The Berry Pickers ~ Amanda Peters In 1962, a Native family comes to Maine from Nova Scotia to pick blueberries, as they do every year. A few weeks in, the four year old daughter, Ruthie, disappears. The last person to see her before she vanishes is her 6 year old brother, Joe, who feels responsible for her loss. Norma is a young girl growing up in Maine to an overprotective mother and a distant father. She has dreams that feel like memories, but they are elusive and unsubstantial. This was a heartbreaking tale of a stolen child, and the repercussions on both the family that lost her and the family…

The Wedding People ~ Alison Espach A suicidal woman (Phoebe) checks in to a lovely resort hotel determined to have a wonderful meal in the beautiful dress she bought but has never had occasion to wear, before ODing on feline pain medication. She is mistaken for a wedding guest at a destination wedding, a wedding that is going to take a week and has booked the rest of the hotel. She ends up talking to the bride (Lila), who asks her which family she is with, and Phoebe tells Lila that no, she is not here for the wedding. She is here to kill herself. I found this book to…

Here One Moment ~ Liane Moriarty On a crowded flight from Tasmania to Sydney in Australia, a mysterious woman stands up and starts walking down the aisle. As she does so, she points at each passenger and states how and at what age they will die. The passengers are pretty shaken by this, especially those whose deaths are seemingly imminent. When, a few months later, the first prediction comes true, followed by two others, the world begins to take notice. The book is written in chapters that skip from person to person, including one of the crew members, the mysterious sooth sayer, and several of the passengers who were told…

Absolution ~ Alice McDermott Tricia and Charlotte are military wives in Saigon in 1963. Tricia is shy and has just arrived there. Charlotte is a ‘queen bee’ type, and bullies others to do her will. Charlotte’s will is to improve the lives of the Vietnamese people. She enlists a local seamstress to help her make costumes for Barbie dolls, which she sells in order to raise money to buy candies and toys to cheer children in local hospitals. This book is told in the form of letters from Tricia to Charlotte’s daughter many years later. Tricia is telling Charlotte’s daughter about this and other charitable endeavors, some of which are…

Terrace Story ~ Hilary Leichter Terrace Story is a collection of linked short stories. In the first story, Terrace, Annie, Edward, and their new baby, Rose live in a cramped city apartment. Annie feels that this tiny apartment is proof of her failures in life, because they cannot afford a bigger apartment. When Annie goes back to work after maternity leave, she meets up with co-worker Stephanie, who took care of Annie’s clients while she was out. Annie invites Stephanie over for dinner. While there, Stephanie opens a closet, which inexplicably opens onto a lovely terrace, complete with outdoor furniture and a view that does not match the reality (it…

Come and Get It ~ Kiley Reid Come and Get It follows three characters at the University of Arkansas: Agatha, Millie, and Kennedy. Agatha is a visiting professor, doing social research on young women and their relationship with money. Millie is a 24 year old black R.A., a senior who is older than her classmates because she took time off to care for her sick mother. Kennedy is a transfer student who is one of Millie’s charges, and one of Agatha’s students. This book was so well written, and examines the relationships between power and money. Agatha has both, as a professor who is well enough off. Millie is searching…

Adelaide ~ Genevieve Wheeler Adelaide Williams is an American living and working in London. As the book opens, she admits herself to the hospital after attempting suicide. She has good friends who support her in her recovery and her recollections on the why behind her suicide attempt. Adelaide had fallen for a dashing Englishman, Rory Hughes. Adelaide’s mental health spirals over the course of their relationship, as he vacillates between being loving and fun to being distant and withholding. Can she learn to love herself and break the unhealthy cycle she is in with Rory? Here’s where writing a review months after listening to it is an issue. I remember…

Amazing Grace Adams ~ Fran Littlewood Grace is having a crappy day. She is rushing to pick up a cake for her daughter’s 16th birthday party, desperate to connect and make up after a horrible fight. She is stuck in stalled traffic on a very hot day, and gets more and more upset, and decides to desert her car in the middle of the street, and walk to the bakery, and then to the party at her estranged husband’s house. Amazing Grace Adams follows Grace across town in her desperate journey, and along the way we learn of her past life, like when she and her husband, Ben, met at…

North Woods ~ Daniel Mason A yellow house in the woods of western Massachusetts is the setting for 12 connected stories. Mason tells of the inhabitants of the house, beginning with a couple of Puritan lovers and ending 400 years later. North Woods tells of these lovers, then an apple farmer, twin spinsters, a naturalist painter, a young black woman fleeing slavery and bounty hunters, a schizophrenic, a reporter of true crimes, a history buff, a beetle, and a mountain lion. The writing is so inventive and engrossing. Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the…

The Vaster Wilds ~ Lauren Groff Lauren Groff reread two classics to her kids, Julie of the Wolves and My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. Reading them as an adult gave her a new perspective, and instead of seeing them as adventure stories, she saw them as chilling stories of loneliness and danger. (Side note – Has anyone read the Hatchet YA books, by Gary Paulsen? I really liked those when I read them years ago. This book is 10x better.) The Vaster Wilds is a survival story placed during the Starving Time of the Jamestown colony in 1609. The unnamed protagonist is a teenaged servant girl…

Mika in Real Life ~ Emiko Jean 35 year old Mika feels like a failure. She’s recently been fired from a dead-end job, her most recent relationship ended badly, and she doesn’t know what to do with her life. When she receives a phone call from Penny, the daughter she gave up for adoption 16 years ago, she very much wants to have a relationship with her, but doesn’t want to admit her life has turned out this way. She wants to appear successful to Penny. So she makes up a more glamorous life, with a career as an artist and a hot boyfriend. All is well so long as…

When We Believed in Mermaids ~ Barbara O’Neal Dr. Kit Bianchi, an emergency room physician living in Santa Cruz, California, happens to catch a news story on TV about a fire in New Zealand. In the background of the news story, she sees her sister, Josie. The same Josie who died in a terrorist attack 15 years ago in Paris. Kit’s mom also saw the story, and asks Kit to go to New Zealand and see what the hell is going on. In Auckland, Mari is a happily married mother of two who flips houses for a living. Her newest project is a house she wants to fix up and…

The Paris Novel ~ Ruth Reichl When Stella’s mother dies, she leaves her a strange inheritance – money and a command to buy a plane ticket to Paris. Stella and her mother had been estranged, so she ignores the command at first, but eventually she goes. In Paris, she continues to live her drab, frugal life for a while, until she happens upon an upscale consignment store with a vintage Dior gown that screams out to her. The gown sets her off on series of unlikely coincidences, and she discovers more about herself, about her mother, and about the person she wants to be. This book was full of so…

My Oxford Year ~ Julia Whelan (yes, that Julia Whelan) Ella is a young American woman who travels to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study for a year. At the same time, she is offered a career changing opportunity to work on a political campaign back in the states, a job she is assured she can do long distance. Oh, and she quickly falls for a sassy local, Jamie, who is teaching one of her classes. They really like each other, but she is only there for one year, so they decide to keep it light, keep it fun, keep it temporary. It’s going to be a busy year.…

Table for Two ~ Amor Towles Table for Two is comprised of 6 short stories and a novella. Without going into too much detail, because I don’t want to ruin anything for you, below are the bare outlines of the stories. The Line – Irina is a fierce believer in the Bolshevik cause, and she and her husband Pushkin leave their farm to go to Moscow in 1916. Irina is able to find work, but Pushkin cannot, and spends his days standing in line for food and other items, making friends along the way. The Ballad of Timothy Touchett – Timothy works in a rare bookshop, and follows the work…