The Locals by Jonathan Dee

One of my favorite books was "The Privileges" by this author so I snatched this up when it appeared on the shelves of the Library. It started out strong for me and definitely waned as I went along. It seemed like the story took a different path than it started on.
Got some mixed reviews...some very good, but I would not heartily recommend.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Found this on the 7 day book shelf at the Library and grabbed it....It was a fast and enjoyable read. Here is what Kirkus has to say:

This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.
It’s not for nothing that Ng (Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You, Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

This was quite a book!  Short but extremely rich and powerful.

It Happens All the Time by Amy Hatvany

Very timely that I read this book just when all of the sexual misconduct allegations were rife:  Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose....and MORE.
This book tells the story of a rape from two different perspectives: the woman and the man and it's done pretty well. The story went on too long, but the issues were real. There was a bit too much melodrama in one part of the book, and I won't give it away, but I do think it's an important book to read.

The Heirs by Susan Reiger

Funny book.....and very entertaining.
From NPR:

Love and sex and money and betrayal make for excellent storytelling. And The Heirs has all of that in excess. As an exploration of the hidden lives of Rupert and Eleanor Falkes, it is a posh soap opera written by Fitzgerald and the Brontes. As a window on a family shaken by death, it is The Royal Tenenbaums, polished up and moved across town.

Pachinko by Min Lin Jee

I loved this book!
From Good Reads

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.

So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity. 

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

I heard about this on one of my podcasts:  All the Books and Liberty LOVED it and really made me want to read it and I am glad I did!
What a fabulous book. Great storytelling....great characters, relevant and important themes.  I just wanted to keep reading this book forever
Here is the Kirkus Review. They liked it too.

The Irish writer’s 10th novel for adults examines one man’s life over the course of 70 years to reveal the personal and societal toll of Ireland’s repression of homosexuality.
It’s 1945, and a philandering Catholic priest is throwing 16-year-old Catherine Goggin out of church and the village for being unwed and pregnant as her family looks on silently. With quick strokes and bitter humor, Boyne’s (A History of Loneliness, 2015, etc.) opening scene encapsulates the Irish church’s hypocrisy and utter control of a meek flock. Having taken on the church’s sexual abuse of children in his previous novel, Boyne continues his crusading ways with the quiet keening of this painful, affecting novel. Catherine will travel to Dublin and give birth after saving the life of a gay youth whose partner is beaten to death by his own father. Her son, Cyril, the book’s first-person narrator, is adopted in infancy by a wealthy Dublin couple. He is smitten at 7 with a boy his age who visits the house, and even more so at 14, when they are roommates in school, but he mutes his passion for the handsome, charismatic Julian as they become close friends. As Boyne captures Cyril every seven years, his 20s feature a double life, secret promiscuity and public straightness. Then, he briefly marries (1973), flees Ireland, finds love in Amsterdam (1980), and works with AIDs patients in New York (1987). There, he suffers two wrenching losses—which also, happily, mark the end of Cyril’s tendency to forget he’s a witty, ironic conversationalist and veer close to maudlin self-pity. His later years in Ireland seem to bring the promise of reconciliation on several fronts, but there is still penance and pain until the book’s last word.
A dark novel marred by occasional melodrama but lightened by often hilarious dialogue.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Heard about this on the Slate Audio Club Podcast and the women were raving, so I got it out of the Library. It's very well written and the plot moves quickly. I did enjoy it but didn't love it.

Boy, the New Yorker reviewer sure did:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/a-new-kind-of-adultery-novel

Here's a good quote that says a lot about the book:

 Rooney’s book glitters with talk, much of it between Frances, the novel’s narrator, and Bobbi, her best friend, two Trinity students supremely gifted in the collegiate sport of competitive banter. Observations, theories, and quips about the world fly between the friends like so many shuttlecocks in a conversation that never ends, because conversations, in our world of screens, don’t have to. They just change format, so that a discussion begun in person continues through texts or e-mails or, as in the following dialogue, instant messages

Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Interesting book, took too long to  read for such a short one, however. The premise was interesting but I got tired of it.
Review from Google Books

In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her - feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she's providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer's market, and a whole new world opens up. When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly? Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, while taking on even more satisfying challenges, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer.

The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn

I loved this book and read it in one day!  It's about a couple who lives in Beekman (it's Garrison! I know because I live 10 minutes away!) and try a little experiment.  They decide to have an Open Marriage for six months.  The book is NOT really about that but about marriage in the burbs, the burbs in general, the people and "stuff" that goes on. It's funny, fun and very entertaining. I loved it!

