer. Here is the story-- Prima ballerina Natalia Leonova was once celebrated across the world, her signature bravura in demand on stages from St. Petersburg to Paris to New York. But at the top of her career, an accident forces her into sudden retirement. Injured and alone, she turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past, still haunted by her relationships with two gifted dancers, Dmitri and Alexander. These men were responsible for her soaring highs, her darkest hours and, ultimately, both played their part in her downfall. So when Dmitri resurfaces with a tantalising offer for Natalia, she must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to dance again – and for the chance to return to the great love of her life. Painting a vivid portrait of a world in which ruthless ambition, desire and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with profound intimacy and breathtaking scope.

To The Moon And Back by Eliana Ramage

This is a book that is one of Reese Witherspoon’s book of the month choices and I have been slowly but surely reading my way through those. This one I found to be a little confusing period I read it over several weeks so in bits and pieces and that may have been a contributing factor. In the end I was glad that I read it especially when you consider um that there are very few Native American authors writing fiction. Thirteen-year-old Steph Harper knows she is different from her friends and classmates living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1995. Determined to be an astronaut, she notes, “I only had about a decade or so to rid myself of every fear I had left,” replacing them with what NASA calls “awareness and preparedness and disaster response protocol.” Steph’s single-minded drive forms the heart of a drama that unfolds from those teen years through 2027 while deftly exploring Cherokee identity, queer love and the price of ambition. Steph’s father, whom she, her mother and younger sister Kayla fled eight years ago, instilled in her a love of space while warning her about the end of the world. Those mixed emotions and strengths end up dictating the course of Steph’s life in wildly unpredictable ways, especially when endless obstacles seem to stand in her way. She is surprised to fall in love with a Cherokee college classmate, Della Owens, who as a baby was adopted and raised by a Mormon couple, and, after a highly public custody battle, allowed only one day of visitation a year with her birth father. While Della fully embraces her Cherokee heritage, Steph focuses on escaping to space.

Throwback by Maureen Go

I picked this up because it is a YA pick for Reese’s book club and I have very much enjoyed her selections. Priscilla, a first-generation Korean American and former high school cheerleader, expects her daughter, Sam, to pursue the All-American dream. But Sam isn't interested in the clichéd high school experience; she's a modern Gen Z teen. After a huge argument, Sam is transported back to the '90s alongside a 17-year-old Priscilla. It may be a bit contrived, bed but this time-travel tale brilliantly explores family, identity, and the immigrant experience making it a must-read for teens. There are plenty of LOL-worthy moments as Sam tries to navigate the '90s. However, the most poignant moments occur when Sam realizes how casual racism, cultural differences, and the pressure to meet Halmoni, Sam’s grandmother, and see how her expectations have shaped Priscilla into who she is today. I didn't enjoy this as much as others that I have read in the past but I would read another book by this author and I did like the time travel aspect in retrospect even though I found it odd at when I was reading it.

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

I have a slow roll on this, but I am reading all the Reese Witherspoon book club picks and have overall found them to be good and a bit lighter than books that are longlisted for the Booker Prize. This is not my favorite of these--I found the writing to be just okay. This story is about Lakshmi, and takes place in 1955, the early years of Indian independence. Fifteen years before, she was married to a man by force who abused her and depended on her to support him. One day, she had the courage to flee her home and her village. Even though it means she had to leave her saas (mother-in-law) behind. She was close to her saas and she learned a lot of herbal medicine remedies. It turns out she has quite a talent for it, and after a rough journey Lakshmi ends up in Jaipur where she settles and establishes a life for herself as henna artist with an herbal medicine practice on the side. Lakshmi has worked hard, starting with nothing and slowly making a name for herself as a henna artist. Her business is taking off, new plans are about to come to fruition, and everything she’s ever wanted is within reach. Then the abusive husband she fled turns up on her doorstep with a sister she never knew about. With her parents dead and an outcast in her village, Radha has no one else to turn to except her sister. Introducing Radha, a 13 year old girl who has only ever known village life to wealthy castes of Jaipur society proves to be increasingly more challenging and Lakshmi can feel her dreams slipping through her fingers. She does manage to find her way, not without help and not without difficulty. The book is strongest when it is describing the sights and sounds of post-colonial India.

Myers + Chang At Home by Joanne Chang

This cookbook, which came out in 2017, but my Facebook Cookbook Group featured it as the cookbook of the month in November, 2025, at which point I found it. Joanne Change has written several baking books, of which Pastry Love is the one we have cooked out of most, but this one is full of recipes from the upscale Chinese restaurant she and her husband have in Boston. She grew up eating only Chinese food and was well into elementary school before she had more typically American food, so she comes from a different food tradition than many of us do--she met her spouse when she was cooking in a restaurant after college, and this is a blend of what they like. So if you are looking for a more traditional approach this is not it--Kenji's The Wok is the book for you, or give Fuchsia Dunlop's oeuvre a whirl--Every Grain of Rice is a good starting place. What I very much appreciate about this book is the non-traditional dipping sauces they have because they are unlike others, and we as a family really love a good dipping sauce. We often buy frozen dumplings at the nearby Asian market, and are satisfied with the quality when we steam then fry them up, but then have to cobble together an acceptable sauce, and having another place to start to do that is a big plus to our cookbook collection. I was able to buy this used for under $10, which is another plus.

Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo

The book, a Reese Witherspoon pick, is about a fiftysomething mixed race protagonist, Anna Bain. She is a Welsh-Bamanian (Bamana is Onuzo’s fictional west African state) who lives in London, and has a life time of belonging nowhere--she is constantly confronting notions of difference and belonging. After Anna's mother, who raised her, dies, Anna uncovers a diary in her mother's belongings that was written in the late 1960s and belonged to Francis Aggrey. Aggrey was a student from the fictional Diamond Coast; while studying in London, he became part of a set of young African scholars agitating for their native countries’ freedom from colonial rule. Through excerpts from these diaries, the plot rapidly delivers us to Anna’s discovery that Aggrey is her father. After his studies, Aggrey returned to his homeland. There he transformed himself into a revolutionary who became the first president of the newly independent Bamana – a country that bears more than a passing resemblance to Ghana. The novel briskly tracks Anna’s wrestling with feelings of abandonment and loss, and follows her literal and figurative journey to try to connect with her father. It is quietly thought provoking, which for me is a hallmark of the Reese picks. I continue to enjoy her picks and working my way toward 100% completion.

One Day In December by Josie Silver

I read a lot of lists, and am not often at a loss for what to read next. That said, it is nice to have a list that is less brainiac and more enjoyable, and I find the Reese Witherspoon book club picks to to be a nice balance of that--some of them are amongst the best books I read all year, and some are romantic fluff. This is the later. Laurie and Sarah are roommates and friends going back to college. Laurie lost her sister when she was young and Sarah fills the role of sibling and BFF. They share everything up until something life changing happens. It goes (improbably) like this: Laurie has a "love at first sight" moment one December with a guy at a bus stop. She spends a year scouring the city looking for him with no luck, until one day Sarah brings the very same guy home as her boyfriend. It goes about how you would predict it would, but the story winds around long enough to have all sorts of options come up and overall I would say the Reese Witherspoon romance selections are above average for the genre.

Stuck Up and Stupid by Angourie and Karen Rice

I read broadly. Not a week goes by where I do not read some or all of a murder mystery--I hesitate to say daily, because sometimes I am flying, or sick, but really, while I read award winning fiction and non-fiction, I also read across the spectrum of what is available in written form. I point this out because rarely do I rate a book at 2-stars, and that is my assessment of this book. I also have read more than half of Reese Witherspoon's monthly picks--as celebrity book clubs go, hers is far and away my favorite, and I picked this because it is one of her picks. For me it fell flat. This is a modern-day Australian take on Pride & Prejudice--for me, this is one of the issues with the book, that it adheres too closely to the original, which you might think would be an advantage, but for me at least it made some of the events seem oddly out of place and the ending abrupt and unsupported by what happened before it.