The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy was the perfect book to enjoy on a lazy Mothers’ Day morning. New mom, Winnie, leaves her baby for the first time with a nanny recommended by a new mom group friend. And, not surprisingly, the baby is abducted. Chapters are told by alternating members of the new moms group, each with her own motivations, leading you to question your assumptions. This was a great page-turner. Nothing to write home about, literarily speaking, but a good escape especially for the beach.

Need to Know by Karen Cleveland is a quick mystery/thriller about Vivian, a CIA analyst who discovers that her husband is not who she thinks he is. While the first 40% of the book was annoyingly focused on how Vivian couldn’t believe any of this was happening, it was a good story with a nice amount of unexpected twists and turns and one that kept the pages turning. I would recommend picking it up – it’s a good summer choice.

I get this question all the time: how are you able to read so many books? And, since I keep answering it over and over, I thought I would share the answer en masse here. First, I have been reading since before I can remember (under the covers, in the car, you know the drill). So, it’s just part of my routine and how I choose to spend my downtime. In fact, of late, the TV is hardly on and a show has to be really good to keep my interest. Second, it’s how I gain energy (introvert at heart, even though you’d never know it based on my life/job). It’s how I decompress – in fact, it’s hard for me to fall asleep if I haven’t read right before bed. Last, I have developed a habit of speed reading. There’s no other way to put it: I read really fast. This means that I don’t have the best memory of what I have read, but I enjoy the books nonetheless (and it’s the crux of why I started this blog in the first place – I can never remember all the books I have read and my real opinions about them if I don’t keep track in an organized way). So, there you have it. On top of all those reasons, I am pretty organized generally, which leaves some extra time (grocery store lines, baseball sidelines, etc.) when I can capitalize and read a few more pages.

Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao was fantastic up until the end. I really enjoyed the story of the friendship of Poornima and Savitha who are poor girls, living in India, and basically unmarry-able. The lengths that Poornima goes to find Savitha after she disappears are impressive and engrossing, but ultimately not believable. That element, as well as the ending, make me not recommend this one too highly, even though it has received rave reviews. However, other than the last 10 pages or so, it was a good one.

I was wary to start The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah because I loved The Nightingale so much and I couldn’t believe she could do that again. And, while The Great Alone was not quite as good as The Nightingale (reviewed here), I did really love it. Leni has a broken family. Her father, returned POW from Vietnam is abusive to her mother and generally angry and unable to hold a job. They head up to Alaska to escape their lives, only to discover how impossible life is in the wilderness. One might argue that this story is somewhat predictable, but it really held my interest and kept the pages turning all weekend. It gets a thumbs up from me.

After having abandoned Everything Here is Beautiful halfway through (I just couldn’t get into it), I pushed through on Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion even though I didn’t like The Interestings (and can’t even find my blog post about it, which means I must have abandoned it). The Female Persuasion focuses on protagonist Greer’s crush on famous feminist, Faith Frank. It takes place during Greer’s college years and then her 20’s. However, the book is also told by others’ points of view and jumps around a bit. The story was interesting and had some good twists and turns, but overall, I forced myself to finish and wish I hadn’t picked it up in the first place. Hoping that my next choice, Kristin Hannah’s new one, The Great Alone, is going to be great. Anyone read it?

You knew I would read Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal since Reese Witherspoon chose it for her book club last month. It’s the story of Nikki who disappoints her parents by dropping out of law school to tend bar. She moves out of the house and ends up teaching a creative writing course at the community center in the Punjabi neighborhood from which she has previously distanced herself. The widows who sign up to learn English end up telling erotic stories instead. There’s a mystery to solve in the middle of the story as well. I like this book, but I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. It was definitely a good story (and even racy), but it got bogged down in the middle through about 50 pages before the end and I can’t say that I loved it overall. Others might disagree and I could have been distracted more than usual this week, but I only give it partial praise.

Go out immediately and purchase Educated by Tara Westover. Even better, buy it from Amazon through the embedded link! I haven’t read a book in a while where I thought about it all the time when I wasn’t reading it. Those who know me know I love a good memoir and I had read many reviews of this one (speaking of memoir, if you are a fan of memoirs and haven’t read The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, tee that one up after Educated). Tara is raised in a Mormon, survivalist family and kept out of school. Her father collects scrap metal and her mother is an herbalist and midwife. Tara, however, breaks free of this life and pursues education, ending up with a PhD from Cambridge. It’s a remarkably dark and yet uplifting story. I could not put it down and cannot believe that anyone could have survived the life she led. Fantastic read – one of the best I have read in months.

I have been fortunate to find a bunch of new releases at the library recently. And Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala was among them. I had it on my to-read list because it was described as: “On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he’s a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer—an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders—and the one person who seems not to judge him.” I thought it might be fun to read a book set in DC. Little did I know that the author attended St. Alban’s (as did the protagonist). The Cathedral references begin on the first page. And, while he could have refrained from using the phrase “Cathedral lawn” as many times as he did, those and other DC references made it that much more fun to read. The story was a tragic one about a Nigerian son who comes out to his parents and they cannot take the news. It is a short book – almost a novella – and well worth reading. While difficult, it was a beautiful story and, for the most part, well-written.

Why wouldn’t you pick up a book whose tagline is: “Five women go on a hike. Only four return.”?! I’m in. And, if the author is Jane Harper, of The Dry, I’m even more in. However, ultimately, Force of Nature didn’t deliver for me. The story was a good one – a corporate retreat into the bush in Australia. The company owners who are along for the retreat are being investigated for fraud by the same officers who come to the investigation after one member of the group goes missing. Every other chapter is either from the investigation point of view or from the women’s time in the wild. But, it was too slow and I found myself finding other things to do rather than read. So, this one fell flat for me in a way that The Dry didn’t. I’m sure this one will get a lot of hype, but I, for one, would skip it.