We're posting some reviews at our Amazon accounts, as either they've been sitting in queue for a while and deserve their time in the sun, fall under our featuring policy, or they're new reads that we couldn't wait to post at the blog. You can check them out at the links below. Hope we can help you find your next favorite book!
Sara:
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Melissa:
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As parents, we Generation Xers are the first cohort to be disparaged as being “helicopter parents” just because we did things like help our kids with their homework and sign them up for afterschool activities so they didn’t come home to an empty house like we did. But helicopter parents did not suddenly burst into being in the 1990s. For people who grew up in Jewish, Italian, Asian and other homes led by involved, overprotective mothers, the helicopters have been hovering for decades.
And what’s wrong with that?
In Jesse Q. Sutanto’s new book Dial A for Aunties (movie rights optioned by Netflix), Meddy Chan has made every life decision in deference to her mother and her mother’s three sisters—where to go to college, where to work, even to give up her college boyfriend rather than choosing him over them. The husbands have left; her male cousins moved across the country, but Meddy is a loyal daughter. Now a wedding photographer in the family business and perennially single, Meddy is chagrined to learn her mother impersonated her on a dating web site… and now she has to go on a date and pretend she’s been chatting with the guy. When she finds out he’s the owner of the resort hotel where they’re working a wedding that weekend, things perk up. Unfortunately, the guy’s a creep and when he drives Meddy down a deserted road, she tases him and he crashes the car. When Meddy wakes up, he’s dead. Convinced the police will never believe he attacked her, she drives home with the body in the trunk and asks her family for help.
The aunties get right to it. They stash the body in a cooler, planning to deal with it after that weekend’s wedding of the century. But the cooler ends up going to the wedding with them. Now they have to dispose of the body while dealing with the over-the-top bride and groom and their families, friends, and attendants. And the icing on the cake—Meddy’s murder victim wasn’t the hotel owner after all. The real owner is Meddy’s old college boyfriend, Nathan—and the spark is still between them.
Dial A for Aunties is a hoot, a mash-up of Crazy Rich Asians and Weekend at Bernies. Meddy is an adorable heroine, loyal to her mother and aunts even while the women compete to be recognized as the most clever in the family. It’s a fast-paced, high-energy romp where anything that can go wrong does go wrong. At the same time, Meddy is the link between the reader and the rich (in both ways) culture of Americans with an Indo-Chinese background. Her warmth, loyalty, and commitment to doing a good job shine through even while the dead body of her murder victim seems to follow her wherever she goes.
The book’s not perfect—things wrapped up a little too easily at the end, and Nathan is too good to be true – but these complaints are like saying the icing on the wedding cake is too sweet. Dial A for Aunties will appeal to a wide range of fans, from Stephanie Plum die-hards to lovers of Hallmark movies.
For helicopter moms like me, though, it demonstrates exactly why it’s a bad idea to impersonate your adult child on dating sites. Even if it seems like you’re never going to get grandchildren. Even though you spent your entire adult life… you gave up … !!!
Thanks to Berkley for the book in exchange for an honest review.
Today we are excited to feature Catherine McKenzie's latest mystery/thriller, Six Weeks to Live. Melissa has it in her TBR and looks forward to reading it soon. Thanks to Atria, we have THREE copies to give away!
While stunned by the diagnosis, the forty-eight-year-old mother decides to spend what little time she has left with her family—her adult triplets and twin grandsons—close by her side. But when she realizes she was possibly poisoned a year earlier, she’s determined to discover who might have tried to get rid of her before she’s gone for good.
Separated from her husband and with a contentious divorce in progress, Jennifer focuses her suspicions on her soon-to-be ex. Meanwhile, her daughters are each processing the news differently. Calm medical student Emily is there for whatever Jennifer needs. Moody scientist Aline, who keeps her mother at arm’s length, nonetheless agrees to help with the investigation. Even imprudent Miranda, who has recently had to move back home, is being unusually solicitous.
But with her daughters doubting her campaign against their father, Jennifer can’t help but wonder if the poisoning is all in her head—or if there’s someone else who wanted her dead.
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| Photo by Fany Ducharme |
Catherine McKenzie is a bestselling author who has sold over a million books. She practiced law in Montreal for twenty years before retiring to write full time. Her most recent novel, You Can’t Catch Me, has been optioned for a television series by Paramount TV. An avid runner, skier, and amateur tennis player, Catherine lives and writes in Montreal, Canada.
