The Windsor Affair by Melanie Benjamin

The Windsor Affair by Melanie Benjamin

384 pages

Published June 2026 by Random House Publishing Group

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary: 

Feuding Windsor brothers and their wives—some things, it seems, never change. The Windsor Affair recreates the cataclysmic events that nearly toppled the monarchy and incited the power struggle between Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Wallis Simpson. Told from the perspective of both women, the novel propels readers into the fabulous world of the debonair Prince of Wales, café society of the 1930s, and the glittering private lives of the Windsors. The first novel to be dedicated to this infamous rivalry, The Windsor Affair brings us all the gossip and intrigue between the two very different—yet perhaps more similar than they would admit—wives of royals.

As Queen, Elizabeth would become the symbol of British pluck and courage during World War II and remain a British institution the rest of her long life. Wallis would be forever forced to enact the World’s Greatest Love Story even after it sours, as she goes from being admired to vilified and, ultimately, pitied. Against the backdrop of the Abdication Crisis, World War II, coronations, funerals, births, and deaths, these two women maintain a biting, sharp-tongued feud—until age and the long arm of history bring about a kind of understanding. For the last communication between these bitter rivals was a simple, surprising message: “In friendship, Elizabeth.”

My Thoughts: 

This is the eighth book by Benjamin that I’ve read and it gave me everything I’ve come to expect from her. Benjamin's books are always centered around real women who have played a role in history, two topics I love. Frequently they are women whose place in history has been overlooked; sometimes the women are very well known, as in this case. 

Over time, I've read a fair amount about Edward VIII (later known as the Duke of Windsor) and Wallis Simpson and I long ago gave up the idea that theirs was a great love story that stood the test of time. What I didn't know about was the feud between Simpson and Queen Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth was much beloved in England as the Duchess of York, after marrying Albert "Bertie", the Duke of York and second in line to the throne. Her hope was to remain in those roles for the remainder of their lives. It allowed them to spend a lot of time together and with their daughters and allowed Bertie to remain out of the spotlight, where his stammer would be less noticeable. 

The first in line to the throne, Edward, the Duke of Wales was a known womanizer, particularly when it came to married women. Wallis Simpson was American, once divorced, and, at that time, married woman who loved a good party, wore stylish clothing, and had a biting humor who set her sights on Edward. 

In January of 1936, King George V died and Edward became king. The family felt certain that Edward would do the right thing and walk away from Wallis, as it was inconceivable that he could remain king if he married her. Edward insisted that he could, and would, in fact do just that. In the end, he was not, as we know, allowed to marry her as king, abdicating the throne to Bertie. 

And here's what I didn't know about all of that: 

• Stylish Wallis looked down her nose at Elizabeth, who continued to wear clothing designed by the woman who had designed her mother's clothing, and made no secret of it. Elizabeth looked dowdy and was constrained by doing things the right (the royal) way. 
• Elizabeth had once been the apple of the public's eye; but the public, surprisingly, got caught up in the great love story and adored Wallis. 
• Elizabeth was very unhappy with Edward's abdication, putting Bertie, as it did, into a highly stressful and very public role that vastly changed both their private and public lives. 
• Wallis and Elizabeth publicly avoided each other as much as possible and their "feud" was very much public knowledge. 

And here's what I'm not sure if fact or fiction - was Elizabeth instrumental in making sure that Wallis and Edward were not allowed to marry if he remained king? Was she instrumental in making Bertie (King George VI) forbid the royal family from having any contact with Edward and Wallis? In Benjamin's world she did. Given what I know about the amount of research puts into each book, I can't help but think that there's some truth to those things in this book. Regardless, it makes for a wonderful tale of two strong women, neither of whom got what they ended up wanting out of life. 

Kin by Tayari Jones

Kin by Tayari Jones

368 pages 

Published /2026 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary: 

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

My Thoughts: 

The Atlantic reviewer says “…Jones gives the novel the…sense of inevitable tragedy that animates Edith Wharton’s books.” As a huge fan of Wharton’s work, that would drawn me to this book. But I already knew that about Jones, having read her 2018 novel, An American Marriage. That’s the mark of a good writer – I know I’m going to have my heart broken in the end, but I want to read the book anyway. 

