Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao

I read this book in two days....it was so compelling, but disturbing.

Girls aren't gone from the publishing industry. The latest book with "girl" in the title is Girls Burn Brighter  by the Indian-born writer Shobha Rao, whose debut novel tells the story of two teenage Indian girls whose friendship helps them overcome the men who try to destroy them.

When the story begins, Poornima’s mother has just died and her father, who treats her as chattel, is desperate to marry the 16-year-old off. After he hires a teenage girl named Savitha to help with his weaving business, the two girls form an instant attachment.

Then something terrible happens to Savitha. When an equally terrible restitution is proposed, she runs away, leaving Poornima at the mercy of her cruel father, who once admitted to the village matchmaker that he almost let her drown as a toddler because, after all, “she’s just a girl.”

Savitha flees to the city, where she winds up enslaved to human traffickers who subject her to unimaginable horrors. Poornima’s father forces her into a loveless match with a man whose family treats her even worse than he did. When the marriage becomes intolerable, she runs away, too, determined to find her lost soulmate.

I don't want to give away anything else, but I will say that I really thought this was a good book. A little high on drama and you had to stretch the imagination a bit, but it is important to read this novel.

That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam

I had heard this reviewed on the All the Books podcast and immediately requested from the Library.  I was not disappointed. The book tells the story of a young mother, Rebecca Stone, a poet, who struggles with her newborn at the beginning (who doesn't?) and hires the La Leche League coach from the hospital to be her nanny. They develop a great relationship, at least to Rebecca, and she comes to depend on Priscilla for much more than just help with the baby, Jacob.  Priscilla is the mother of a young woman (Priscilla gave birth to her at 17) and has experience that Rebecca lacks.  Oh, and Priscilla is black.
Priscilla comes one day and announces that she is pregnant. This is when Rebecca realizes that there are aspects of Priscilla's life she has no clue about, although she tries. Priscilla dies in childbirth and Rebecca and her husband adopt the baby, even though Andrew does have a "sister" much older than him, Cheryl. SHE has just given birth to a little girl, Ivy.

There is a lot going on here, and it's interesting to see how Rebecca develops as a character in the book.  Exploring themes of race, privilege, and family, Alam's second novel will leave you thinking about it long after finishing.

Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen

This was a very quiet but poignant book. I am not sure why I feel it was "quiet" because some very disruptive and even violent events took place but the books moves at a quiet, slow pace and pretty much tells a story of what it's like to live in the UWS of Manhattan with a group of friends who are similar and yet very different. It is a story of have and have-nots and of race issues in the city. And the story of a marriage slowly falling apart - more like two people just drifting apart.
I can't recall a book that Anna Quindlen wrote that I didn't like, and this is no exception.
Kirkus doesn't agree with me. They say it's not on par with her other books, but I say, it's just a little different for her,

The vagaries of parking in New York City figure prominently in Quindlen’s ninth novel, which begins with a moment of parking karma: Charlie Nolan has just scored a permanent spot in the small outdoor lot on his Upper West Side block. Charlie, an investment banker, and his wife, Nora, who runs a jewelry museum, live in a town house surrounded by other town houses owned by affluent types much like themselves; the only blight on the block is a single-room-occupancy building. The Nolans have been married for almost 25 years—not unhappily, not quite serenely—and are parents of college-age twins. Nothing much happens in the first 100 pages or so, but the author’s amusing digressions—on dogs, rats, parking tickets, housing prices, and other city obsessions—keep things moving. Then a violent act shatters the calm on the Nolans’ block: Hot-tempered Jack Fisk, partner in a white-shoe law firm, takes a golf club to mild-mannered Ricky Ramos, the neighborhood handyman, who’s had the temerity to block the entrance to the parking lot with his van. And simmering issues of race and class boil over. (Earlier, when Nora visits Ricky at his home in the Bronx—getting lost, of course, on the way—there’s a whiff of Bonfire of the Vanities.) The golf-club incident also has consequences for the Nolan family. The title of the book, it turns out, doesn’t just refer to parking. Quindlen’s sendup of entitled Manhattanites is fun but familiar. And though the author has been justly praised for her richly imagined female characters, Nora can seem more a type than a full-bodied woman.
There’s insight here—about the precariousness of even the most stable-seeming marriages—and some charm, but the novel is not on a par with Quindlen’s best.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

This is a "hot" book right now and it started out strong, but as time went on, I found myself losing interest.  I did finish it but it was not a satisfying ending. Maybe I didn't "get it."
 From Kirkus

The book revolves around the question, "Would you want to know when your life was going to end?"
A psychic on the Lower East Side tells four children the dates they will die. Only time will tell if her predictions are accurate.
“Perhaps nothing would have happened were it not the pit of summer, with a month and a half of humid boredom behind them and a month and a half ahead….[T]his year—the summer of 1969—it seems something is happening to everyone but them.” Varya is 13, Daniel, 11, Klara, 9, and Simon, 7, the day they visit the woman on Hester Street who is said to know the future. She sees each of the siblings alone, telling each the exact date of his or her death; at first, the reader hears only Varya’s, which is far in the future. The next four sections focus on each of the siblings in turn, continuing through 2010. Simon runs off to San Francisco and becomes a dancer at a gay club called Purp; when one of his many sex partners is described as an Australian flight attendant, we, too, can predict his future. Klara, who tags along with Simon to the West Coast, studies magic and eventually takes her act to Las Vegas; she marries her stage partner and has a child. Daniel becomes a doctor in the military; Varya, a scientist doing longevity experiments with primates. Speaking of longevity experiments with primates, the book’s hypothesis about the fortuneteller’s death dates is inexplicably credulous, though suggestions of a self-fulfilling prophecy muddy the waters a bit. In any case, the siblings are an unhappy bunch, saddled not only with this unwelcome knowledge of the future but with alcoholism, depression, OCD, possible bipolar disease, and many regrets; misunderstandings and grudges divide them from each other. Various minor characters—a cop; spouses, lovers, and offspring; the fortuneteller herself—weave through the plot in a contrived way.