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| Photo by JordanBree Photography |
A passionate believer in happily-ever-afters, Sariah and her own soulmate live in Utah with their four children and the two family cats. Her belief in true love has inspired several bestselling romance series, including End of the Line (THE FRIEND ZONE, JUST A BOYFRIEND); Lovestruck (#STARSTRUCK, #MOONSTRUCK, #AWESTRUCK); Ugly Stepsisters (THE UGLY STEPSISTER STRIKES BACK; PROMPOSAL), Royals of Monterra (ROYAL DATE, ROYAL CHASE, ROYAL GAMES, ROYAL DESIGN), and many standalone novels, including her most recent smash hit from October--ROOMMAID.
Visit Sariah online:
Website * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram
She’s pretty and unpretentious, loves his dog, and is not a worshipping fan. No way Noah’s giving up on her, even if his affectionate pursuit comes with a bump: Juliet has a pathological fear of kissing and the disappointments that follow. What odds does romance have without that momentous, stupendous, once-in-a-lifetime first smooch? Patient, empathetic, and carrying personal burdens of his own, Noah suggests a remedy: they rehearse.
The lessons begin. The guards come down. But there’s another hitch they weren’t betting on. As for that cue-the-orchestra-and-roll-credits happy ending? It might take more than practice to make it perfect.
THE SEAT FILLER: How meeting Adam Driver IRL inspired my newest romance novel
**Contains Star Wars spoilers.**
Being a lifelong Star Wars fan, I was excited by the recent sequel trilogy. I went to see The Rise of Skywalker, and given that I am a romance author, was keenly disappointed by the ending. Ben Solo should have lived, and heroine Rey should have won her soulmate. I needed to know if there had been an alternate ending for Reylo (Rey and Ben Solo), but there was no one to ask.
Until I saw that Adam Driver was doing a charity auction for his charity, Arts in the Armed Forces. It was a chance to meet him on the red carpet at the SAG-AFTRA Awards. This felt like the stars aligning—here was my chance to ask my question! I bid and won and flew out to Los Angeles with my then 12-year-old daughter.
We were put in bleachers next to the red carpet, and it was everything you’d hope for. Glitz, glamour, lights, and all kinds of celebrities. I had the absolute best time getting to briefly chat with stars like Rachel Brosnahan, Henry Winkler, Helena Bonham Carter and Christian Bale, getting autographs and pictures.
Getting to meet Adam was like being involved in a military operation—I met with several different members of his team to get everything arranged beforehand. I continued meeting some of my favorite stars while waiting for him to arrive. A few days before I’d interacted with some other Adam Driver fans online, telling them about my chance to meet him. They told me that he is a bit socially awkward and doesn’t like these kinds of events, so it would be up to me to make conversation. I felt fully prepared to carry on a one-sided chat.
I asked him to sign a couple of autographs for us, a Vanity Fair Kylo Ren cover for me, my daughter’s autograph book for her. He signed a very sweet message to her, and then read the message to us (given his messy handwriting). But because it was so loud, I thought he was saying goodbye. So I somehow managed to pull my wits together and ask for a photo, which he was more than happy to take with us. He shook our hands again and wished us a good night.
As he walked away, still kicking myself over my inability to have a conversation, I thought, “This is a book.” A girl meets her favorite celebrity at an awards show and can’t speak. I called my agent that night (even though she was several time zones ahead of me) and pitched her the idea. She loved it, and so did my editor, and thus THE SEAT FILLER was born.
(In case you’re curious, I did eventually get to find out whether or not there had been an alternate ending filmed when I won another charity auction and had a Zoom call with co-star Daisy Ridley, and she confirmed that there was no other ending.)
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| Photo by Lori Berkowitz |
Thanks to Jane for chatting with us and to Berkley for sharing her book with our readers.
I love reading novels about sisters and their relationships. In French author, Dominque Barbéris’s novel, A SUNDAY IN VILLE-d’AVRAY (Other Press), which has recently been translated from French to English, we meet Jane and her sister Claire Marie. The novel is different from anything I’ve read before. Jane lives with her partner Luc in central Paris and Claire Marie lives a suburban life with husband, Christian and daughter, Melanie in Ville d’Avray.
Jane and Claire Marie grew up in Brussels and Sunday nights were always sad. The author describes those evenings as “turmoil under calm” filled with dreams and fears. Their mother called Sunday nights “unbearable” and forced the girls to learn poems. It’s easy to read Barbéris’s novel as a simple story about sisters, but it is so much more. It reveals the depth of human souls.
Jane doesn’t frequent Ville-d’Avray often because her partner Luc finds her sister boring. “Your sister has never had her feet on the ground. It’s a family trait.” His words are also a commentary on how he feels about Jane. You can feel both, Jane and Claire Marie yearning to be close, like they were as children, despite the obstacles.
