However, you have read lots of books in your life so you know what happens next–LIES DECEPTION TRICKERY SECRETS

and SHOPPING

We Could Be Beautiful = yes.

In grown up reading:
Behave by Andromeda Romano-Lax about the wife of notorious behaviorist John Watson. As a perinatal professional working directly with parents, I am fascinated (and dismayed) by the continued influence of Watson’s theories on parents. News flash–you can’t spoil a baby. Kiss them as much as you want! So I was disappointed that there wasn’t more of a focus on Rosalie Raynor Watson the mother. It was more about their marriage and it just didn’t stay engaged the whole time.

The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas certainly delivered psychological complexity. Tessa and her best friend Callie put a serial killer behind bars back when they were kids, and now she’s back for the first time in years to deal with some family matters, and things get really twisted. She and Callie didn’t lie, but they may not have told the truth, and people are dying again. The plot was a little overstuffed but the characters were satisfyingly rich.

Snore at Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta. As much as I loved all the film geeky stuff, the whole thing really added up to next-to-nothing for me. It’s a lot of smarts and not a lot of storytelling.

If you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God (my book club’s latest pick) then you basically have to read it. The language is so beautiful it hurts and I just love Janie so much. Since nobody is actually reading this blog I won’t even attempt to write about what makes this book so great. It’s late and I’m tired and I’m out of words for this blog, yet I can’t seem to let it go. I’ve been blogging here for over 10 years, every single book I’ve ever read. It feels weird to think about stopping, just like that. But I think the day is coming when I do just that.

The Lie demonstrated considerable growth from Taylor’s previous book, Before I Wake, and I found it noticeably better than many entries in the Gone Girl genre. Glad I read this one.

That nitpick aside, I loved the setting of the story and the way it informed the plot. A group of houses all back up on what is essentially a private park, closed off to the rest of London and acting like a communal backyard. The kids are largely unsupervised and you can imagine where that has led in the past and is leading in the present.

The newest arrivals are Clare and her daughters Pip and Grace, who have a past they don’t want to talk about. The story opens with Pip discovering Grace’s lifeless body in the garden, and in the course of the subsequent investigation, ghosts from the past are disturbed and present relationships cast in a new light. It’s mostly well done with only a few slips to keep it from perfection.

Speaking of big sister, her book club in our homeschool coop spend the last several months reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by EL Konisburg. I read it when I was a kid but think I only read it once and when we started it up I realized I didn’t remember anything about it except that the kids slept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I loved the journey taken by Claudia, who runs away because she wants to have an experience that makes her different. We had a great time in class, with lots of fun activities and discussions. The kids loved the book, we grown-ups loved the book, and it’s easy to understand why it remains a classic.

I teach the book club for the 4th-8th graders and we read Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. What a book! Most of the kids said it was their favorite of the year. I loved our discussions–we got to go so deep into important issues like justice and mercy, the toxic effect that slavery had on the American dream, and the ways in which goodness can never be fully extinguished. I like to open every class with a poem, and here is my list of poems for Chains:

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus and “Song For a Dark Girl” by Langston Hughes
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers (To WEB Dubois),” “Harlem,” and “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“wonâ€t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton
“Morning” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
“Coal” by Audre Lorde and “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phillis Wheatley
“my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” by Gwendolyn Brooks
“Who Will Cry for the Little Boy” by Antwone Fisher and “Love Is” by Nikki Giovanni

I also discovered the most beautiful picture book about Harriet Tubman. It made all of us grownups cry when I read it to the kids in class, and they were all riveted while listening, even though most of them are too big to be read to. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom is an absolute treasure.

Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke was almost unbearably emo. Poppy is beyond popular, Midnight the boy who thinks he loves her, and Wink an outcast girl who pulls at Midnight’s heart and rips him away from Poppy, setting into course a chain of action with devastating results. Told from all three characters points-of-view in alternating chapters, the book plays with the notion of reliability. I got tired of all their whining and ultimately didn’t care about the outcome for any of them.