The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas

This started out strong and then petered out for me. Too long!  And I found that I was losing interest.  Here is a review:

This long-winded debut saga takes place over three decades in the life of a writer. By age 13, Joan Ashby, a writer to her core, has vowed never to allow marriage or offspring to get in the way of her authorial life. By her early 20s she has published two dark, prize-winning short story collections. Beautiful and poised, Joan travels the world on book tours and the literary world awaits with bated breath her first novel. But she falls for a brilliant, dashing young eye doctor, marries him, and her plans change. Their beloved son, Daniel, is Joan's doppelganger and loves the written word from an early age, but she never lets on to him that she is a famous writer. As Daniel grows, Joan writes stories, which she reads to him, and also novels, which she keeps secret from both her son and her husband, believing she must keep this self separate from her self as mother and wife. Eventually, she has another son and decides not to publish the novel she has secretly completed, because she believes she must devote her time to keeping her troubled but brilliant second son from the brink of despair. In the meantime, Daniel discovers his mother is an author. Joan finally flees to Dharamsala for 200 pages of meditation, recovering her identity, forgiving her son, falling in love again, coming to terms with her marriage-and writing another novel. The novel, in addition to overextending itself-both in scope and actual page count-is frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of artistic pursuit versus family, and eventually turns into more of an inspirational primer on Buddhism than character study.

The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne

I never heard of John Boyne until very recently when I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, "Book Riot: All the Books" by Liberty Hardy and Rebecca Schinsky. Liberty LOVED The Heart's Invisible Furies by this author so I checked out his other books and found this one - right up my alley! It takes place in Russia at the time of the Revolution. It's a fictionalized account of events that took place then. From Amazon:

"Part love story, part historical epic, part tragedy, The House of Special Purpose illuminates an empire at the end of its reign. Eighty-year-old Georgy Jachmenev is haunted by his past - a past of death, suffering, and scandal that will stay with him until the end of his days. Living in England with his beloved wife, Zoya, Georgy prepares to make one final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, the Russia that both destroyed and defined him. As Georgy remembers days gone by, we are transported to St. Petersburg, to the Winter Palace of the czar, in the early twentieth century—a time of change, threat, and bloody revolution. As Georgy overturns the most painful stone of all, we uncover the story of the house of special purpose."

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta

I read a lot about this book and read it quickly. I was totally involved in the plot and the characters. But it was NOT what I expected it to be:

Here is the final line from the NPR review:

Mrs. Fletcher isn't the first book by Perrotta to mix dark humor with serious issues; he's done so before in novels like Election and Little Children. But his latest might just be his best — it's a stunning and audacious book, and Perrotta never lets his characters take the easy way out. Uncompromisingly obscene but somehow still kind-hearted, Mrs. Fletcher is one for the ages.

And here is what Newsday says:

 I loved the characters of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Mrs. Fletcher,” but I was worried about them. After all, they’re in a social satire by the author of “The Leftovers,” “Little Children” and “Election,” and they’re making mistakes and misbehaving right and left — surely they’d have to pay. So convinced was I that comeuppance was at hand that the surprise happy ending almost brought me to tears. Perrotta has been called the “Steinbeck of suburbia” and an “American Chekhov,” but with “Mrs. Fletcher,” he’s become the Jane Austen of 21st century sexual mores.

On Turpentine Lane by Eleanor Lipman

I have read a few books by this author and always enjoy them. They are light, funny, entertaining and fast to read. I read this one in a weekend. And it was a weekend that I did a lot of work, too!  The book was a breeze.
Here's the NYTimes review:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/books/review/on-turpentine-lane-elinor-lipman.html?mcubz=3&_r=0

Thoroughly enjoyable.......

You Belong to Me by Colin Harrison

I had not read a book by Colin Harrison in SO many years, but he wrote a book, Bodies Electric, that I remember  LOVING when I read it way back when. So when his new book came out, I ordered it from the Library and waited for it. Worth the wait! I had not read a thriller in a while and it was the perfect summer read.
It has this interesting component - old maps - that I found fascinating. The protagonist, Paul Reeves, collects maps and will do anything to get the ones he wants.  Here's an excerpt from Kirkus to describe the tenor of this book.

...an elaborate story with many moving parts, some of them involving large piles of money, hit men of a decidedly murderous bent, wealthy expats and players from shadowy sultanates, map thieves, drug dealers and crackheads, and an assortment of other people you probably wouldn’t want to know. When the body count starts to rise, it’s up to Paul to save his skin while trying to figure out how to grab the object of his dreams, to say nothing of luscious Jennifer Mehraz. Harrison’s story moves nimbly across a populous, MacGuffin-strewn landscape, and though it doesn’t paint a nice picture of rural America, it doesn’t spare the worst of New York, either.

