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.......