A Million Little Things

Author: Susan Mallery

Genre: Chick Lit

Publisher: MIRA, 2017

Pages: 368

Rating: Recommend 

Synopsis: Zoe Saldivar is more than just single—she's ALONE. She recently broke up with her longtime boyfriend, she works from home and her best friend Jen is so obsessed with her baby that she has practically abandoned their friendship. The day Zoe accidentally traps herself in her attic with her hungry-looking cat, she realizes that it's up to her to stop living in isolation.

Her seemingly empty life takes a sudden turn for the complicated—her first new friend is Jen's widowed mom, Pam. The only guy to give her butterflies in a very long time is Jen's brother. And meanwhile, Pam is being very deliberately seduced by Zoe's own smooth-as-tequila father. Pam's flustered, Jen's annoyed and Zoe is beginning to think "alone" doesn't sound so bad, after all.

Review: My 17th book of 2017.
This may be my favorite book in this series. I waited a year for this novel, and loved it.

I could relate to the issues the characters are facing. These are characters I've come to know over the course of this series, and while they stay true to themselves throughout the series, they do grow.

I didn't love that Zoe and Steven jump so quickly into a sexual relationship, but welcome to 2017 fiction, I guess. Steven is also a stereotypical man/hero in a chick lit novel, and I wanted him to be flawed in some way, but of course he isn't. I think every woman wants a Steven :-)

I love this series, and recommend reading all the books in order, but there's no reason you couldn't just read one or two, in any order.

Other Susan Mallery Novels:
The Friendship List
The Sister Effect

The Christmas Wedding Ring

Wishing Tree Series
The Christmas Wedding Guest
Home Sweet Christmas

Mischief Bay Novels
The Girls of Mischief Bay
The Friends We Keep
A Million Little Things

Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J.D. Vance

Genre: Memoir

Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher, 2016

Pages: 272

Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Review: Reminiscent of Jeannette Walls' memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy was a far easier and more interesting read than I had anticipated. Reviews have promoted this as a way to understand Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency, but that was not Vance's intended, or stated, purpose. This is a memoir about one man's family's migration from Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio.

He's not that much younger than me, but our childhoods could not have been more different. I think that's what I enjoyed most about this. The contrast of lives/backgrounds in roughly the same time frame.

The Wicked City

Author: Beatriz Williams

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2017

Pages: 384

Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams recreates the New York City of A Certain Age in this deliciously spicy adventure that mixes past and present and centers on a Jazz Age love triangle involving a rugged Prohibition agent, a saucy redheaded flapper, and a debonair Princetonian from a wealthy family.

When she discovers her husband cheating, Ella Hawthorne impulsively moves out of their SoHo loft and into a small apartment in an old Greenwich Village building. Her surprisingly attractive new neighbor, Hector, warns her to stay out of the basement at night. Tenants have reported strange noises after midnight—laughter, clinking glasses, jazz piano—even though the space has been empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the place hid a speakeasy.

In 1924, Geneva "Gin" Kelly, a smart-mouthed flapper from the hills of western Maryland, is a regular at this Village hideaway known as the Christopher Club. Caught up in a raid, Gin becomes entangled with Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson, who persuades her to help him catch her stepfather Duke Kelly, one of Appalachia’s most notorious bootleggers.

Headstrong and independent, Gin is no weak-kneed fool. So how can she be falling in love with the taciturn, straight-arrow Revenue agent when she’s got Princeton boy Billy Marshall, the dashing son of society doyenne Theresa Marshall, begging to make an honest woman of her? While anything goes in the Roaring Twenties, Gin’s adventures will shake proper Manhattan society to its foundations, exposing secrets that shock even this free-spirited redhead—secrets that will echo from Park Avenue to the hollers of her Southern hometown.

As Ella discovers more about the basement speakeasy, she becomes inspired by the spirit of her exuberant predecessor, and decides to live with abandon in the wicked city too. . . .

Review: First, the good stuff. I loved this book. Prohibition and the Roaring 20s are such a fun period in history to read about, and I imagine write. Geneva was a great character and I flew through her chapters. I could have done without Ella's story line. It was well-written, but it pulled me away from Geneva and the 20s, which was jarring.

I'd like to try another Beatriz Williams' novel.

Update: Other books by Beatriz Williams that I have read and reviewed:
The Secret Life of Violet Grant

The Orphan's Tale

Author: Pam Jenoff

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: MIRA, 2017

Pages: 368

Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier during the occupation of her native Holland. Heartbroken over the loss of the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, she lives above a small German rail station, which she cleans in order to earn her keep.

When Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants, unknown children ripped from their parents and headed for a concentration camp, she is reminded of the baby that was taken from her. In a moment that will change the course of her life, she steals one of the babies and flees into the snowy night, where she is rescued by a German circus.

The circus owner offers to teach Noa the flying trapeze act so she can blend in undetected, spurning the resentment of the lead aerialist, Astrid. At first rivals, Noa and Astrid soon forge a powerful bond. But as the facade that protects them proves increasingly tenuous, Noa and Astrid must decide whether their unlikely friendship is enough to save one another—or if the secrets that burn between them will destroy everything.

Review: MUST READ. Simply amazing, and no doubt this will be one of the top books of 2017 on everyone's lists.

The first two chapters are heart wrenching and I wondered how I was going to survive this novel emotionally. It's a beautiful story that will stay with me, probably forever.