Vernice and Annie are more than best friends, they are sisters, inseparable no matter what the physical distance between them. Both were raised by women who were forced to mother the girls and who were afraid to bond too closely with the them. Because of the way they each became motherless, and the they were raised afterward, they are two very different people who seek healing in very different ways. 

Annie escapes town, headed north to find the mother who abandoned her. Annie doesn’t see that the people she travels with and meets along the way as a family and can’t accept the love she finds, so consumed is she in trying to finding her mother. It’s an obsession that comes with a high cost. 

Vernice escapes through education and makes her way to college in Atlanta There she meets her first love and people who will open her eyes to the Civil Rights movement. When a well-to-do woman takes Vernice under her wing, though,Vernice is convinced that the way to succeed is by marrying, settling down, and doing the "right thing." The woman becomes the mother Vernice has been seeking and soon becomes her mother-in-law as well. 

When Annie finds herself in trouble,  it's Vernice she turns to, despite  and Vernice finds that taking care of Annie is more important to her than following the rules set by society. 

Jones is one of those rare authors that makes you feel like you're in the room with these women. You can feel the emotions of the characters and see them clearly; you can picture the rooms and the roads; you can feel the tension, the fear, the nuances of the characters. Here is a story of grief, sadness, obsession, family and love that, despite the sadness the overwhelmed me throughout the book, made it impossible to put this book down. 

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

The Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

512 pages

Published June 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher’s Summary: 

Same As It Ever Was showcases the consummate style, signature wit, and profound emotional intelligence that made The Most Fun We Ever Had one of the most beloved novels of the past decade. Featuring a memorably messy family and the multifaceted marriage at its heart, Lombardo’s debut was dubbed “the literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler” (The Guardian) and hailed as “ambitious and brilliantly written” (Washington Post). In this remarkable follow-up—another elegant and tumultuous story in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, and Celeste Ng—Lombardo introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, this time by way of her singularly complicated protagonist.

Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things.

She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.

Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. 

My Thoughts: 

I’m just going to honest up front about this one. Same As It Ever Was was a tough read for me, both in the content and in actual act of reading it. At over 500 pages, it was going to take a while for me to get through, even if it had really gripped me. It did not. I felt like I was slogging my way through mud. 

There wasn’t a single character in this book that I didn’t find annoying in some way by the time I was finished with it. I often found myself skimming, feeling like things were just being rehashed, and felt like the book could easily have been 100 pages shorter and still conveyed the messages that Lombardo intended. Had it all ended in a way that I found satisfactory, it would have redeemed itself to some extent. It did not. While I appreciate a book that doesn’t put a bow on it and everyone lives happily ever after, I wasn’t entirely sure that any of these characters was going to be truly happy ever. 

But Ron Charles, of The Washington Post, said of this book: 

“Lombardo’s witty, sympathetic take on motherhood exudes the sharp scent of fermented apple juice and a full diaper… Lombardo has such a fine eye for the weft and warp of a family’s fabric. She understands the chemistry of that special epoxy of irritation and affection that keeps a marriage glued together. One finishes Same As It Ever Was with the satisfaction of knowing this complicated woman well — and the poignant disappointment of having to say goodbye.”

Was this merely a case of the wrong book at the wrong time for me? Possibly. But I don’t think so. I think, for me, this was simply the wrong book. 

Where The Girls Were by Kate Schatz

Where The Girls Were by Kate Schatz

368 pages

Published March 2026 by The Dial Press

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips: She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.

Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Without any other options, Baker is sent to a home for unwed mothers, and finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she grapples with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”

Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society's expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.

My Thoughts: 

This one is timely, as more and more we appear headed back to the time where choice was taken away from women and women and girls were forced to have babies. We've all heard the stories about women and girls who died from botched abortions performed by unqualified people in unsanitary conditions. But what of the girls who chose, or were forced, to carry their babies to term? What were the places like where these girls disappeared to for months? 

