Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout—Strout brings her favorite characters together again in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Lucy Barton is an author who moves there from NYC with her ex-husband during the pandemic (Lucy by the Sea) and decides to stay there. She makes friends with Bob Burgess, a lawyer and they develop a deep friendship that could be on the verge of something else. She also makes friends with the irascible Olive Kitteridge, now older, as they exchange stories of “unrecorded lives”.
We get to know many Crosby citizens, family, even a possible murderer. But this is not a fast-paced novel. If things happen, they happen slowly. Somehow, the story grows, and the reader learns to care about the characters because Strout paints them so realistically and humanly.
Will Strout return to Cosby? Or in her next book, will we meet many new characters that we will also learn to love?
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty—The premise is simple: An older lady boards the plane from Hobart to Sydney, Australia and halfway through the flight, she stands up, counts down 3-2-1, proceeds down the aisle, and predicts the cause and time of death for each passenger. Some don’t even hear her, some laugh, but others listen carefully. What do they do with this information? How would they change their lives?
Sue listens carefully as her cause of death is pancreatic cancer. Eve, a young married woman’s cause is death is at the hands of her husband during sex. Ethan, a young man is supposed to die in a fight and Allegra, the flight attendant, celebrating her 28th birthday would die by suicide. Paula’s baby, death by drowning at age 7.
Will these predictions come true and if so, how much did the predictions affect the outcome? We also learn about “The Death Lady” as she is soon to be called. This was a book I could not put down. With Moriarty’s patented flair for storytelling, you will be thinking about the questions she raises for a long time.
The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson—I love amnesia books!And that is why I chose this novel.Shelley wakes up from a coma in a hospital and knows at once that her husband put her there. But where are the police and why is no one talking to her about it? And she seems to have a gap in her memory. She has no idea how long she’s been there, or where her friends are. And who is this nice volunteer who returns every day and makes her so happy?
The reader only learns as Shelley does, in bits and pieces. Every other chapter is Then and Now. But what begins as a mystery, becomes more than that, as we learn about marital abuse and the affect it can have on the women who have been abused, and those around them, sometimes for many years. Yes, it can get a little preachy, but it is well worth the read.
Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis—Satirical, a little dystopian, dark, funny, tragic, these all describe the plot of “Girlfriend on Mars”. Amber and Kevin live together with their little baby marijuana plants in Vancouver, but secretly Amber has other ambitions. She wants to go to Mars and establish life there. She joins a competition called MarsNow funded by the billionaire, Geoff Task, an Elon Musk, lookalike. But what it turns out to be is a reality show where contestants compete, not only physically and mentally, but of course who is the hottest. She meets a hot Israeli doctor, appropriately named Adam.
Meanwhile, Kevin stays home, grieving and becoming more agoraphobic and obsessive. We see him in every other chapter as he monitors Amber’s life while refusing to have one of his own.
Does Amber make it to Mars? What happens with Adam? Does Earth continue to deteriorate? Does Kevin ever leave the house? Read on.
Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj—A series of interconnected stories about three families who live in a Palestinian community in Baltimore, is also about all immigrants in this country. Much of it is from the point of view of women who find it especially difficult to navigate the old world/new world life. A young pregnant teen, a housecleaner who confronts her rich Palestinian employer, a lawyer who is always paying for her family’s functions but never feels part of them. There is also a young policeman, struggling with his father who never seemed content or forgiving, but yet learns the most about his father and his own identity when he journeys to his father’s homeland.
This is a beautiful, starkly written homage to Darraj’s family and community, with a nod to the political landscape. But she mostly writes about the Palestinian community and their life in America. An interesting choice for a book club discussion.
GET LIT WITH LISA 