Jane goes out one Sunday to visit Claire Marie without Luc. Over several glasses of wine, Claire Marie shares a well-kept secret with her sister. She had a relationship with a man and kept it secret for fifteen years. While reading, I felt a wall come down between the sisters and a closeness grow. I knew they were going to grow close again.
Barbéris’s prose is eloquent and the narrative complex revealing the women’s midlife dreams and regrets. The setting for the novel has a feeling of melancholy that keeps pushing you forward. I felt a dark hole filling up as I read, eventually leading to a satisfying ending.
Thanks to Other Press for the book in exchange for an honest review.
Historical fiction, soaked in details about iconic times in history, is one of the most challenging genres to write in and one of the most enjoyable genres to read. Historical fiction about real people is even more challenging; the goal is to convey the essential truth of a person’s life, looking backwards for meaning and even themes while creating dialogue and confrontation. At the same time, the author must account for the times in which the protagonist lived. Balancing all these elements is quite an act.
Author Mitchell James Kaplan has written his third novel, Rhapsody, about Katharine “Kay” Swift, an American composer who was George Gershwin’s collaborator and lover, despite being married to another man and mother to his three children. I’m not a huge Gershwin fan and had never heard of Swift, but missing Broadway desperately, was eager to learn more about these musicals and the woman that helped create them.
“Behind every great man is a great woman,” is the saying, but sometimes the woman would prefer not to be behind the man, but standing by his side. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible for women in the early part of the 20th century, and Swift was no exception. A classically trained pianist who grew up working class, her fortunes changed when she met Jimmy Warburg, scion of a wealthy banking family. They married and Kay gave him three daughters, but never got over her love for the piano. Introduced to Gershwin, she fell for both the man and his talent—her open marriage to Jimmy (and constant child care) allowing her much freedom to pursue her romantic and creative goals. While Kay’s musical talent and aspirations are an important part of her character, most of the book centers Kay’s identity in relation to her husband or George; the author even chooses to end the book with Gershwin’s death, although Kay continued to work and lived until age 95.
A person’s life doesn’t move in a straight line, but most books are linear and focus on plot points that get the protagonist closer to her goal. Writers of historical fiction need to square a circle, to keep the focus on events in the protagonist’s life, but at the same time, feature the historical incidents of importance. Swift’s relationships with her husband and Gershwin unfolded against the backdrop of tumultuous times—the end of World War I, suffragism, the Great Depression (which did not affect Kay’s family at all) and the build-up to World War II. Swift and Gershwin aren’t directly affected by any of this, so Kaplan has to thread the needle by having his characters comment on these crises but never participate in them. (At times, they appear absolutely callous, such as a scene where the two step over families sleeping on the sidewalk to get to their premiere.) They’re more involved in the civil rights issues of the age, as Gershwin spends years developing Porgy and Bess, learning about the Gullah culture, and working with African-American artists. These episodes seem timely and consequential, as the musicians grapple with cultural appropriation and who has the right to tell certain stories, issues artists deal with today.
I found Rhapsody to be an uneven book. The beginning is cluttered and noisy; the language pretentious. Some of the dialogue was the kind of complicated, overwritten, arch exchanges found in Hollywood movies of the time. But as Kaplan got further into the story, those trappings fell away and a more streamlined structure emerged. At its best, the novel reminded me of last year’s Fosse/Verdon mini-series, two collaborative geniuses producing art together but unable to make the personal relationship work. (Swift actually wrote shows both with Gershwin and her husband, who worked under the name Paul James.)
But the music is the core of the story, and this presents Kaplan with his greatest challenge. While paintings and dance and other types of art can be depicted on the page, music can only be described, and it has a special vocabulary not necessarily known to non-musicians. Jazz, in particular, defies written description, yet the Jazz Age is vitally important to the story. Kaplan gives it his best shot, citing specific pieces by Beethoven and Mozart that classically trained Kay plays; in other passages, metaphors do the work of conveying the sound.
Swift was definitely a trailblazer, the first woman to score a hit musical completely. Rhapsody is an interesting look at what it took to be a female artist a century ago. At the same time, many women today make some of the same sacrifices for their art. Behind every great man is a great woman, but behind every great woman is effective child care and a room of her own. If Swift hadn’t had nannies and an absent husband, would she have blazed those trails? What art today has not been produced by female artists, thanks to the challenge of the COVID age?
Thanks to Gallery for the book in exchange for an honest review.
More by Mitchell James Kaplan:
We've been running a column series to get more personal with our readers. This month, we're talking about regrets. What do you regret? Please share your thoughts in the comments on this post.