Baker was a "good" girl. She knew what she wanted for her future. She knew what her parents expected of her; and, even though she didn't plan exactly the future they wanted, she knew she would make good. But even good girls want to have fun sometimes and even good girls make mistakes. Because she'd always been so focused on her education and reaching her goals, Baker doesn't have the kinds of friends most high school aged girls do. So when the worst happens, she's left without any support. Even her cousin, May, who introduced her to Wiley, can't help. 

When her mother finds out, she takes charge and Baker finds herself in a home for unwed mothers. Even there the girls are made to feel "less than," the leadership more concerned about making the home look good than in helping the girls. At first Baker is utterly detached from the baby growing inside of her, calling it "The Bun." She has is woefully naive about pregnancy and childbirth. But the home leads Baker to the kinds of friends she's never had and a determination to do help them in some way. 

While the book can be a little overly dramatic, and there's a storyline about a former resident that I felt was unnecessary, I enjoyed reading about how Baker navigated her reality and the stories of the other girls in the home. I appreciated what Schatz left out of the book, as much as I did what she included. And I really liked the way the book ended; we don't get all of the answers, but those answers aren't really important to the book. 

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen

256 pages

Published February 2026 by Random House 

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

No one knows you like your book club.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.

But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.

My Thoughts: 

I'm pretty sure I say this every time I read one of Quinlen's books, but it's true that she's one of my go-to authors. I haven't always loved one of her books; but they always given me plenty to think about and depth and there is always so much truth to them. This one falls into the category of not being one of Quindlen's books I loved, but also a book that I would recommend because there is so much to think about (and talk about, making it a good book club choice). 

While there is a lot going on in this one (infertility, mental health, friendship, death grief, dementia, family dynamics, and family secrets), there also isn't much of a plot, It's absolutely centered on its characters.  Some things feel a bit forced and some characters are a bit stereotyped (could Mark be any more perfect?). But most of those characters? I really liked them, even the ones that had sharper edges and the relationships between them. There's a gentleness to this story that I really enjoyed and an easy flow that pulled me along. 

Despite what I perceived as its flaws, this is a book I can easily recommend for those who enjoy character-driven novels and novels about relationships and what makes a family. 

The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

352 pages 

Published April 2025 by Sourcebooks

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond recognition. Two days later, he dies in the hospital. His name is John Gilbert Hartman and he's just turned 15 years old. The police quickly arrest four suspects, all under the age of 21 and of Alaska Native and American Indian descent. Police lineup witnesses, trials follow, and all four men receive lengthy prison terms. Case closed. 

But journalist Brian Patrick O'Donoghue can't put the story out of his mind. When the opportunity arises to teach a class on investigative reporting, he finally digs into what happened to the "Fairbanks Four." A relentless search for the truth ensues as O'Donoghue and his students uncover the lies, deceit, and prejudice that put four innocent young men in jail.

The Fairbanks Four is the gripping story of a brutal crime and its sprawling aftermath in the frigid Alaska landscape. It's a story of collective action as one journalist, his students, and the Fairbanks indigenous community challenge the verdicts. It's the story of a broken justice system, and the effort required to keep hope alive. This is the story of the Fairbanks Four.

My Thoughts: 

Ever since Mini-me and Ms. S moved to Alaska, I've been drawn toward learning more about that state and its people, which is why this book initially caught my eye. But the subtitle is what really pulled me in. The more I read in general, the more aware I am of how often our justice system fails us as a society - corruption, racism, sloppy work, reliance on people who have a lot to gain by saying what the system wants them to say, society's expectation that crimes will be resolved quickly (fueled by watching it happen that way on t.v.). 

