The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

The Woman In Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

400 pages

Published July 2025 by Gallery/Scout Press 

Publisher's Summary: 

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman...and if she can even trust her?

My Thoughts: 

This is my eighth book by Ware. I found myself, from the start, wondering if it might be my last. 

It's a sequel of sorts to Ware's hit, The Woman In Cabin 10, in which Lo Blacklock finds herself locked in a cabin on a boat, certain she is going to die there. This book opens giving readers the belief that the same thing has happened to Lo again. And that's where Ware first lost me. Could this woman seriously have found herself in exactly the same position ten years later? Didn't Ware have any better story ideas than to rehash the same story? 

By the time this story finally caught up with the teaser opening chapter, I had spent too much time being frustrated with idea that this would be the same story to be very much relieved that it wasn't. 

I will say that the story picked up and I did find myself racing through it. Did I figure out all of the plot twists? No, I didn't; although to be fair to myself, that was partly because some of the plot points felt so preposterous that they never would have occurred to me. But also, yes, I did figure out some of the twists and you'll know by now that if I've figured it out ahead of the denouement, it's pretty obvious. Another problem I had with the book was that there were so many loose threads. Now you might say they were red herrings, but they didn't feel like that and they never got explained away. 

Overall, a disappointment. But let's be honest, I've like Ware enough in the past to give her another chance when her next book comes out. 

Oh, William ! by Elizabeth Strout

Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout

Published October 2021 by Random House

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

Publisher's Summary:

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. 

Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. 

So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart. 

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

My Thoughts:

In The New York Times' review of Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton, Claire Messud called Strout's vision of the world "Protestant and flinty." In Strout's return to Lucy Barton, Protestant and flinty are, again, apt descriptions of her writing. 

"I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say - oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world."

Despite being a successful author, Lucy Barton continues to feel invisible and to find it surprisingly difficult to put her feelings into words. Except for when it isn't:

"A tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt. It has stayed snapped, it never grew back. I began to write more truthfully after that."

A childhood of poverty and abuse has led Lucy to live her life feeling "less than," a feeling that was reinforced by a mother-in-law she simultaneously loved and resented. Catherine asked Lucy to call her "Mom" when Lucy married Catherine's son, William. But she found any number of ways to make Lucy feel out of place and beneath her, from giving Lucy hand-me-down nightgowns to giving her a set of golf clubs knowing that Lucy didn't enjoy golfing. So Lucy was as surprised as William when he discovered that Catherine's childhood was not all that different from Lucy's own. 

"How is it that some people know how to do this [cross the lines in our world], and others, like me, still give off the faint smell of what we came from? I would like to know. I will never know. Catherine, with her own scent that she always wore. My point is that there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening."

In Oh, William! Strout explores the ways we never completely escape our upbringing and that cost that trying to do so takes. In her quiet, spare way, she also, as always, explores the lasting relationships between parents and children and spouses, even after divorce. William and Lucy have a complicated relationship that is only underscored by the wonderful relationship Lucy had with her second husband who only recently died. 

I'm a huge fan of Strout's and I love the way she comes back to characters again and again (this is her third book that includes Lucy), even working characters from other books into her stories (here characters from The Burgess Boys show up). While some readers may read this book and feel that they are missing something by not having read My Name Is Lucy Barton (and I kept wondering if I was forgetting things from that book), in looking back at my review, and others, of that book, I find that Strout left somethings to the readers' imaginations before as she does again here. You're getting all you need to have to understand Lucy. This one crept up on me and my appreciation of it grows even after I finished reading it. If you're a fan of Strout's, you'll enjoy this one. If you're new to her work, understand that this is a quiet, slow-paced book that is filled with introspection. It will make you think, if you have patience. I'm glad I did.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Published September 2019 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.

With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.


My Thoughts:
The Handmaid's Tale was written in 1985 and Atwood calls it speculative fiction. But the thing is, Atwood drew largely actual global events to create that book, making it as much based on history as speculation about the future. By the time I finally read it in 2010, an astonishing amount of what Atwood had written was starting to be much more than fiction. Thirty-four years after Atwood created it, Gilead seems even more possible than ever. Which made this the perfect time to revisit it.

When a book has the kind of impact on you that The Handmaid’s Tale had on me, you both look forward to and dread a sequel. It's rare for a sequel to live up to the original book when a sequel wasn't in the original plans, and I've been disappointed more than once. Not this time. I can’t speak for all fans of The Handmaid’s Tale; but, for me, Atwood has not disappointed.

Aunt Lydia, as portrayed by Ann Dowd in the
Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. 

In The Testaments, Atwood takes the original premise of Gilead and ups the game. This time we get a better view of how Gilead developed and the women who play a role in a regime that oppresses women. While the men may appear to hold all of the power, it is just as likely that it is women who are doing the damage to other women in Gilead.

Aunt Lydia, reappears in The Testaments and she is just as terrifying as she was in The Handmaid's Tale. Actually, she is even more terrifying as we learn just how much power she has in Gilead. But Atwood also forces readers to confront the "what if it was you" question when it comes to why Aunt Lydia has become the woman she is. It makes you hate her just a little bit less.

The book's not perfect. The girls aren't as interesting as Lydia, there is a section that I thought moved along at a much faster pace than the rest of the book, and a scene later that seemed a bit like something out of an action movie. But it's not enough to take away from the story for me.

As we did before, we see how little it would take to move from our current world to one of complete control, how easy it is to pit one faction against another. This time, Atwood is not just speculating about the future, she's reminding us that Gilead is just around the corner if we don't remain vigilante.