Susan Mallery starts the summer off with a flawed and yet funny beach read, Secrets of the Tulip Sisters. The story of two sisters and a best friend muddling their way through small town life, it boasts a lot of Mallery’s favorite storytelling tropes but is ultimately a little short on real romance. The Tulip…
Dystopian novels are a dime a dozen these days, but Jennie Melamed’s début novel, Gather the Daughters, is anything but typical. Centering around a cult with some fascinating, if problematic, views about women and the societal roles they should occupy, it’s a powerful story of courage, filled with identifiable characters who face unimaginable hardships. As…
Under a Sardinian Sky offers the reader a complete immersion into the Sardinia of the 1950s. Every page makes you feel as if you’re right there experiencing everything, as there is no detail deemed too big or too small to reveal the subtlest nuances of the setting. Joy of family and familial love is a…
What if The Handmaid’s Tale took place in a separatist cult, ensconced on an island? That’s exactly what I think went through Ms. Melamed’s head while coming up with this novel. Gather the Daughters is a haunting tale of a society where women are controlled but children are free, and a young woman on the…
I can’t think of a Joshilyn Jackson novel I haven’t loved. There’s something so very special about the way she constructs her stories set in the American South. Her love for the region comes through so clearly in her stories of independent women struggling to understand and appreciate their place in an ever-changing world. The…
The first chapter of Jenny Colgan’s The Café By the Sea had me squirming in anticipation. Written in a sort of first-person, all-knowing viewpoint, I loved the unique style of storytelling that felt like having my best, snarkiest friend narrate a movie that I was watching. However, this style quickly morphed into a more traditional…
Some authors write character based stories, some write plot based ones. Beatriz Williams writes great characters and places them within a gripping plot. Such is the case with her latest novel, Cocoa Beach. Although most of her books are standalones she is able to uniquely link her novels through a shared universe. Fans will probably…
Picture this: a group of older women, likely in their seventies and eighties, sitting around chatting. Could be the bus or train, the park, that one corner or the community center. What do you think they are talking about? I would have thought aches and pains, or their kids or grandkids. Maybe the weather? Or…
The Swallow’s Nest is such a classic example of women’s fiction that, were you to look the genre up in a dictionary, you might see a picture of this book’s cover as the definition. It’s got unexpected motherhood, marital infidelity, a custody battle, cancer, evil mother figures, and prose right out of the Iris Rainer…
Upon first reading the synopsis of Julia Fierro’s The Gypsy Moth Summer, I had no real idea what kind of book it was supposed to be. Its mention of young love in the midst of troubled times made me think I would be losing myself in a young adult tale of star-crossed lovers, but, the…
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