I will say that some of the characters are not really explained too well; you can't really figure out who they are and why they do the things that they do. this is especially true of Wilkerson, but the pace is fast and furious and Harrison tells a good story.

The Good Country by Laleh Khadivi

This was such an interesting and important book.  How does a upper middle class AMERICAN young man of Iranian descent become radicalized?  He has everything going for him. Good looks, excellent academics, acceptance into UC Berkeley, a beautiful girlfriend, and great parents who love him and give him everything he wants.

From Kirkus: 

At first, Rez is a “typical” American teenager, blissfully numbing himself with surfing and drugs to the complexities of his life and world. But after the Boston Marathon and another massacre closer to home, Rez can’t ignore the fact that he is treated with suspicion and prejudice by the same white community with which he has spent his entire life.

His girlfriend is first attracted to some friends who are becoming fundamentalist and draws Rez into it. But he is the one who takes them on a journey to Syria to join the movement.

More from Kirkus:

His radicalization takes place gradually, the result of a countless number of small intertwining factors rather than one overwhelming reason. That makes Rez’s journey believable, his psychological transition vivid and real. You’ll sympathize with Rez even as you find yourself devastated by his ultimate choices. Khadivi’s feat is a crucial one, especially at this moment in time, when young Muslim men are dehumanized by white Americans far more often than they are understood to be complicated, and individual, human beings.

It's such a powerful book with such an important message. I highly recommend it. She's an excellent writer, too!

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

After reading Anything is Possible, I felt that I HAD to ready Lucy Barton again and I just did. Now I feel like I have to ready Anything is Possible again
She is an amazing writer! Theses two books are interconnected in really interesting ways.

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

What a beautiful book!  As soon as I finished it, I started My Name Is Lucy Barton all over again. This novel, Anything is Possible has the same characters as Lucy Barton. I just HAD to go back and remind myself about who they are, how they are connected, etc.
So, that is what I will write about next!

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

I heard about this book on my beloved podcast, All the Books by Liberty and Rebecca. They are so much fun and I like a lot of the books they recommend.
So, I reserved this from the Library and read it in just a few days!
Here is the Kirkus Review:

A Chinese woman who works in a New York nail salon doesn’t come home one day; her young son is raised by well-meaning strangers who cannot heal his broken heart.
We meet Bronx fifth-grader Deming Guo on the day his mother disappears without a trace. From there, the story moves both forward and backward, intercutting between the narrative of his bumpy path to adulthood and his mother’s testimony. Gradually the picture comes together—Deming was conceived in China and born in America because his unmarried mother, Peilan, decided she would rather borrow the $50,000 to be smuggled to America than live out her life in her rural village. After her baby is born she tries to hide him underneath her sewing machine at work, but clearly she cannot care for him and work enough to repay the loan shark. She sends him back to China to be raised by her aging father. When Deming is 6, Yi Ba dies, and the boy rejoins his mother, who now has a boyfriend and lives with him; his sister, Vivian; and her son, Michael. After Peilan disappears, Deming is shuffled into foster care—his new parents are a pair of white academics upstate. Ten years later, it is Michael who tracks down a college dropout with a gambling problem named Daniel Wilkinson and sends a message that, if he is Deming Guo, he has information about his mother. The twists and turns continue, with the answers about Peilan’s disappearance withheld until the final pages. Daniel’s involvement in the alternative music scene is painted in unnecessary detail, but otherwise the specificity of the intertwined stories is the novel’s strength. Ko’s debut is the winner of the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Prize for Fiction for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, chosen by Barbara Kingsolver.
This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants with meticulous specificity.

The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

I had heard of this book and had seen it around so when it came up on Overdrive, I checked it out and I enjoyed it a lot!
It deals with an inheritance to be divided between four siblings and it's a riot! It's not the greatest literary giant, but it's just a fast and fun look into four dysfunctional siblings and their particular foibles and fancies.

The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky

I really enjoyed this book and raced through it.  The story deals with a lost painting (it's actually a fictional painting by a real artist - Chaim Soutine - who I learned about at my two visits to the Barnes collection in Philly) and the Holocaust.  The story switches back and forth between Lizzie and Rose telling their stories (Rose was the daughter of the owners of the painting that was taken by the Nazis) and Lizzie, living in present day LA and NY and who subsequently owned the same painting, which was again lost!
How did Lizzie get the painting? How did she lose it? How do Rose and Lizzie meet up? What happened to the painting the second time? What happened to Rose's parents? 
All of these questions are handled in the book, along with revelations about guilt, friendship, family, and trust.
Read it!