I made the mistake of reading this on my phone. I should know better - I don't think any book I've ever read entirely on my phone has ever gotten the fair shake it deserves and I feel certain that my opinion of this book would have been different if I'd have read it on my iPad. It wasn't helped, either, by the fact that I read it during a reading slump and never read it long enough at any one sitting to really get immersed in it. For me, it seemed to drag a bit at time and I got bogged down in trying to keep who was who straight. There are a lot of people involved in this story, from the four young men initially convicted of the murder, to the witnesses, the police, the attorneys, the judges, those working to free the young men, and those working with O'Donoghue to get to the truth of the murder. If I'd have been smart, I would have made myself a list. 

Do you ever watch Dateline or 48 Hours or any of those kinds of shows? If you do, then you're familiar with the way that, as details emerge and depending on who you're listening to, the truth seems to sway first one way and then the next. Even knowing going in (because of course this book wouldn't exist if this weren't true) that the four young men would eventually be exonerated, I still swayed back and forth. Certainly none of these young men were perfect angels, but it was clear early on that a desperately understaffed police department was being pressured to solve this case as quickly as possible by any means possible and that's what they did. 

O'Donoghue, left; the Fairbanks Four, right

O'Donoghue, who had been a newspaperman and then became a college professor, was convinced to look further into the case and used this case as a learning tool for his classes. Others in the native Alaskan community also took up the cause. Even so, it took 18 years of pressure and hundreds of man hours and digging for these men to be released. It took almost another decade before O'Donoghue was able to get the book published; not until the men won settlements from the city did the publisher agree that there was an ending to the story that made it worth publishing. 

As much as I struggled getting through the book (again, my fault more than the book's), it's the first book I've read in a long time that made me want to dig deeper. I discovered that the victim's brother still believes that the four men initially convicted were the real killers and he's extremely angry that they've not only gone free but have won settlements. It was brought home to me, once again, that when someone is released, it's hard to assimilate back into society - imagine how the outside world changed between 1997 and 2015. One of the men had a young daughter when he was imprisoned; by the time he got out, he had two granddaughters. Nothing can bring back everything that these men lost while they were behind bars. 

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

176 pages

Published February 2025 by Knopf

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers.

My Thoughts: 

I've been a fan of Tyler's for more than forty years now. While the past couple of her books that I've read have not had that spark for me that her work once did, they still had more than enough to recommend them and to keep me reading. So I'm always going to be ready to pick up another of her books, which is why I was excited to find this one available. 

Guys, Tyler is back for me! 

This book is only 176 pages long but it has everything in it that I've come to expect and appreciate from Tyler. Not only that, the compactness of it might very well be what makes it work best. We get the full story of Gail's life as we travel through only three days of her life. 

Gail is a bit of a prickly person. She wasn't the greatest mother (which puts her kind of out of the loop when it comes to her own daughter's wedding) and she wasn't the greatest wife. And just on the eve of her daughter's wedding, she finds out that she's also not the greatest people person, which is one of the reasons she's just found herself out of a job. But in just 176 pages, we come to really understand Gail and hope that things will work out for her. Not only that, but Gail comes to really understand Gail, which might seem implausible in such a short time, but with everything that's happening in that period, it's entirely believable. 

 It is lovely to see Gail reminisce about why she fell in love with Max and to forgive herself. Although there's a big event at the center of the story, it's the intimate details and the mundane that give the book its heart, which is where Tyler is at her best.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Isola by Allegra Goodman 

400 pages

Published February 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

My Thoughts: 

In 2011 I read Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector and enjoyed it enough that when this book began getting buzz and I recalled Goodman's name, I was eager to read it. Not sure if Reese Witherspoon had read Goodman's work before, but after she read this one, she was eager to put it into other readers hands.

Truthfully, I just saw the author's name and requested this one - without even looking at what it was about.  So I started reading, feeling sorry for this little orphaned little girl who was entirely reliant on a guardian who was never around, who was left in the care of her nurse and the other servants in the castle her parents had left her. I'm thinking that the really terrible thing that's going to happen to Marguerite is that her guardian is going to marry her off to some icky older man when she turns 15 and that's a bad enough fate. But no! Jean-Francois Roberval, her guardian, uses the money that should go toward Marguerite's dowry to recoup losses from his shipping business; then he leases out her home to gain the money he needs to rebuild his fleet. 

