The Partner Track by Helen Wan

Very engaging and suspenseful novel! I read about it in the New York Times and thought it sounded interesting. The novel takes place at a highly esteemed and venerable law practice in NYC and the main character, Ingrid Yung, is brilliant and beautiful Asian American woman on her way towards partnership.....but there are a few obstacles in her way.  And those obstacles also can be the reason she may get partner instead of her friend Murph, who is "typical." She is a woman and a minority, but she also  has an impeccable work ethic.  From Booklist:

When she’s simultaneously assigned to a huge case and asked to spearhead the firm’s new diversity initiative, however, Ingrid’s ­priorities begin to shift from playing the corporate game to exposing the injustices of the old-boy network, even though it may cost her both her partnership and her relationship with a fellow associate. Debut novelist Wan, an associate general counsel at Time Inc. shows that she has writing chops in addition to legal acumen. In spite of creating a lackluster romance and pat epilogue, Wan succeeds in exploring and fictionalizing the timely topics of sexism and racism in workplace politics in a fluent, thought-provoking, and compelling tale.

I really enjoyed reading this book.  It dealt with a lot of real issues and is told in an easy and engaging manner.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Surprised that I have never read anything by Eggers before. Loved visiting his "Pirate Store" at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, just around the corner from where my son lived.
Anyway, I also was surprised that I had not heard about this book earlier; I just found it on the shelf of the Library, read it's inside cover description and thought, "I have to read this book! So relevant to what I lived and do each day."

Mae Holland is hired to work at the Circle, the world's most powerful Internet company (think Google!). This is the opportunity of a lifetime. The description of the office reminded me of the Google offices in San Francisco where my nephew worked for a while.  At the Circle, users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing are linked up with a universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Mae is enthralled with the office, dorm rooms for those who work late, the parties that last through the night, the famous musicians playing on the lawn. There are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Some of the book seemed predictable, but I never tired of reading it. And the end was a bit of a surprise for me.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

Louisa Clark is an ordinary British girl in an ordinary British family. She has a steady boyfriend, who she is clearly resigned to be with, but not madly in love with. Her life is quiet, rather dull and pedestrian.  She is content working in a cafe and does nothing to upset the quiet monotony of her life. Her family struggles financially, she has a less than wonderful relationship with her sister and she and Patrick (boyfriend) go out to pubs with friends.
She loses her cafe job when the owner decides to close up shop. Lou needs a job!
She is suggested for a job as an assistant to a quadriplegic. The pay is good and it's close to home. She won't have to do any of the "personal grooming," but rather, just keep him company and in good spirits. What a job that turns out to be.
The interesting part of this novel is captured in this passage from a NYTimes review by Liesl Schillinger:

Lou has never fully lived; Will has, but no longer can. In health, he had exhilarated in “crushing people in business deals.” He had scaled rock faces at Yosemite, swum in volcanic springs in Iceland, sampled warm croissants in the Marais and had his pick of glamorous, leggy girlfriends. After the accident, he can’t walk, can’t feed himself, can’t have sex. The only power he believes he retains is the power to end his life; and, as a man of action, he wants to exercise that power.  But in Lou, he discovers an unexpected outlet for his thwarted energies: teaching her how to exert her own autonomy. “You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are ‘not that sort of person,’ ” he scolds her. “You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

A lot of this book is predictable, for sure, but I read it quickly and it was entertaining.


The ending may surprise some readers. I liked the ending.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

What a beautiful novel....simple, thoughtful, and quiet, but powerful. The writing is wonderful and the main character is so interesting, in a simple way.
Rebecca Winter is an artist on the other side of her career. She's 60, divorced, in financial straights and making changes in her life....and not dealing too well with those changes. Her parents are both alive, one with Alzheimer's and in a nursing home, and the other (her father) is frail and living with a housekeeper. Rebecca has to make payments on both of those places, and pay for her own UWS apartment, but she's having a hard time making ends meet. She comes up with a plan to rent out her fancy apartment and move to a cottage upstate.
The first night there she hears an animal in the attic - she doesn't know it's an animal until Jim Bates, the roofer, comes and tells her and sets a trap for it.
Rebecca is the once famous artist who created "Still Life with Bread Crumbs" and other domestic works of photographic art.  She is still somewhat of a legend, but clearly the pinnacle of her career is past. But read on, and see how she reinvents her life and figures herself out in her later years.
I loved the writing and the tone of the book. Anna Quindlen is one of my favorite authors and this is a new departure from her former fictional works.

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarity

I read this book on the recommendation of several friends, and I enjoyed it. Great literature - no, but a good read. Here is the information from the Westchester Library System:

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret - something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive... Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all - shes an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia - or each other - but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husbands secret.
Australian author Moriarty, in her fifth novel (after The Hypnotist's Love Story), puts three women in an impossible situation and doesn't cut them any slack. Cecilia Fitzpatrick lives to be perfect: a perfect marriage, three perfect daughters, and a perfectly organized life. Then she finds a letter from her husband, John-Paul, to be opened only in the event of his death. She opens it anyway, and everything she believed is thrown into doubt. Meanwhile, Tess O'Leary's husband, Will, and her cousin and best friend, Felicity, confess they've fallen in love, so Tess takes her young son, Liam, and goes to Sydney to live with her mother. There she meets up with an old boyfriend, Connor Whitby, while enrolling Liam in St. Angela's Primary School, where Cecilia is the star mother. Rachel Crowley, the school secretary, believes that Connor, St. Angela's PE teacher, is the man who, nearly three decades before, got away with murdering her daughter-a daughter for whom she is still grieving. Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty's novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I was captivated by this book and annoyed at the same time.  The main character, Victoria, will drive you crazy. You want to shake her and talk some sense into this girl! But, she is a child without a mother, who has been in over 30 foster homes during her short 18 year life, so you forgive her and are sympathetic....to a point.
There were parts that were not at all believable, but still, I wanted to read this book and finish it, so that is a testament to its merit.  The reader wants to know what Victoria did to Elizabeth, the one foster "mother" who loved her and wanted to adopt her formally. You want to know what happened between Elizabeth and her sister, Catherine, that keeps cropping up over and over. And  you want to tell her, "Just love Grant! He is a gem!"
So, I read the book in just a few days because the story is compelling and the reader is drawn in.  But is it great literature? Probably not. I did learn a lot about flowers, though!

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

I loved reading the last 150 pages of this book, and I actually loved the first 150, too, but in the middle there were LONG passages that I felt could have been much condensed. There were long passages describing what a courtesan should expect and do for their clients and that chapter was far too long and not really that interesting.
What I did love about the book was the way it came full circle in the end, reuniting the three women: Lulu, Violet and Flora (grandmother, mother and daughter) and showing their similarities. It was a touching and satisfying ending to a too long book.