Here, from our friend Liz Morgan, are this months great reads! 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard So my biblio-brain has been waiting for a COVID-based thriller being that we’ve lived the actual horror story of it all for over a year-and y’all - I think this one is it. In 56 Days, Clara meets an impossibly perfect guy in a supermarket line (or queue in this case) in Dublin inthe early days of the pandemic. (Side note, watch enough Dateline and you KNOW most supermarket meet cute guys are always NOT perfect). They date for a few weeks and when lockdown starts, they make an oxytocin fueled impulse decision to move in together for the pandemic. Or WAS it impulsive? As the story unfolds we find neither is who they said they were, secrets come tumbling out and it all ends up with a dead body in the shower. Lots of tense moments, all made more surreal in that the all too relatable pandemic times are the backdrop. I loved it! 5 out of 5 vaccinations from me PUB DATE August 17 Ghosts by Dolly Aldertson Ghosts is the debut novel by author Dolly Alderston, a London-based pop culture writer.
It’s impossible to talk about this book without making inevitable comparison’s to my beloved Bridget Jones’ Diary – it’s a story a young woman, who like Bridget is a young singleton in London who finds herself surrounded by friends pairing up, marrying and having babies. Like Bridget it’s a very witty story that I think a lot of people will find super relatable. The Bridget in this case is Nina Dean, a cookbook author who is unbothered by being single, but her always single and hopelessly romantic BFF Lola convinces her to give dating apps a try, and she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. But with a title like “Ghosts” you can guess what happens, she gets ghosted along the way but finds herself haunted by relationships past, including the one with her aging parents. I loved this book. It’s the kind of book that stays with you, and the kind of character like Nina you feel like, is actually a friend in real life. Five out of five floating dots in messenger from me!
We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz This is Reese’s Book Club for August, and I gotta say our girl Reese rarely steers me wrong. We Were Never Here is by a writer called Andrea Bartz, who wrote a book I read last year and loved called The Herd. Andrea has a great knack for capturing the nuances of female friendship, in this case two college besties who meet up once a year for an annual travel adventure to far flung places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile, and something horrible that happens on one trip…and then a year later, unbelievably the same terrible consequence in Chile. It’s a very tense, psychological thriller – one that I just can picture Reese developing in her head for an HBO series. There are sometimes where things so obvious to the reader that you find yourself almost yelling at your Kindle “NO DON’T DO IT!” horror movie style, and other times you find yourself whacked in the head by a twist. I devoured this book in two nail-biting nights. Five out five Pisco Sours for me, and when you read it… you’ll know why.
One to Watch: Cloud Cuckoo Land from Anthoney Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See. Because so many readers fell in love with All the Light We Cannot See, there’s a lot of anticipation for the author’s follow up book and third novel – and it is sprawling and dense but just this gorgeous writing and storytelling readers loved about All the Light. The story toggles back and forth between three different timelines - in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now and is a soaring story about children on the verge of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book.