While Aria’s Travelling Bookshop appears to be listed as a stand alone novel, it did not read that way to me. I felt I had a better grasp on the story because I had read the first book Aria appeared in, Rosie’s Travelling Tea Shop. Both narratives detail the joys of van-life and the delight…
The Summer Seekers is a lovely road-trip novel that starts with violence from a woman clinging to her independence and ends with an important meeting that we – frustratingly – never get to see. In between, there are little black dresses, marriages that are healed, and white water rafting trips. Octogenarian Kathleen is determinedly living…
The Rehearsals is one big problem. Billed as a combination of Groundhog Day with the 2020 film Palm Springs, it does have romantic potential, as hundreds of series that have done time-travel episode can attest to. But when you have your characters doing some pretty unlikable things, it’s hard for your audience to root for…
One can already see the motion picture brewing at the fringes of Lady Sunshine. It’s an old fashioned slice of women’s fiction about That One Summer When Everything Changed, well, it is at first. A girl finds herself among the bohemian set, there is a Big Tragedy which kills a character. Maybe two. OR DOES…
While periodicals like Salon and The Atlantic sounded the death knell on chick lit back in the 2010s, I’ve been noticing a mild resurgence of the genre via reprints and new releases. The Rules of Arrangement is one of the latter, a modernized iteration of the classic formula of a young woman juggling familial expectations,…
Just Last Night isn’t my favorite Mhairi McFarlane read; the background characters feel ill-sketched, and the leads a bit unlikable, though very human. And even though the central tragedy is compelling, the mourning process so real, the book as a whole isn’t quite engaging enough to earn a recommendation. A small group of Nottingham-based friends…
Shoulder Season is that time in resort towns that wind up towards and then extends from late summer through Labor Day, before the tourists leave and life in the towns return to normal. Christina Clancy’s vision of life in the waning days of the Playboy Club system is hampered by an unbelievably dopey heroine and…
I came up with the genre British Angst Lit to categorize books like Eva Carter’s long and underdeveloped How to Save a Life. In this genre, the story survives entirely on keeping apart its obviously meant-to-be protagonists until the last page, preferably through a variety of missed opportunities, poor communication, and, most importantly, a Third…
Melissa Scholes Young’s terrific southern coming of age tale is an interesting character portrait that manages to combine an emotional slice-of-life tale with a feminist mien that makes the entire experience a fascination. The Fehler Sisters – teenage Tammy and Kate, college-bound Jules, and recent high school graduate Maggie – are living in Missouri together…
Joshua and Lauren are the perfect couple. Newly married, they’re wildly in love, each on a successful and rewarding career path. Then Lauren is diagnosed with a terminal illness. As Lauren’s disease progresses, Joshua struggles to make the most of the time he has left with his wife and to come to terms with his…
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