Emily Giffin’s latest novel, All We Ever Wanted, is a compulsively readable story that focuses on three people all faced with difficult, life-changing choices. Nina Browning is living the life she’s always dreamed of. Her husband has recently made a small fortune in the tech industry, and they’re well and truly part of the Nashville…
In Breathless, their sequel to A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man, Celeste Bradley and Susan Donovan present readers with this enjoyable story of an amnesiac courtesan who becomes a muse and a professor of sociology discovering a yen for adventure. Assistant Professor of Sociology Brenna Anderson is at the end of her tether. She…
Between You and Me is the latest novel from bestselling author Susan Wiggs. AAR Staffers Lisa Fernandes and Shannon Dyer read it, and are here to share their thoughts. Caleb Stoltz is of two worlds. Raised Amish, he chose to stay in the modern world and attend college after his rumspringa. Years later the complicated…
I was drawn to The Concubine’s Child by the unique premise and even more unique location. Set primarily in 1930s Malaya (known today as Malaysia) it is the story of a group of women and how they handle the limited choices life gives them. Madame Chan is praying to – although it’s more like berating…
Karen White’s complicated saga Dreams of Falling pulls apart the many-hived secrets of the Lanier/Darlington family. Artist Ivy Lanier, haunted by a tragic and complex past, sprints away from her broken heart by plunging herself into frantic activity after frantic activity and new thing after new thing. Nostalgia spurred on by refinishing her father’s desk…
Amy Meyerson’s The Bookshop of Yesterdays is a melancholy and tender cozy mystery in which the author gives us a fun, twisty story to follow – which ultimately sinks under the weight of its own implausibility. Miranda Brooks has long lived in the shadow of her beloved Uncle Billy Silver’s eccentric charm. He was the…
Jenny Colgan returns to the Scottish island of Mure, location of her book The Café By The Sea and one of the novellas from A Very Distant Shore, to give us another atmospheric, pretty, cozy (and sometimes a bit stereotypical) tale about life in the tiny summer town. The Endless Beach continues to chronicle the…
Jamie Brenner’s The Husband Hour is one of those lovely novels that straddles the line between women’s fiction and contemporary romance. Our heroine is a woman trying desperately to find herself after her husband’s tragic death. Her journey to self-discovery is pretty tricky, but she ends up learning quite a bit about who she really…
One of my 2018 reading goals is to increase the number of books I read that take place in places other than the U.S. and Europe, so when I read the blurb for In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, I leapt at the chance to review it. It’s a story of indescribable depth, and I’m…
If you read and loved Sally Hepworth’s The Family Next Door, you won’t want to miss Not That I Could Tell, the latest novel from Jessica Strawser. The two books, while not identical, share similar themes, and neither one was at all easy to put down. Five neighborhood women gather around a backyard fire pit…
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