Without any money to wed her off, and a deep-seeded need to manipulate and own Marguerite, Roberval insists that she join him on the 8-week journey to New France (Canada) along with a group of pilgrims looking to start a new life. But Roberval is unaware that Marguerite and his secretary have begun to develop a relationship. When he discovers it, just as they begin to spot land, he deserts the two of them and Marguerite's nurse on an island. There is no wood to speak of on the island and not much in the way of wildlife to hunt. The only saving grace is that Roberval has left them with some food, bedding, knives, guns & powder, and some clothing. It's enough to get them started but they won't survive without finding shelter and how to get more food and fresh water. It's grueling work that eventually forces Marguerite to pitch in and leave her sheltered ways behind her. Two years later, she is finally saved. But finding her way home and to safety turns out to be almost as difficult as the past two years have been. 

It's a tough read, with things going from bad to worse and worse. I sometimes felt like I couldn't go on; I often wondered how Marguerite did. The human will to survive to always astonishing. 

I'm not always one to read the author's notes at the end of books (and why not since I'm always interested in learning what inspired author's to write their books?), but this time I was glad that I did because I had entirely missed that this novel was inspired by the real life of Marguerite de la Rocque, who was stranded by her guardian on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, along with her lover, in 1542. Goodman found a reference to this in a book about explorer Jacques Cartier 22 years ago and thought it would make a great story. Let that be a lesson to aspiring authors - hang on to those book ideas, you never know when you'll finally figure out how to make them work! 

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult 

544 pages

Published August 2024 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley

Publisher's Summary:

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.

In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.

My Thoughts: 

Until a little over six years ago I had never read one of Picoult's books. I have now read five of them. My previous reluctant had mostly to do with my reluctance to read books that dealt with the latest "hot" topic. And while the main theme of this book, feminism, is certainly a hot topic, it is also a theme that resonates through the centuries which is the very reason this book is written in dual timelines. 

I have a tough time with dual time lines. I understand why authors utilize a modern timeline to help readers see the importance of stories set in the past. In this case, Picoult uses the story set in the present to introduce ideas to the reader that there's another person who plays into the idea that William Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him. In fact, at least one of the true authors of the works may well have been a woman. Emilia Bassano was a real person who lived in the time of Shakespeare. The fact of the matter is that Bassano had skills and life experiences that Shakespeare did not, skills and life experiences that would have allowed her to write about the Danish court or life in Italy. 

Inevitably for me, one story nearly always outshines the other. Generally that's the story set in the past and this book was no exception, as difficult as it was to read. While this is a work of fiction, Picoult has crafted it around the known details of Bassano's life and the realities of women of the time. Picoult's vision of Bassano's life is a tough read. She is sold into becoming a courtesan at age 13. When she becomes pregnant, she is sold to a man who will horribly abuse her for decades and drink away everything they have, she will never be able to be with the man she truly loves, and her writing will only find an audience through a man who underpays her for her work. 

I felt like both story lines could have been pared down considerably.  Melina's story got pulled in too many directions - a love story, a storyline involving her father, a misunderstanding that puts her into an impossible (but also unbelievable) situation, and a detour where Melina is the bad guy in a diversity battle.  Emilia's story sometimes felt a little repetitive and that Picoult had too many terrible things happen to her. 

But Emilia's story is well worth the read as is Melina's fight to bring Emilia's story to life. I highly recommend reading the Author's Notes and the References to Shakespeare at the back of the book, which I found terrifically interesting and gave me a greater appreciation for the ways that Picoult had managed to work into the story the works attributed to Shakespeare. 