Girls and Sex (with its bright pink cover) is meant to terrify, just like every single other book Peggy Orenstein has written. I’m not knocking on her ability to pen incisive cultural commentary that raises important questions about women’s issues, and I care deeply about those same issues, but sometimes I feel like Orenstein is writing for the sake of writing. I don’t know how much I actually trust her interpretation of things, because her instinct for the dramatic and the controversial makes me wonder if things are truly as bad as they seem in her books.

I grabbed Opening Belle at the library based on the cover and title, and the description sounded too good to pass up. Set (like Everybody Rise) on the eve of the financial crisis, the story follows Belle, a mom of three with a high pressure Wall Street job (echoes of I Don’t Know How She Does It). I found the writing to be smart, particularly in terms of presenting the historical context, and the plotting avoided a lot of typical plot situations. For instance, when it came out that Belle would be partnered with her ex-fiancé on a big account, I was ready for the affair to happen. But it played out differently than I’d ever seen, and their relationship was complex and fascinating and actually made me think a lot about intimacy and marriage.

You know you loved You, so you will also love Hidden Bodies, maybe even more than You. In Hidden Bodies, author Caroline Kepnes picks up with stalker Joe Goldberg, where he’s fallen hard in love yet again, this time with Amy, who’s obsessive love for Portnoy’s Complaint kicks off a chain of events that brings Joe out of New York and to Los Angeles, where he takes up with a grocery store heiress and makes a mistake with his new neighbor called Don’t F* Delilah. The book is dark, funny, incisive, and has a romanticism that surprised me.

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder was the pick for my church book club, and I can’t wait for the discussion on Monday night. This was the story that Elizabeth Gilbert referred to in her otherwise unmemorable book on creativity. Dr. Marina Singh is a pharmaceutical researcher whose colleague Anders has disappeared in the Amazon, so her boss (and lover) sends her to find him. The malaria pills bring up childhood memories and make her a little crazy, as does seeing her former mentor, the monomaniacal Dr. Anneck Swenson, the researcher who won’t leave the jungle and who won’t reveal the discoveries she’s made.

In kids’ book news, I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game with our homeschool coop’s 4th-8th graders and it was a huge hit. Maybe one of the favorite books of the year. We did some great enrichment activities like making brochures to “Come to Westingtown!” and speculating whodunit. My favorite memory will be that one of the 4th graders kept calling Sandy McSouthers “Bernie Sanders.” On my own I reread The Strange Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) to see if it would be a good fit for next year, when I will just have 4th/5th graders, and while I found it just as fun and wacky as I remembered, it had too much wordplay for that age group. Meanwhile, with my younger daughter I read aloud D’Aulaire’s book of Norse Myths. She’s a little goth so we had a great time with these weird and wacky tales.

Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina hooked me right away because it’s set in Queens! Not exactly my neighborhood, but close enough to be fun. The title evokes disco because the story takes place in 1977, time of the blackout and Son of Sam (same setting as one of Spike Lee’s better movies). Nora is a Cuban-American girl about to turn 18 along with her best friend, but their plans to party all night are shadowed by the menacing serial killer stalking the streets of NYC, Queens in particular. Nora is also hiding the secret that her younger brother is physically abusive to their mother, and possibly involved in drugs and crime. Her best friend Kathleen comes from a good home and wouldn’t understand, and Nora lives in fear that her brother’s issues will jeopardize everything Nora wants out of life. The story is intimate, intense, and powerful, and Nora’s struggle leaps off the page with an emotional strength that matches the richness of the period detail.

(For some reason, searching for the Spike Lee movie on Amazon led me to an amazing discovery–apparently BBC did a recent adaptation of And Then There Were None that’s edgy and dark and fabulous and went right on my wishlist.)

I grabbed Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford on impulse at the library, thinking it would be fluffy chick lit about a social climber in NYC in 2006 on the verge of the financial crisis. I was not expecting such a nail-biter. Following the perils of ethically-challenged, socially-aspiring Evelyn Beegan, the story went to some dark places as Evelyn tries to infiltrate the highest levels of the socialite world, not realizing that she’s in no financial position to play any of those reindeer games. I know a little bit about being young in NYC and having too much available credit, and while I’m older than Evelyn (my 20s spanned the go-go 90s) and not quite as foolish, her emotional journey resonated with me on a deep level. I got why she did what she did, and felt grateful that my financial stupidity never went as far as Evelyn’s. Maybe that’s because my rich friends were never quite as rich as Evelyn’s. Thank heavens for that!

