Category: womens fiction

The Dane of My Existence by Jessica Martin (Chick Lit)

Book two in the Shakespeare drenched Rom Com series from Jessica Martin. While the first book (For the Love of the Bard) focused on one Barnes daughter ( the Barnes family being a kind of First Family of the Bard’s Rest Shakespeare Festival), this book centered on the eldest daughter — Portia — the uber driven, germaphobic, corporate lawyer who does not get the hype about Shakespeare (grumble grumble). Forced into a summer sabbatical prior to a big promotion, Portia gets a real chance for something different when she meets Ben Dane — a genuine good (and smart and gorgeous etc.) guy in the guise of an evil developer who wants to turn the local island / festival outdoor stage into — gasp — condos!

Honesty, ethics, and truth in relationships trump all — great banter and wonderful (completely unrealistic but absolutely fun to read about) characters make this very entertaining and great alternative to reading the daily news. Medium-high on the Steamy Scale. Plenty of fun around the Shakespeare themed town with merchants such as: the Merry Wines of Windsor, The Taming of the Shoe, and Parting is Such Sweet Gelato including the flavor “Et Tu, Brûlée.” I admit it — I would totally book a place for the weekend.

A few fun quotes to give you an idea of her comic and irreverent writing style:

“Selfishly, I rooted against the baby thing. Babies were gross, and I was really bad at faking any enthusiasm for them.”

“Dan’ face twisted into somewhere between ‘accidentally licked a persimmon’ and ‘received undesirable correspondence from the IRS.’”

“Candace is the total package: smart, creative, caring. And in a zombie apocalypse scenario, she’d be the last one standing atop a pile of rotting undead carcasses.”

“I was committing a felony with people who weren’t smart enough to wear non-identifiable gear. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.”

Thank you to Berkley and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on July 4th, 2023

A Little Ray of Sunshine by Kristan Higgins (Women’s Fiction)

I don’t read the Women’s Fiction genre as a rule, but I make an exception for Kristen Higgins. I love the way she writes families and best friends. She writes the world I wish I lived in and while not shying away from deep and sometimes painful feelings, always manages to infuse a sense of humor into most scenes.

This particular book is all about adoption — exploring it from every perspective: the adopted child, adopting family, and the birth mother and father. While the main storyline concerns a woman who gave up her baby at 17 and gets a (sudden) chance to meet him 18 years later, several other characters have different adoption experiences which are shared.

Our main character (Harlow, the birth mother) is part owner of a book store on Cape Cod; her gummy imbibing grandfather is losing his marbles in a somehow adorable way (he may be the best character in the book); and both the birth and adoptive families are replete with interesting siblings, cousins, etc. A strong message of (sexual) diversity and acceptance is transmitted via the requisite lesbian couple, transsexual employee, and a pretty hysterical speed dating event with no gender boundaries.

A few parts felt a little repetitive to me (but then we do tend to let our brains perseverate over issues important and / or painful to ourselves) but overall enjoyed as much as usual with Higgins’ books.

Thank you to Berkley and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 6th, 2023

Summer’s Gift by Jennifer Ryan (Romance)

Funny story. I selected this book to read and review because I thought it was written by a different Jennifer Ryan — the one who specializes in WWII Home Front stories that I love. Who knew there were two? I figured out my mistake about 20% in. This book is a Romance novel — full of physically beautiful, successful and wealthy people — not a bomb or make-do attitude in sight.

Still — although Romance is definitely not my genre — I kept reading. While there was literally nothing realistic about the characters, I found them likable (despite all their money and good luck, they were pretty grounded and decent) and felt quite happy when things worked out (that’s not a spoiler — all Romance novels work out — that’s the point! )

The writing was fine, I liked the characters, and while parts of it got a bit repetitive, I appreciated the strong messages about responsibility, good communication, and being kind without allowing yourself to become a piece of marshmallow fluff that people can trod on with impunity.

