Everyday I Write the Book - It'll help you figure out what to read.

YOU WITH THE SAD EYES by Christina Applegate

I chose You With The Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate as the June memoir book club pick for Wonderland Books because I had heard great things about it, and it delivered. Applegate, an actor known best for her roles on Married… With Children and Dead To Me, has faced a lot of challenges in her life despite her onscreen success. She and her mother were abandoned by her father when she was a baby. She worked hard through her childhood and teens to support the two of them. She witnessed and endured abuse from her mother’s violent partner, and then

THE LOCKED WARD by Sarah Pekkanen

Every now and again, I find it good to throw a thriller into the mix, amongst the literary fiction and memoirs. The pace, the lack of detailed and complicated character development, the twists – this is a different type of reading than what I usually do. The pages fly by faster and I get engrossed in finding out how it will end. I read Sarah Pekkanen’s latest thriller, The Locked Ward, in preparation for a

MAGGIE, OR A MAN AND A WOMAN WALK INTO A BAR by Katie Yee

Maggie, Or A Man And A Woman Walk Into A Bar, is a novel by Katie Yee about a woman who has had a terrible year. First, her husband tells her he is leaving her for another woman, and then she is diagnosed with breast cancer. The novel is told vignette style, almost stream-of-consciousness, and jumps around the narrator’s life – her childhood, her Chinese parents, her relationship with her husband, her sickness, her kids.

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

Heart The Lover by Lily King is a quietly devastating novel about two romantic relationships that the main character, a fortysomething woman, had in college with Sam and Yash, two men (who happen to be best friends). The first part is a pitch perfect depiction of young(ish) love, with its intensity and complications. Decades later, the novel picks up with Yash coming back into her life when she is settled and married with kids. I

TRYING by Chloe Caldwell

Before a recent vacation I grabbed an ARC of Trying by Chloe Caldwell, which came out in August. It’s a memoir told vignette style about the author’s attempts to get pregnant, then unexpectedly, about the demise of her marriage. Caldwell covers infertility, betrayal, longing, and the discovery of her queerness, all in short chapters that give little glimpses into her life and what’s going on. “Trying” takes on new meanings beyond trying to get pregnant,

THESE SUMMER STORMS by Sarah MacLean

These Summer Storms by Sarah Maclean is a rich-people-behaving-badly book about the family of a tech gazillionaire who has just died in a hang-glider accident at age 70. His wife and four children – including his estranged daughter Alice – gather at their summer estate in Rhode Island to grieve the sudden loss. Once together, they learn from their father’s “fixer” Jack that he left notes for them with tasks for each to accomplish before

LLOYD MCNEIL’S LAST RIDE

In Will Leitch’s latest novel, Lloyd McNeil is an Atlanta policeman with terminal brain cancer who decides that in order to provide for his 13 year-old son after his death, he has to die while on duty. Telling no one about his diagnosis, he puts himself into increasingly more dangerous situations so that his son will receive his death benefits. This sounds like a depressing and stressful premise, but, just as he did in his

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige

My streak of excellent reading continues! Heartwood by Amity Gaige is a novel about a woman in her early 40s who disappears in Maine while hiking the Appalachian Trail. The narration cycles between Valerie, the missing hiker, and Lt. Bev, the warden assigned to help search for her, and Lena, an older woman living in a Connecticut retirement community who tries to help the search from a distance. Heartwood is very suspenseful – will Valerie

THE NAMES by Florence Knapp

When debut novel The Names by Florence Knapp opens, a young mother named Cora is faced with a task: she is to register the name of her baby boy in the small town where she lives. Her husband has instructed her to give the boy his name and the name of his father – Gordon. But she doesn’t want to, because her husband is a brutal, abusive man and she doesn’t want her baby son

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is my top read so far this year. It is an epistolary novel consisting almost entirely of letters written to and from Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman in her 70s living outside Annapolis. Sybil is a bit prickly and cold, but as you learn through her correspondence with many people in her life – her brother, her children, her best friend, former colleagues, neighbors, and even famous novelists – there

WHAT KIND OF PARADISE by Janelle Brown

Janelle Brown’s novel What Kind Of Paradise takes a story we know – the Unabomber – and reimagines it as if he had had a daughter living with him in that isolated cabin in Montana in the 90s, telling the story from her point of view. For as long as she can remember, Jane Williams has lived alone with her father, having been told that her mother died in a car accident. She is homeschooled,

CULPABILITY by Bruce Holsinger

Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability is an of-the-moment novel about one family’s involvement in a fatal car accident and how it was ultimately caused by many layers of guilt and negligence. When the Cassidy-Shaw family – dad Noah, mom Lorelei, and kids Charlie, Alice and Izzy – is en route to Charlie’s lacrosse tournament on the Eastern Shore, their car, which was being driven by Charlie but had been taken over by self-driving mode, swerves and strikes

JULIE CHAN IS DEAD by Liann Zhang

Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang is not my typical fare – a thriller with some hints of horror – but I was intrigued by the plot and decided to pick it up. Julie Chan and her twin sister Chloe were separated as young girls, with Chloe adopted by a wealthy white couple and Julie sent to live with an poor, opportunistic aunt. Chloe becomes a wealthy influencer with no interest in a relationship

I SEE YOU’VE CALLED IN DEAD by John Kenney

John Kenney’s novel, I See You’ve Called In Dead, is about an obituary writer named Bud Stanley whose life has flattened out – his wife has left him, he has lost his job due to a drunken binge when he wrote – and published – his own outlandish obituary, and he is, simply, stuck. In the wake of his unceremonious dismissal from his job, Bud and a close friend decide to start going to strangers’

THE GRIFFIN SISTERS’ GREATEST HITS by Jennifer Weiner

Fans of Jennifer Weiner are familiar with her particular brand of women’s lit – strong women characters who overcome adversity and dysfunctional relationships and prove they are more than their appearance – and while The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits does have these elements, it is both a more serious yet less fulfilling book than some of her others. It’s about two sisters, Cassie and Zoe Grossberg, who grow up outside Philadelphia. They are very different

PENITENCE by Kristin Koval

Penitence by Kristin Koval is about a Colorado family torn apart by the killing of their teenage son by their younger daughter, and how they try to survive the aftermath. Penitence, as its title suggests, is about the acts of atoning and forgiving, both yourself and those whose actions have wronged you. In this case, there are layers of guilt going back to earlier generations that ultimately led to the girl’s awful act, including ones