The Antidote by Karen Russell

The Antidote by Karen Russell

432 pages

Published March 2025 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

My Thoughts: 

The Antidote was a great book to finish off 2024. It defies classification: it is both historical fiction and fantasy. It is political commentary, sweeping saga, intimate personal stories. It is devastating and hopeful, tense but not without humor. It's set in one of the most notable times of this country's history but addresses concerns that span the centuries. And it's set in a fictional small town in Nebraska, but it's packed with real places, the real history of the state, and real photographs taken by those sent to record that time.

"Black Sunday began as a gash in the western sky, growing wider and wider and spilling down dirt instead of blood. Sometimes I imagine the glee of those journalists in the New York City papers - typing up the story of our worst day in their fancy language. Adjusting the margins and pushing our tragedy into a skinny column, just like old Marvin at the funeral home shoving a tall corpse into a tight suit."

"Imagine every ghost rising up to hurl their cemetery earth at the living. That was the sound we heard last Sunday afternoon. At 3:00 p.m the sun was murdered in cold blood, in full view of every woman and child. The sun sank into black cloud. Buried alive, at a shocking altitude, but the duster to end all dusters."

We get the story primarily from The Prairie Witch, Asphodel Oletsky, Harp Oletsky, and Cleo Allfrey whose names will change as chapter headings as the books progresses. But we also get chapters from the points of view of a cat and a scarecrow, chapters that are The Antidote's history, and one of Harp's "deposits." In less skilled hands, all of this shifting could be confusing; but Russell skillfully blends all of these points of view at the same time she is moving the story forward while giving us the backstory of the land and the people. The characters are fully realized, their travails their own but their concerns and hopes universal. While the full story is slow to develop, it's never drags and it's well worth the time spent when everything comes to a conclusion with a second cataclysmic (and real) event. 

"The Republican River became a four-mile-wide whitewater monster, thrashing its long tail from eastern Colorado to Oxford, Nebraska. Twenty-four inches of rain fell in twenty-four house! Bridges split and splintered apart. Hundreds of miles of road got washed out. The river poured forward with enough force to carry cars and rooftops. Walls floated away. Friends became cadavers in outfits we recognized, floating beside tractors and drowned cattle. Bodies were seen riding on the crest through the middle of towns, their shy faces staring underwater even as we screamed their names."

At a time when I was really struggling to focus on any book, this one grabbed me and kept me reading. The concepts, the history, the characters, the writing, the pacing, the creativity all worked to make this book that will stay with me a long time. As much as it is set in the past, it is filled with lessons to be learned, not the least of which are to see how history is repeating itself and how human nature remains unchanged. Russell leaves us with hope - we see that there is an opportunity to learn from the past and to change our future. If only we will listen. 

One final note, if you read this book, make sure you read the Land Lost Acknowledgment and the Author's Note at the end. 

Mini-reviews: Revenge Wears Prada, The Paris Bookseller, A Rosie Life In Italy, and Sorrow and Bliss

Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns by Lauren Weisberger

Read by Megan Hilty

7 hours, 10 minutes

Published June 2013 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary: 

Almost a decade has passed since Andy Sachs quit the job “a million girls would die for” working for Miranda Priestly at Runway magazine-a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Andy and Emily, her former nemesis and co-assistant, have since joined forces to start a high end bridal magazine, The Plunge, which has quickly become required reading for the young and stylish. Now they get to call all the shots: Andy writes and travels to her heart's content; Emily plans parties and secures advertising like a seasoned pro. Even better, Andy has met the love of her life. Max Harrison, scion of a storied media family, is confident, successful, and drop-dead gorgeous. Their wedding will be splashed across all the society pages as their friends and family gather to toast the glowing couple. Andy Sachs is on top of the world. But karma's a bitch. The morning of her wedding, Andy can't shake the past. And when she discovers a secret letter with crushing implications, her wedding-day jitters turn to cold dread. Andy realizes that nothing-not her husband, nor her beloved career-is as it seems. She never suspected that her efforts to build a bright new life would lead her back to the darkness she barely escaped ten years ago-and directly into the path of the devil herself.