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Very short but very powerful book.  I had it on my "Want To Read" list and found it on the shelf in the Library on Friday and finished it by Sunday.

Here is theAmazon blurb:

A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.

A searing, suspenseful story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare what divides us from the inner lives of others. With exquisitely cool precision, Katie Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on edge, with a fiercely mesmerizing story to tell.

Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

This was a fabulous read! Gritty, jarring, suspenseful, and above-all else, a psychological study of human beings struggling with guilt, morality, pathos, and much more.
Read the NYTimes review for a spot-on analysis.

Exit West by Moshin Hamid

This was a really different kind of book for me, but quite amazing in its craft and creativity. I found it to be extremely relevant and timely, given the Syrian refugee crisis.

Here's the Kirkus Review:

Hamid (Discontent and Its Civilizations, 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war.
The country—well, it doesn’t much matter, one of any number that are riven by sectarian violence, by militias and fundamentalists and repressive government troops. It’s a place where a ponytailed spice merchant might vanish only to be found headless, decapitated “nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort.” Against this background, Nadia and Saeed don’t stand much of a chance; she wears a burka but only “so men don’t fuck with me,” but otherwise the two young lovers don’t do a lot to try to blend in, spending their days ingesting “shrooms” and smoking a little ganga to get away from the explosions and screams, listening to records that the militants have forbidden, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, Saeed crouching in terror at the “flying robots high above in the darkening sky.” Fortunately, there’s a way out: some portal, both literal and fantastic, that the militants haven’t yet discovered and that, for a price, leads outside the embattled city to the West. “When we migrate,” writes Hamid, “we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” True, and Saeed and Nadia murder a bit of themselves in fleeing, too, making new homes in London and then San Francisco while shed of their old, innocent selves and now locked in descending unhappiness, sharing a bed without touching, just two among countless nameless and faceless refugees in an uncaring new world. Saeed and Nadia understand what would happen if millions of people suddenly turned up in their country, fleeing a war far away. That doesn’t really make things better, though. Unable to protect each other, fearful but resolute, their lives turn in unexpected ways in this new world.
One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg

From Kirkus, because I agree with them and they say it so well:

Deeply perceptive and dryly hilarious, Attenberg’s (Saint Mazie, 2015, etc.) latest novel follows Andrea Bern: on the cusp of 40, single, child-free by choice, and reasonably content, she’s living a life that still, even now, bucks societal conventions. But without the benchmarks of “grown up” success—an engagement, a husband, a baby—Andrea is left to navigate her own shifting understanding of adulthood.
“Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too,” Andrea says, much to the delight of her therapist, who wants to know, then, what exactly those other things are. She is a woman, Andrea says. A designer who works in advertising; a New Yorker; technically, a Jew. A friend, she tells her therapist. A daughter, a sister, an aunt. Here are the things that Andrea does not say: she’s alone. A drinker. A former artist. A shrieker in bed. At 39, Andrea is neither an aspirational figure nor a cautionary tale of urban solitude. She is, instead, a human being, a person who, a few years ago, got a pair of raises at work and paid off her debt from her abandoned graduate program and then bought some real furniture, as well as proper wine glasses. And still she does not fully compute to the people around her, people whose “lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.” Everyone is married or marrying, parenting or pregnant, and it’s not so much that she’s lusting after these things, specifically—neither marriage nor babies is her “bag,” anyway—so much as it’s that her lack of them puts her at odds with the adult world and its definitions of progress. Structured as a series of addictive vignettes—they fly by if you let them, though they deserve to be savored—the novel is a study not only of Andrea, but of her entire ecosystem: her gorgeous, earthy best friend whose perfect marriage maybe isn’t; her much younger co-worker; her friend, the broke artist, who is also her ex-boyfriend and sometimes her current one. And above all, her brother and his wife, whose marriage, once a living affirmation of the possibility of love, is now crumbling under the pressure of their terminally ill child.
Wry, sharp, and profoundly kind; a necessary pleasure.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Because of how much I LOVED A Gentleman in Moscow, I had to read Towles' earlier novel. It was very good, but no comparison to the new book. From Oprah:

In Amor Towles's debut novel, Rules of Civility (Viking), post-Depression Manhattan—the glittering metropolis of cocktails, jazz clubs, and glamorous apartment towers guarded by knowing doormen—is also the city of profound reinvention. Towles's fascinating narrator, Katey (née Katya) Kontent, works as a secretary at a white-shoe law firm, where she deftly hides the fact that she's the daughter of immigrant laborers. Refreshingly unconcerned about becoming an old maid—she just turned 25!—she nevertheless finds herself in competition with her roommate for the affections of one very attractive patrician named Tinker Grey. ("How the Wasps loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy.") The charming and cerebral Katey appears to have the edge, until Eve is badly injured in a car accident in Tinker's roadster. Guilt-ridden, he moves Eve into his elegant Central Park West apartment; she gets better, they begin to travel together. As Katey learns about their escapades in Europe and the finer New York suburbs, she tries to make do with other privileged, sometimes more callow boys, but time has changed everything, including her. In the crisp, noirish prose of the era, Towles portrays complex relationships in a city that is at once melting pot and elitist enclave—and a thoroughly modern heroine who fearlessly claims her place in it.