Thank you to Avon and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on June 20th, 2023

The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 3.5/5 Characters: 4/5 Plot: 4/5

This is a fictionalized history of the Bethnal Green (at the time) unfinished tube stop in East London during WWII.  This book focuses on the library that was moved to the station when the above ground version was bombed, but there was a veritable city created in the stop and (unused) tunnels, with triple bunks for 5,000 people, a nursery, cafe, and the as-always top notch administration by locals.  I don’t like reading books about war, but I’m always drawn to books about how civilians create on the fly systems to help them survive.  The addendum explains the actual history more fully, making clear what part of the book was fiction vs fact, though I found that pretty obvious anyway.

It’s March 1944. Clara Button is the 25-year old childless widow who is “temporarily” put in charge of the library, with the help of the irrepressible library assistant Ruby Munro.  A well-detailed set of characters ranging across age and socio-economic levels populate the library, all with inspiring and heart-breaking stories.  Thompson does a good job of bringing these characters to life.  An engaging story — I could pick apart aspects of the plot if I were in a snippy mood, but overall I quite enjoyed it.  It spoke well to the value of books and reading in all circumstances which means that it spoke very well to me!

This book would make a great movie — I hope it gets optioned!  

Thank you to Forever Publishing and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 21st, 2023

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Cozy Mystery)

This book really grew on me. At first I just thought it was a (very silly) cozy mystery, but in reality the mystery is just an excuse for Vera Wong — a kind of Chinese Mary Poppins — to make everything better for everyone. Definitely upbeat!

Vera Wong runs a tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Vera Wang’s World Famous Tea House in fact, though it is named after the famous Vera Wang not the proprietor Vera Wong, and doesn’t appear to be very terribly famous as it rarely has any customers. Everything changes one morning, though, when Vera heads down to the shop and finds a dead body clutching a thumb drive on the floor. Based on her unshakeable premise that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, Vera soon has four “suspects” who, while still under suspicion (from Vera’s perspective), also become close friends and subjects for Vera’s meddlesome, tyrannical and yet heartfelt ways.

What started as a kind of stereotypical Chinese auntie persona for Vera really blossomed with individual personality as the story went on. One of my favorite scenes: Vera reads Rumplestiltskin to an impressionable young girl and rails against the utter stupidity of the story in favor of an alternative Chinese folk story that addresses the situation … differently. Some actual interesting comments on tea as well. And the resolution of the mystery nicely surprising. Very pleasant read.

Some good quotes:

“In Chinese culture, respect only flows in one direction, from the younger to the older, like a river. The older generation doesn’t owe the younger ones respect; if any is given it is done so out of kindness and generosity, not necessity.”

“Lipton, like many other Western brands of black tea, uses inferior tea leaves that are then roasted at a higher temperature, killing all traces of subtle flavoring. The result is a strong black tea that can stand up to aggressive boiling and generous amounts of sugar and milk.”

As an opening line, this one tickled me: “Vera Wong Zhuzhu, age sixty, is a pig, but she really should have been born a rooster.”

Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 14th, 2023

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5.5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5

Loved, loved, loved this book! It’s clever, witty, full of intra- and inter-personal insights and … it simply made me happy. Our narrator is a 26-year old writer for The Night Owls (TNO — think Saturday Night Live) whose goal is to one day write “non-condescending, ragingly feminist screenplays for romantic comedies.” The book opens with a grumpy and well depicted annoyance that her office mate — middle aged schlub writer Danny Horst — is engaged to a gorgeous and popular celebrity. Her curmudgeonly point? This could never happen if the genders were reversed. And this sets the stage for this laugh-out-loud and deeply satisfying examination of love, romance, gender stereotyping, and personal insight with plenty of grammar jokes, neuroses, soul baring and an extremely funny and yet poignant story of how she got her hamster tattoo.

