The Body in Question by Jill Climent

Really enjoyed this book - a page turner for sure.

The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial involving a rich, white teenage girl - a twin - on trial for the horrific murder of her toddler brother, and the sequestered jury deciding her fate.  Two of the jurors sequestered (she, Juror C-2; he, F-17), holed up at the Econo-Lodge off I-75. As the shocking and numbing details of the crime and its surrounding facts are revealed during a string of days and seemingly endless court hours, the nights, playing out in a series of court-financed meals Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath, as jurors, never to discuss the trial. During deliberations the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case and realize that their fellow jurors are wise to their affair. After the trial's end, as Hannah returns home to her much older, now, suddenly, frail husband (they married when she was 24; he, 58) an exploding media fury involving the case catches them all up in a frenzy of public outrage at a jury that seems to have convicted the wrong twin, and a judge who has received an anonymous handwritten letter about a series of sexual encounters ("I feel it is my duty as a juror and a citizen to report that two of my fellow jurors had sexual contact on more than seven occasions during our nights at the motel..."), calling into question their respective verdicts, and announcing she is releasing the jurors' names to the media. Hannah's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as the novel moves to its affecting, powerful and surprising conclusion.

The World that We Knew by Alice Hoffman

I read this book in less than a week.....I had to because it was a 7-day book, but I also enjoyed it and wanted to dive in and be absorbed by a Hoffman book. Have not read one in a while. This did not disappoint!
From GoodReads:
In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but it’s his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked.

Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter she’s destined to be.

What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending.In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but it’s his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked.

Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter she’s destined to be.

What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending.In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but it’s his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked.

Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter she’s destined to be.

What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending.

In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but it’s his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea. Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked.

Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter she’s destined to be.

What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love? In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending.

🌟 The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Just read this for my 2nd book club and really enjoyed it.  It's a bit different for Patchett, I think and I heard her interviewed on the radio and heard her discuss how she hasn't done "evil or bad characters."  So that was a goal for this book.
Here's the opener for the NPR review:

Patchett's eighth novel is a paradise lost tale dusted with a sprinkling of Cinderella, The Little Princess and Hansel and Gretel. Two siblings, Maeve and Danny Conroy, bond tightly after their mother leaves home when they're 10 and 3. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. The house, built by a Dutch couple who made their fortune in cigarettes, is grand, with an ornate dining room ceiling, six bedrooms on the second floor, and a ballroom on the third floor. His wife, Elna, hates it, aesthetically and ethically. After she flees, ostensibly to India to devote herself to the poor, her family suffers, as if "they had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale," Patchett writes.

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

This is a very different kind of book for me....so I am glad that my book club chose it.  I really enjoyed it.  This is a family saga about a Mexican-American family - BIG family, and their relationaships, struggles, successes and more. Here, from Westchester Library System, is a great summary:

"In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home"--

The Need by Helen Phillips

"Motherhood Is Scary and Crazy and Darkly Comic. So Is This Novel About It." This is the headline title of the NY Times book review about this book and it nails it - right on.

It's a really interesting book - half sci-fi, half horror, but in the end, it's apart a woman's quest to find herself. She has fantasies and nightmares and can't figure out what's real and what's imagined. But her life seems to be unraveling.

The issues are issues that I imagine many working moms deal with, but they deal better than Molly. But who knows? How many are terrorized by these conflicting feelings?

It's powerful and strange and not like many books I have read. I really recommend it. But it's not "light."

The Times review points out that readers who are NOT moms, or parents, may not get it and may have no sympathy for Molly. I get that.....but they should try to read it and understand it

The Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz

This is one of my favorite books of the year so far, and I have read a lot of books!  I had heard about it a while ago but never reserved it. So glad I went back to my want to read list and found it. Right up my alley, of course, dealing with Russian history.
It is a fictionalized account of Svetlana Alliluyeva's life as a Soviet defector, mother, daughter, wife and troubled person. And I can certainly understand why after reading this book. It makes me want to read more about her.
It's a great story, most of it true (the author's father is the person who met her in Zurich for her defection), but the author adds some romance to the story. Probably thought that people wouldn't be so interested without it.
The Washinton Post's reviewer says, "“The Red Daughter” is a meditative novel about regret, trauma and the unenviable fate of history’s castoffs." So true.
This is a great review. so if you are interested in this book, read this and you will be compelled to read it!

Conversations with Friends (Take Two) by Sally Rooney

I re-read this book as it's the choice for my book club in October. I welcomed the chance to read it again because I recall not loving it the first time, but really liking her next book, Normal People.

So I read it again and liked it more but I still can't say it is at the top of my list.  But Normal People still is.

I read it more carefully, more observant of the characters (mainly Frances) and trying to like her more.  And understand her more and I can say that I do with the second reading.