 And from Kirkus:

Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.

 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Here's what the book is about:  the death of a teenage girl, Lydia, from a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio, suddenly forces a once tight-knit family to unravel in unexpected ways.

I liked this book but thought that some aspects were predictable and a bit cliche. At times I felt like I was reading a YA book; it WOULD be a very good YA book.

Maybe because I find it hard to believe that Asian students would be heckled in the 70s. Did I just forget that or because I didn't really have many Asians in my high school, I was unaware? But I was in college in the 70s and NEVER felt any prejudice toward Asians in my life at U of W.

But I was very aware of prejudice against Blacks and even Jews. So maybe I was just delusional about the Asian prejudice and it existed but I was unaware. So then, this book is a good one and enlightened me about something of which I was unaware.

I liked the way that the reader came to understand Lydia and her "suicide" (spoiler - it WASN'T a suicide, but the family will never know that)

So yes, I enjoyed the book, am glad I read it but it was not the best book in this genre that I have read.

 

The Patriots by Sana Krasikov

Of course I loved this book. Read what Kirkus says (they loved it, too!)

An idealistic young American heads for the Soviet Union in 1934, with consequences that reverberate through three generations in Krasikov’s ambitious and compelling first novel (One More Year: Stories, 2008).
The grim saga of Florence Fein’s education in the realities of Soviet life is punctuated by her son Julian’s sardonic first-person account of his return to Moscow in 2008 to facilitate an American-Soviet oil project, during which he also takes jaundiced looks back at his fraught relationship with his mother. Julian, one of the disenchanted Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate in the late 1970s, has never really forgiven Florence for her stubborn loyalty to the brutal police state that murdered her husband, sent her to a labor camp, and stuck their son in state orphanages. Julian is equally judgmental about his son, Lenny, an expatriate venture capitalist in Moscow who fancies himself “a cowboy on the frontiers of private enterprise,” while Julian bitterly finds capitalist Russia as corrupt and repressive as its Soviet predecessor. Krasikov skillfully intertwines multiple narratives and time frames in a sweeping drama that is both a touching affirmation of the enduring bonds of family and a searing examination of the ghastly moral quandaries faced by the subjects of a totalitarian state. Her American passport confiscated, terrified by the threats of the secret police, Florence is reduced to informing on friends and colleagues; the chapters chronicling her experiences in the gulag bring to life a horrific world in which survival is the only goal but also give her an opportunity to make amends for her betrayals. The once-secret police files Julian unearths in Moscow teach him to judge his mother more gently and admire her resourceful manipulation of her oppressors; he even emulates some of her tactics to protect Lenny from the threat posed by a sinister Russian “vice-president of corporate security.”
We do the best we can in an imperfect world, Krasikov reminds us in a dark tale brightened by tender compassion for human frailty.

Modern Lovers by Emma Straub

Great synopsis of the theme of this entertaining book.  From the New York Times:

When do the wheels come off the wagon? In your 20s, after a short-lived stint in a rock band? In your 30s, after your kids have sucked the life out of you? In your 40s, after you acquire gray hair and a real estate license? How about when your ­almost-adult child starts having sex with your best friend’s almost-adult child? Or maybe it’s when you, nearing 50, find a guru? And the guru turns out to be a con artist?

I also agree with the Times in their assessment of the ending, which I found highly disappointing. Tied up all the loose ends in a few pages using a literary device that was too easy for the author to do quickly. It was like SHE was ready to move on from these characters!

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I read this book quite a while ago, probably when it first came out, so when my husband started reading it, I wanted to read it again. I remember having liked it so much! And I still liked it every bit as much as the first time I read it. And it's so relevant - even more so now?

The book grabs you with the first line:  "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

This is a coming of age story more than anything else and a saga of a Greek family "coming to America." I was reading it as Donald Trump was inaugurated, was closing the doors to Muslim  immigrants and generally, trying to make our country something different than it was when this family came over.

I loved the book the second time and will love it the third time - if I read it again.