It is a self-referential, Covid fueled, Romantic Comedy for our times. I always love Sittenfeld’s writing — it is clean, pointed, and intelligent (and allows her audience to engage intelligently) while never belaboring an obvious point and always remaining simultaneously funny and meaningful. I would love to see some of the SNL style skits her characters propose and the whole thing would make a great movie that would easily bear multiple rewatches. Great cast of characters.

Some great quotes — out of context and just a drop in the bucket:
“Did he realize I wasn’t yet wearing earbuds or did he not care? I suspected the latter; every day, things were said at TNO, often on camera, that would have constituted sexual harassment in any other workplace except the current White House.”

“Even with the baked-in sexism, even when I’ve barely slept. I just can’t imagine a job where I laugh more, or the people are more talented and hard-working. And to get paid to make fun of stuff that deserves to be made fun of and have this huge platform — what more could a misanthrope from Missouri wish for?”

“Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to all be sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they’re all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren’t flawless but also aren’t ridiculous or incompetent at life.”

“Just to be clear, I do lead a life of quiet desperation. I wouldn’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t, or anyone who isn’t filled with ambivalence, because I assume they’d be incredibly shallow. But I’m sure I’d be ten times more quietly desperate if I were living in the suburbs with a two-car garage.”

“Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?”

“All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them, but from my resentment at their hold on me.”

“I thought, not for the first time, that plainly expressing what you thought about fraught topics was significantly harder than writing banter between imaginary characters.”

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 11th, 2023

Other People’s Houses by Abbi Waxman (Literary Fiction)

My third Waxman book — I love her combination of humor, reflection, and relatable characters. She reminds me of Anne Lamott (in her earlier, less spiritual days). Other People’s Houses focuses on a Los Angeles neighborhood — a block really — with a set of families and children brought together through proximity and friendship. Frances has become the group “designated driver” with everyone agreeing that it just makes more sense for Frances to drive the 7 kids to the various schools every morning and home in the afternoon. One fateful day when a neighbor’s child is delivered to school sans the essential toilet paper roll required for the day’s craft project, Frances drops by the house to pick it up and sees … something she really, really, wishes she hadn’t seen.

An exploration of different lifestyles brought together by the social glue of gossip, the writing is good, the characters engaging, and the dialog and reflections do a good job of presenting different viewpoints (although I can’t help feel that the author’s own viewpoint is heavily represented by Frances, and I don’t totally agree with it but… fun to think about.

I also liked the neologism (to me) of youthsplaining as in “Frances hated it when neonates lectured her about things she already understood — Youthsplaining.”

A few more fun quotes:
“The dogs followed her, wondering if this morning they would get fed in the bathroom; it paid to keep an open mind.”

“You might think that cotillion, which is basically a class where kids learn to be overly polite, to use the right fork, and where boys learn to open doors for girls, is a trivial offering, but you would be wrong. It is a fulcrum of dispute between parenting paradigms, at least in Los Angeles.”

“She pulled on the same pair of jeans she’d had on the day before and the hooded sweatshirt she found under them. Look, if they hadn’t wanted to be worn a second day they could have run away, but instead they just lay there overnight, asking for it.”

Out of Patients by Sandra Cavallo Miller (Fiction)

Story: 4/5 Characters: 5/5 Writing: 4/5 Enjoyment: 5/5

Norah is the tending-toward-cynical but unfailingly caring and dedicated family practice doctor in the Arizona desert. In her 50s, she thinks of retirement almost every day, but can’t get herself to pull the trigger.

With a jaded but humorous and never bitter tone, Miller brings to life the modern family doctor. Forget Marcus Welby, Norah and her colleagues are beset with endless regulations, condescending specialists, arrogant medical students, health insurance battles, and a plethora of patients who don’t always (ie hardly ever) advance their own cause. On top of this, the practice seems to be losing money despite a full waiting room, and someone is leaving nasty-notes on car windshields. Norah had to kick her do-nothing boyfriend of three years out of the house for … continuing to do nothing, and she has nearly daily calls with (possibly my favorite character) her 86-year old mother who has a crush on the elderly, but well-built mailman and gives detailed instructions on what to do if she doesn’t answer the phone (wait several days to make sure she is dead!). While too grumpy to even consider dating, Norah does come across some potential love interests — an even grumpier vet and a shy radiologist who suffers at her side during endless student admissions committee meetings .