My Thoughts: 

I love the movie adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, but I'd forgotten how far from the source material it veered until I read the sequel. Andy may have quit that dream job, but I was pretty disappointed to find that she quit it only to run a bridal magazine. Never trusted Emily or Max and Weisberger gave me exactly what I'd expected. Predictable. I'm a fan of a lot of movies adapted from books like these; but not, it appears, the books themselves. 

The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher

Read by Lauryn Allman

10 hours, 37 minutes

Published January 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself.

 
Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home. It's where some of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century are forged-none more so than the one between Irish writer James Joyce and Sylvia herself. When Joyce's controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.
 
But the success and notoriety of publishing the most infamous and influential book of the century comes with steep costs. The future of her beloved store itself is threatened when Ulysses' success brings other publishers to woo Joyce away. Her most cherished relationships are put to the test as Paris is plunged deeper into the Depression and many expatriate friends return to America. As she faces painful personal and financial crises, Sylvia-a woman who has made it her mission to honor the life-changing impact of books-must decide what Shakespeare and Company truly means to her.

My Thoughts: 

Picked this one up because "Paris" and "Bookseller" intrigued me. Was pretty excited to find that it was about Sylvia Beach, who founded the famous Paris bookstore "Shakespeare and Company." While Beach led an interesting life, surrounded by fascinating people, the book dragged a bit for me, with so much of the focus on Beach's struggle with James Joyce and the publishing rights for Ulysses. Maybe the problem was that I wanted to shake her and make her understand what an a*# Joyce was before he about wiped her out. Part of it was just too much detail to getting that book "right" before it was sent out into the world. 

A Rosie Life In Italy: Move to Italy. Buy a Rundown Villa. What Could Go Wrong? by Rosie Melody

368 pages

Published October 2024 by Sourcebooks

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

When Rosie Meleady's landlady doubles her rent in cold, wet, overpriced Ireland, she packs up her family, her two dogs, and all her possessions into a camper van and sets off across Europe to sunny Italy, where she plans to grow her destination wedding planning business. 

Even though it has been a dream she attempted to follow several times, Rosie and her family soon find out moving abroad to start a new life is not all sunshine and gelato.

Between a hurricane, a global pandemic, and accidentally buying a massive villa—that has definitely seen better days— from eight cousins in the middle of a long-standing family dispute, Rosie pulls back the curtains on the less glamorous side of moving abroad. 

Lighthearted, uplifting, and utterly escapist, A Rosie Life in Italy is HGTV meets Under the Tuscan Sun—a delightful peek under the covers of what it's like to throw caution to the wind, take a risk, and build a life you once only dreamed of having.

My Thoughts: 

This one was a slow start for me (Rosie and her husband bounce around a lot in the beginning and seem particularly inept with their money) and things early on bounced between too much detail and giant jumps in time. But things picked up and I did enjoy this one, especially once I got more attached to the family and once they made the move to Italy. Although it does take all of the book before they actually have bought that rundown villa. This one's a memoir which makes the fact that they are only just getting their business in Italy up and running and have just started buying the villa (what a process!), when Covid hits all the more intense. 

That publication date is for the paperback edition, the edition I got through Netgalley. I wasn't aware of that so was startled, when I looked this one up, to discover that there is entire series to be read now. 

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Macon 

Read by Emilia Fox

10 hours, 38 minutes

Published February 2021 by HarperCollins

Publisher's Summary: 

Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.

Because there’s something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen, a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. But countless doctors, endless therapy, every kind of drug later, she still doesn’t know what’s wrong, why she spends days unable to get out of bed or alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks. 

And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London—to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her. 

But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself—and she’ll find out that she’s not quite finished after all.

My Thoughts: 

I seems strange to say that I really liked a book in which mental illness and it's devastating consequences are the focus. But I really did - the book is well written and Emilia Fox does a terrific job. Family relationships and communication are explored in a caring way that shows that we don't always know what's happening in someone else's mind or life. Because we're getting the story from Martha's point of view, we're also getting the story from an unreliable narrator, which makes the entire book quite a ride.