Posy Fairweather should be on top of the world when her boyfriend, Matt proposes to her – oh right, she is on a mountain in the Alps when he drops to his knee. But in Jenny Colgan’s latest novel, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE DUMPED (LittleBrown/HarperCollins), Matt’s proposal has Posy rethinking her past boyfriends and wondering why they didn’t work out. So, she does the obvious thing and reconnects with them. Because if you’re worried about getting married, why not lie before you take the plunge. It didn’t make sense to me, either, but I went along with it to finish the book.
Posy’s would-be fiancé, Matt is a personal trainer at a gym, and somewhat frowned upon in her circle. Mom’s a psychologist divorced from her dad and basically thinks men are scum. Posy looks up her boyfriend from University, Chris and finds him in a remote part of the Shetland Islands. She braves the elements to visit him and finds out she doesn’t love him, but news of her trip leaks to Matt and he takes back his ring. Her resistance to follow the grass is always greener syndrome doesn’t stop there. Then she’s on to Adam, a true wanker by all her friends accounts. Then she’s off to find Almaric and things continue to get complicated and not any better with Matt who still apparently loves her.
I couldn't really figure out where Jenny Colgan was going with this novel, or what was the point. It took on a bunch of different focuses without really settling on one, until the end. We learn her mom has bad mouthed her dad, and Posy has been estranged from him all these years. Turns out, her main problem has been not resolving her relationship with her dad. By the time we get to that, we're at the end and readers have either hung in there or closed the book on THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE DUMPED. It's cute, but not one of my favorite Jenny Colgan novels. But of course, that's just my opinion. Maybe it'll be different for you.
Thanks to William Morrow for the book in exchange for an honest review.
More by Jenny Colgan:
When it comes to historical fiction, I have two interests: World War II and the Titanic. While Patti Callahan’s latest, Surviving Savannah, doesn’t take place in either of these time periods, her story is inspired by a shipwreck nicknamed “the Titanic of the South.” So naturally I wanted to learn more.
In 1838, the steamship Pulaski exploded, 30 miles off the coast of North Carolina, on its way from Savannah, Georgia, to Baltimore, Maryland. Onboard were families from the cream of Savannah society… as well as the enslaved people forced to serve them. This is the event that prompted Callahan, a big fan of Savannah and its complicated history, to write the novel. Fortuitously, she had just begun the writing process when the remains of the ship were discovered.
Callahan’s work of fiction tackles the story through three third-person points-of-view: Everly, a Savannah native and museum curator still mourning the death of her best friend in a hit-and-run in the present day; Lilly, a new mother in 1838 who desperately wishes to flee her abusive husband; and Augusta, Lilly’s maiden aunt and best friend. Augusta and Lilly are both on the Pulaski, along with Augusta’s brother, his wife and their six children, and Lilly’s husband, baby, and enslaved nursemaid Priscilla.
When Everly is first tasked with curating a project about the doomed steamship, she demurs – she’s still mourning the death of her best friend, Mora, and the project would bring her too close to Mora’s fiancé, Oliver. But she’s captivated by the people involved, and still drawn to Oliver. As she tries to find out what happened to the passengers on the Pulaski, her story alternates with Lilly’s and Augusta’s. Lilly’s, in particular, has always been a mystery. Her husband Adam commissioned a statue of her at the docks, and her name was on a list of survivors in North Carolina—but no trace of her was ever found.
Also drawing the stories together is the question of fate. Everly is haunted by the capricious nature of Mora’s death—if she hadn’t bumped Mora, Mora wouldn’t have been in the path of the car. And Augusta and Lilly, in their separate lifeboats, wonder why they were saved while others perished.
While I found the writing to be a little overdone at times, the story drew me in so quickly and completely that I stopped reading halfway through in order to surf the web about the tragedy and the real-life people involved. It was an unnecessary step, though, because Callahan provides a lot of information at the end in a few author’s notes. I also thought she did a sensitive job including issues around slavery in the novel. With a book taking place in the antebellum south, featuring characters who owned other people, some authors want to ignore the “peculiar institution” to focus on other aspects of their story. Callahan’s characters grapple with the institution, and her enslaved character is a vital part of the narrative. The Savannah setting itself acts as an additional character; its past and present coming together vividly.
My only quibble is that Callahan had some trouble keeping the pace of the novel consistent among the three point-of-view characters. With Lilly and Augusta’s stories concluding before Everly’s, there is some summarizing in place of scene work, and some telling over showing. At times, near the end, her close third-person became omniscient. But these are minor issues in a book that overall works very well.
There’s something uniquely gratifying about discovering an historical event through fiction rather than a textbook; it prompts the reader to look for information herself rather than having it dictated to her. Not only will Surviving Savannah impress fans of historical fiction, it may also prompt many of them to plan a trip to the city.
Thanks to Tandem Literary for the book in exchange for an honest review.
More by Patti Callahan:
