My first DIK for 2026 and it’s a cracker! Dandelion is Dead is the début novel from Rosie Storey, and it’s complicated and literary and beautiful. Set in London, it has a very British messiness; the characters drink too much, use recreational drugs, cheat and lie and fall over, and are not only redeemable, but…
An Introvert’s Guide to Life and Love offers a truly fun narrative voice. This contemporary romance is an eminently readable slice of fiction that will make you smile your way through the winter months. It does, however, feel much more like a piece of women’s fiction than a straight-up romance novel but if you go…
Mhairi McFarlane has written some of my favorite novels of the last decade, so it is with great sorrow that I’m giving Cover Story a relatively low grade. This is women’s fiction with a romance at the very end. While the characters work together and spend time together, they aren’t dating or involved romantically for…
The lives of three feisty, snarky women intertwine in popular author Beatrice Williams’ Under the Stars. Containing a more modern setting and more acerbic characters than her usual fare, this women’s fiction novel examines the question of what exactly ties people together – and what pushes them apart. Audrey Fisher is not having a stellar…
I’ve read numerous novels about book clubs that take place in dark times, but those stories are typically about happier situations than the ones we encounter in The Secret Book Society. Set during a time when women could have their reading restricted by their husbands or fathers and were seen as so mentally deficient that…
Hot Desk is Laura Dickerman’s debut novel. Set in the New York literary world, there are dual timelines with two PoV characters in the present (2022) and a third in the past (1982). The 2022 timeline is a lighthearted rivals-to-lovers slow burn romance as junior editors Ben Heath and Rebecca Blume are forced to share…
The 1920s are a rich historical period which have seen little exploration in either women’s fiction or romance. Juliette Fay’s The Harvey Girls offers a uniquely feminine look at this fascinating era. Charlotte (Crowninshield) Turner needs this job. The position with the Harvey Girls is one of the only career options available to women in…
The Codebreaker’s Daughter tells the story of two generations of women who faced similar wars in very different ways. When we first meet Dinah Kendall she’s a volunteer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She arranges to casually encounter the spies they train away from their campus, masquerading as exactly what she is –…
You can’t change the past. You can, however, forget it. Or bury it so that it is barely spoken of. The Filling Station speaks of a critical ‘lost’ moment in American history with courage, integrity, and grace. Greenwood, 1921: Just outside Tulsa is Greenwood, a thriving community known as Black Wall Street, where folks not…
To this day, if you want a quickie divorce, you go to Reno. Six weeks of residency and bingo-bango: freedom. This is what our Depression-era heroines do in Six Weeks in Reno, hoping to divorce their lousy spouses and move on with their lives. It’s a very flawed book but parts of it do sing. …
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