I can’t really think of a time when I’ve been this satisfied by the conclusion of a trilogy/series. Robin Hobb’s books have transported me, certainly, but Fitz’s story isn’t over yet. I only hope I feel the same way I felt when I finished Morning Star. I literally hugged the book, I was so happy with the deeply satisfying resolution to the very complicated story told by Pierce Brown.

Set in the future, where the Moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter have been terraformed and colonized. Genetic engineering and technology have created a stratified society where Golds (godlike in appearance and abilities) rule over the lesser colors, the lowest of which are the Reds. Darrow is a Red and a Helldiver of Lykos. He spends his life underground mining helium, which he is told will lead to the eventual terraforming of his planet. Thanks to his hard work, one day the surface will be habitable. When Darrow’s wife Eo stages a rebellion and is executed, Darrow follows her to the grave. He is resurrected by his uncle, who shows him the lie–the surface is already habitable. The Reds are slaves. Through surgery, Darrow is reshaped into a Gold and the Sons of Ares train him to become the leader of the revolution that will overthrow society.

In Book 1, Darrow goes through the Institute in a classic training/coming-of-age story. Book 2 takes him out into the “real world,” and Book 3 picks up after everything Darrow has ever believed in is taken away from him. Pretty classic progression–and there’s nothing wrong with that when it’s done as well as it’s done here. The genre trappings are pitch perfect, but the book soars because the characters are so Shakespearean in their conception, and the action sequences as big as anything that’s ever been imagined even in the biggest action movie. I never lost the thread during any of the action scenes because Brown uses the character conflicts to take us through. That’s what makes it so wonderful. It’s like Macbeth meets Battlestar Galactica meets Game of Thrones and it’s all at the highest level of storytelling imaginable. Did I mention all the allusions to classical Greek and Roman mythology–and the Norse, too? Plus I cried at the end.

What truly blew me away was seeing that the seeds for the final scenes of the trilogy were planted in the first chapters of the first book. I always say that storytelling is mathematic, and in the Red Rising trilogy Pierce Brown does the most advanced calculus I’ve ever seen–and in the end it all comes out correct. Awesome.

Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America was a departure for me as I hardly ever read short stories. This one I did in fact read for a book club, the first one I’ve joined in ages. As much as I love to read, I don’t generally do well in book clubs because I feel like it’s really hard to get to a place where you’re discussing the book on its own terms. It always seems like you waste a lot of time discussing who liked the book, who didn’t like the book, and then why everybody’s wrong, and unless everyone LOVED the book you never get around to engaging with it as a text.

That hasn’t been the case with this book club, because the woman who facilitates it puts a lot of effort into coming up with discussion questions that take us to a deeper place. So while none of us adored Birds of America, we still had a great discussion about the craft of short story writing and the commonalities among the stories. We all found them both sad and funny at the same time, with Moore excelling in the unexpectedly witty turn of phrase that produces complex characterizations with fresh economy. I am glad we chose it. My favorite story was about a dancer who goes to stay with a professor friend living in an old frat house in Pennsylvania. I loved the silliness of it, and felt it masked an appealing hopefulness about the importance of art for art’s sake.

I had such high hopes for Viral by Helen FitzGerald. The story of a college student who gets filmed performing a sex act in a bar, and has her life ruined when it goes viral, I was hoping for the fiction version of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, but it was just so frustrating because the story just wasn’t big enough or interesting enough, and the ending was really unsatisfying.

Viral left me in the mood for something ripped from the headlines, so I figured The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian would do the trick. When a bachelor party in a suburban Westchester home ends with two bodyguards dead and two strippers/prostitutes on the run from the law, the host/best man finds his marriage in trouble because the girls turn out to have been sex slaves. Unfortunately, Richard was so dull and the author took such pains to make sure we knew he was a Good Guy (even one of the prostitutes likes him!) that it lost dramatic power for me.

So the one I really liked was Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson, about a preteen ballerina in the 1970s and her mess of a life in the present day. I loved the insider’s look at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and the complex psychology of the main character. There was suspense, drama, emotion, and struggle, everything I want in a book.