Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

This was such a delightful read - I thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning really reels you in with humor and pathos and a crazy cast of characters.  Here is what Kirkus says:

In her debut novel, the author of the charming short story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow (2015) matures into new (equally beguiling) terrain, exploring marriage, fidelity, friendship, and parenting.
It’s easy to see why Graham, one-half of the New York City couple at the center of Heiny’s first novel, is enthralled by his wife of 12 years, Audra. While Graham, a medical-venture specialist at a venture capitalist firm, is steady, stable, and fond of “routine and order,” Audra, a freelance graphic designer 15 years his junior, is an unrestrained force of good nature. Audra’s vivacity offers a stark contrast to Graham’s emotionally cool first wife, Elspeth, with whom the couple reconnects. Audra draws all manner of friends and random strangers into her orbit with her chatty sociability and almost unwavering cheer. She cannot make it through a trip to the grocery store without running into a million people she knows (Graham says it’s like shopping with “a visiting dignity”) and bonding big-time with the checkout guy, is constantly inviting people (a woman she barely knows from her book group whose husband has been unfaithful; their building’s afternoon doorman, for a reason Graham cannot recall) to move into their den or eat at their table. Audra is forever on the phone, helping out with PTA activities at the school attended by their 10-year-old son, Matthew, who has Asperger’s and is some kind of origami prodigy, or chatting with her best friend, Lorelei. Like Graham, the reader may be deeply enchanted with, if also somewhat mystified by, Audra. She’s a wonderful character, as are many of those assembled around her, and the series of minor challenges she and Graham face (potential infidelities, possible pregnancy, challenging play dates, and other parental concerns)—she pluckily; he sheepishly—make for reading as delicious as the meals Graham is forever called into service to cook for whomever Audra happens to have invited by that night. To quibble, the episodic, somewhat attenuated plot lacks a degree of urgency and loses a bit of steam midway through, but it regains its footing by the end. And to spend 300-plus pages with Heiny’s wry voice and colorful cast of characters is to love them, truly.
An amusingly engaging take on long-term marriage with a lovably loopy character at its center.

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

This author gets a lot of press and accolades so I tried this one. Started off good but I really thought it was predictable and not that suspenseful. I am not even sure I finished it! That's how much I cared about "Who Did It?"

🌟 The Sisters Chase by Sarah Healy

Loved this book! Read what Kirkus says

An absorbing story of two sisters on the road.
When their mother dies in a car accident, the Chase sisters, 18-year-old Mary and 4-year-old Hannah (affectionately called Bunny), are on their own. Their connection is intense, “the line where one ended and the other began a malleable, gossamer thing,” but what Mary knows about the identities of the girls’ fathers she does not share. They leave their home and the motel their mother ran on the southeast coast to find lives elsewhere, slowly but surely trailing a kind of fate to the opposite coast. On the road, they have to cobble together funds, shelter, and food. Mary is smart, strong-willed, beautiful, and fiercely protective of Hannah. She knows how to use these powers to manipulate the men she encounters. The first of these is her second cousin’s husband, whom she blackmails for $10,000—a desperate but lifesaving move with major consequences. They rarely stay anywhere for longer than a few days until a significant stop in Rhode Island. Eventually, the choice of this location becomes clear: it’s the hometown of a boy who passed through their motel when Mary was 14, a boy with whom she is still in love. When the past catches up to them and they are forced to leave Rhode Island, it is with extreme devastation that they have to get back on the road toward their final destination: California, where Mary will work the night shift at a famous old hotel and Hannah will begin school. The fate that brought them there ultimately brings them face to face with their fathers. The story unfolds over the course of 13 years and feels throughout like one of providence. Healy (House of Wonder, 2014, etc.) takes every opportunity to surprise her reader as Mary and Hannah grow up and into themselves.
The sisters' relationship—and their resilience—makes this novel powerful when it might otherwise have been prosaic.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Fantastic Book! That's all I can say. READ IT!

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

I started off really engaged with the book and its disturbing theme:  a mother murders her own daughter.  We want to figure out why, what happened, what would cause a mother to do such a horrific act.
So, I kept reading, trying to make sense of it. But I never really did make sense of it. The book got great reviews, but I am sorry that I spent so much time on it. The writing was good, but after a while....I just wanted some answers.  Answers that never came. At least not for me.
I read a review from SFGate which really helped me understand why this book is so beautiful (at least for the reviewer) and I recognize what is special about this book.

“Idaho’s” brilliance is in its ability to not to tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life — but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us. And to do that, Ruskovich reminds us, we need only have “hearts whole enough to know they can break.”

I guess after just having read Eleanor Oliphant, this was a bit too upsetting. I need something uplifting now.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I really enjoyed this book even though it's not a happy story.  The writing is very smart and the author is so good at capturing the character and personality of this quirky young woman. Her take on the "common" things of life is so well articulated; she has had a very "uncommon" life so her perspective on life is very interesting.
Quick Take from Book of the Month Club:  "This is a warm account of one woman’s fight to let go of old hurts and insecurities and make room for self-acceptance and friends."
Kirkus Review:

A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.

In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende

From the Washington Post: 

The title comes from a line by Camus, who knew something about the oscillations of joy and sadness himself: “In the midst of winter,” he wrote, “I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.” That’s an inspiring sentiment, a hopeful promise to those in darkness and a truism for anyone who has emerged from it stronger. But the challenge for a novelist is how to convey that gospel without trivializing life’s horrors or falsifying the possibilities of happiness.

Really captures the heart of this story, which I really enjoyed so much!  This is a book about unlocking grief and it does it so well. Each of the three characters has its own grief and they are vastly different characters, but all richly developed in the book through their stories that are told over a short period of time, within the context of this "caper." The caper being getting rid of a dead body; sounds crazy but it's all pretty believable when you read this fabulous book!