Lady Tremaine ~ Rachel Hochhauser Lady Tremaine is in the unenviable position of being twice widowed, once wealthy but now takes her hawk Lucy hunting for meat. She is unable to pay her servants, and is meanwhile trying to keep up appearances in order to secure decent marriages for her daughters in order to pull the family out of poverty. She has two daughters from her first marriage, Rosamund and Mathilde, and a stepdaughter from her second, Elin. Her daughters are helpful and do their best to lighten her load, while her stepdaughter mostly walks about spouting insipid platitudes from a book on etiquette, waiting for a husband to sweep…

The Warm Hands of Ghosts ~ Katherine Arden World War I combat nurse Laura Iven is sent home to Halifax, Nova Scotia after she is injured in Belgium. She lives with her parents, and takes a job caring for an elderly woman a few blocks away. After a horrible explosion in the harbor kills her parents, and she receives a package of her brother’s effects from Belgium with a cryptic note, she decides to go to Europe and find out what happened to her brother, who is ‘missing, presumed dead’. Freddie Iven is trapped under a bunker in Belgium with a German Soldier, Hans Winter, during a fierce battle. They…

Great Big Beautiful Life ~ Emily Henry Alice Scott travels to an island off the Georgia coast, hoping to write a biography of the famous and reclusive heiress, Margaret Ives. She soon discovered that she is in competition for the job, as a Pulitzer Prize Winning biographer, Hayden Anderson, is also vying for the job. Alice is a sunshiny type who always has a smile on her face. Hayden is a grouch. Margaret gives them a month to work separately…once she sees what they have come up with, she will decide who gets the gig. Great Big Beautiful Life alternates between Alice and Hayden’s competition in the present day, and…

Dolly All the Time ~ Annabelle Monaghan Dolly is the single mom to a 13 year old boy, Gus. She teaches kindergarten in Boston, but is spending the summer at her father’s Rhode Island home, repairing damage from a small fire. Struggling to make ends meet, she supplements her income by driving for Uber and working in customer support for a tiny company that specializes in weighted vests. She also helps out with her father’s seafood business. Years earlier, her mother persuaded him to expand the company, then abandoned the family when the venture failed, leaving him deeply in debt. Now the house needs a new roof to avoid being…

Mad Mabel ~ Sally Hepworth Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is 81 and lives on a quiet street in Melbourne. She has lived there for decades, and is the type of person to speak her mind, often when she should probably keep her mouth shut. When she finds the body of her dead neighbor, a neighbor she never liked, her history as the youngest person ever convicted of murder comes to the forefront, and a media circus ensues. From here we go back to her childhood, to the deaths that surrounded her – her sister, her mother, and others. How she was teased by her classmates for being tall and having red…

Land ~ Maggie O’Farrell When Tomás and his son, Liam, come across a hidden spring in a small copse in western Ireland, Tomás decides that he will no longer work for the Redcoats, and instead the maps he creates will be real and true, though this will mean the loss of the only income the family has. Tomás is a cartographer in mid 19th century Ireland, and has survived the Great Hunger that killed so many, and sent others to the New World in search of a better life.  He is a quiet, sometimes hard man, though his childhood in a Dickensian workhouse softens the reader up a bit to him. Land is…

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife ~ Anna Johnston At 82, Frederick Fife is on the verge of homelessness. His life savings was spent on unsuccessful cancer treatments to save his wife, and he is being evicted because he can’t afford his rent. (Shockingly, this story takes place in Australia, not the US. It feels like such an American story, right?) A fluke accident, a heart attack (not his), a man who could be his identical twin, and suddenly Frederick is living in a nearby rest home, and everyone is calling him Bernard. He tries to straighten them out, but as Bernard suffers dementia, no one will listen to him.…

The Vanishing Place ~ Zoe Rankin Effie has left her troubled childhood in the bush of New Zealand behind, and is living in Scotland, when she receives a phone call from a police officer that she was close to decades before – a young girl has come out of the bush, covered in blood, who looks like she could be Effie as a child. The girl, Anya, won’t speak to anyone, and Effie is the only person who knows that area well. Please, the friend says, you are the only person who can help her. Please come. So Effie travels to New Zealand, to the town of Koramo, and confronts…

Small Rain ~ Garth Greenwall It’s the summer of 2020 in a small Iowa college town, and the unnamed narrator of Small Rain suffers an infrarenal aortic dissection, a rare vascular condition where a tear forms in the inner layer of the abdominal aorta below the kidneys. It is incredibly painful and very dangerous. The majority of the novel takes place in the ER and ICU. He’s hospitalized for about two weeks, during which time he meditates on art (especially poetry, he is a poet and teaches at the nearby college), the frailty of the body, intimacy, and the pros and cons of domesticity. Small Rain is such a beautiful…

Whistler ~ Ann Patchett Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, are spending the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, when they run into Eddie Tripplet, who was, for a brief time in her childhood, Daphne’s stepfather. Daphne and her sister Leda had three fathers – their biological father, Buddy, who probably should not have had children, his first love was the ocean; Eddie, who probably should not have married their mother; and Lucas, to whom Daphne never felt connected. Both Daphne and Leda have strong affection for Eddie, and consider the time with him in their lives to be the most stable and happy. As Daphne…

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano ~ Donna Freitas Rose does not have children. She has never wanted children. She has always been very clear about this, to herself, to her family, her friends, and her partners. She marries Luke, who also does not want to have children, never has. Until a few years into their marriage, his parents convince him that life is meaningless without kids, and now suddenly it is the most important thing ever for him. He’s a complete dick to her, and piles on the pressure, despite knowing that she doesn’t want kids, despite knowing (I assume) how much money and work goes into being a…