I loved the tone, loved the characters, and appreciated the peek into a real doctor’s life by someone who a) has lived through it themselves and b) translates her knowledge into a highly self-aware and comical story. Some very interesting medical tidbits and asides as well…

Some good quotes:
“To give your life more purpose, for what that’s worth. I’m not sure anyone has ever convincingly proved that human life actually has a purpose. Evolution just does its thing. Sunrise, sunset.”

“I guess when your spirit pales to a washed-out shadow, you grow tentative.”

“Once upon a time we became physicians, but now we also must perform as secretaries and transcriptionists and file clerks and coding authorities and billing experts ad regulations enforcers.”

“And I wondered how anyone can eat baloney, that mash of pig snouts and ears and genitals. You can feel gritty little bits of bone.”

“That made me sad, but why should it? Why should I impose my arduous overdrive, my endless quests, on a quietly contented person?”

“No, apparently my ego needed to analyze and try to fix them. Make a difference in their lives. Maybe I worried that my failure with Grace, a previous student, might repeat itself. I may have mentioned how doctors often obsess about doing things right.”

“Nobody listens. Sometimes I feel like a tiny squeaky voice in a wind tunnel, about to be blown away.”

“And even before I say this next sentence, I’m aware it isn’t fair, because I know tons of great physician men, smart and intuitive, generous and wise. But between Jeremy Newell and Carter Billings, I’d drink my fill of medical males that day.”

“A long afternoon, but mostly rewarding. Nothing easy, nothing cut and dried. Everyone needed to talk. Mostly good patients, all with real problems. No one surly or defiant, no one acting like I owed them good health because they demanded it, no matter how unwilling they might be to earn it. Every now and then those petulant people stayed home and I felt in my element, listening, sorting, treating. Come on, Norah, I told myself, settling in with my charts after everyone had gone.”

“What would fix me would be better healthcare systems, not spending hours grappling with a convoluted computer program. Where I got more than ten minutes with an addict. Consistent medical billing and affordable insulin. Free insulin, Where medical students didn’t lose their glittering idealism in a few short years, while a handful of ego-besotted attending physicians badgered them into despondency. Until some students lost themselves under the crushing demise of their dream. The statistics on physician suicide are dreadful — every day, at least one physician or medical student is lost forever. What an unforgivable waste.”

Thank you to University of Nevada Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on August 16th, 2022.

The Shop on Royal Street by Karen White (Mystery / Fiction)

I love Karen White’s Tradd Street series — ghosts, mysteries, and the kind of characters you’d want to befriend (while simultaneously being tempted to wring their little high maintenance necks at times). This book is the first in a spin-off series about Nola Trenholm (step daughter of Tradd Street’s protagonist) who is setting up shop on her own in the Big Easy (where I am conveniently visiting atm for the first jazz fest in three years — hooray!)

Nola buys an historic fixer-upper that comes complete with dissatisfied spirits, a long festering mystery and plenty of architectural pearls.

Well-written and plenty of fun. High in puzzle solving but low in stress.

The Codebreaker’s Secret by Sara Ackerman (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 4/5


Very engaging story about Isabel Cooper — a crack codebreaker serving in Hawaii during WWII. While the plot is a little clunky, the writing draws you in, the characters are wonderful, and the descriptions of Hawaii, code breakers, and smart women playing chess were well done and lots of fun. I thought the author did a decent job of portraying intelligent, working women at the time: no heavy handed agenda — just women getting along as well as they could (and that was pretty well!) given their situation. Decent male characters as well. Romance and an a multi-generational mystery thrown in. Very Enjoyable.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on August 2nd, 2022.