Staff Picks Category: Women

The Glass House by Beatrice Colin [Book]

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Disappointed artist Antonia McCulloch is going through the motions with her distant husband when her previously unknown sister-in-law and niece unexpectedly arrive on her doorstep. Antonia has been managing Balmarra, the family estate, since her father’s death, and never expected to hear from her estranged brother again. Cicely Pick has packed herself and her daughter Kitty up to travel from Darjeeling, India to Scotland in pursuit of her husband’s right to the family home. He’s in need of financial support, and she intends to sell Balmarra and the assets therein to fund his continued botanical expeditions in Asia. As Antonia and Cicely become acquainted, their mutual suspicions give way to tentative friendship. Cicely is a novel addition to village society, and strikes up an ill-advised flirtation with a wealthy neighbor. Neither of the women’s husbands seems invested in the future of the estate, and none of them anticipate what they eventually learn from the family solicitors. Balmarra itself is another character in the story, filled with family treasures and portraits, with a spectacular glass house on the grounds containing rare plant specimens from all over the world.

Offer this to fans of historical fiction, women’s stories, botany, and Scotland.

Well-Behaved Indian Women by Saumya Dave [Book]

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Three generations of Indian women living in India, New Jersey, and Manhattan try in vain to do what is expected of them and all fail, in the same year, by following their dreams instead.

Simran is finishing her master’s degree in psychology and planning her wedding to Kunal, an altruistic medical student, when she meets someone who changes the way she sees herself. Nandini is anticipating her empty nest with a sense of dissatisfaction with her distant husband and her job in a family practice clinic where the bottom line is everything, when a former colleague gets in touch about an amazing opportunity. Mimi is enjoying a peaceful widowhood in her village in India, visiting the local school to teach girls around the edges of what the curriculum offers, when parental complaints bring her to the attention of the superintendent. All three of them face these surprises with their own strength and the support of the others, in ways they didn’t realize were possible.

A compelling and complicated family story filled with secrets, assumptions, and growth through communication, Saumya Dave’s debut renders these women’s lives realistically, with stumbles and corrections as they go along.

This debut is a good fit for readers who like layered stories of women’s lives, complex social structures, and families finding balance between tradition and progressiveness.

Fast Girls by Elise Hooper [Book]

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Elise Hooper (The Other Alcott, 2017) finds three unheralded female athletes to share in a tale spanning three Olympiads: 1928 Amsterdam, when the first women’s delegation competed in track and field; 1932 Los Angeles, when runners of color were unjustly left out of competition; and 1936 Berlin, where Jesse Owens outshone all other American athletes. Betty Robinson, Louise Stokes, and Helen Stephens have different backgrounds and a shared talent: running like the wind. Their challenges, compounded by the Great Depression, vary as well. Betty is a classic golden girl with doting parents and a bright future and the first female gold medal winner in track and field, but is nearly killed in a plane crash just weeks before the 1932 games. Louise is the oldest daughter in a poor black family, leaving school for domestic work to help support her younger siblings. Helen is an awkward farm girl with few prospects beyond working the family farm until her potential is seen by the local track coach at a church basketball game. Each makes her own way to excellence, with support outside of family, making history along the way. Social commentary is provided by fictitious news articles written in the style of the period, with condescending awe that women could accomplish these things.

For fans of The Boys in the Boat, historical fiction about real people, and stories about little-known female heroes breaking through barriers.

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho [Book]

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Andrea Tang, at 33, is living the life she is supposed to live in Singapore: up for partner at her law firm, in possession of the latest designer handbag, surrounded by devoted friends, living in a posh apartment. The only thing she hasn’t successfully accomplished is landing a husband. When her cousin’s engagement leaves her the titular last Tang standing (unmarried), things start to get real. Competing with her office mate Suresh for promotion while dating handsome and wealthy marriage-minded entrepreneur Eric, Andrea has to decide what she wants from her life and what happiness means to her. Does she make partner, marry Eric, and live lavishly ever after? Does she quit her job and redirect her life entirely? Is her rivalry with Suresh shifting from antagonism to civility to friendship to something else?

Ho’s debut novel is a charming and witty diary of a year in the life of Andrea Tang. It’s a good match for fans of The Hating Game, Crazy Rich Asians, and misguided young professional women.

The Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Pancol [Book]

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An improbably melodramatic follow up to The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, this French best seller continues the saga of Josephine Cortes and the lives of those around her as she pursues her quest for self-discovery. Josephine has moved into a large Paris apartment with her younger daughter, while her older daughter studies fashion in London. Her mother employs a psychic to curse her stepfather’s new wife. Her intermittent boyfriend grows distant. Her sister Iris leaves the mental health facility she had entered. She thinks she sees her dead husband on the Metro. A neighborhood serial killer fails to kill her in a late night attack. Her flirtation with her brother-in-law deepens. She adopts an apparently stray dog. Her new neighbors are a mix of standoffish and interfering. Familiar characters from the first novel appear in virtual cameos and new ones populate Josephine’s new milieu. Less compulsively readable than the first novel, but enjoyable in itself. For fans of women’s stories, midlife crises, melodrama, and murder.

Virtually Perfect by Paige Roberts [Book]

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Following her fifteen minutes of fame as a celebrity chef (complete with TV show, cookbook deal, magazine column, and adoring fans), Lizzie Glass is reduced to working as a food truck shill and still can’t make her rent. She gives up her apartment and moves home to New Jersey where she takes a job as private chef to a wealthy family, literally catering to their comically extreme individual dietary restrictions and those of their frequent guests. Among the guests are the daughter of the house Zoe, who runs a popular website and app dedicated to clean living, and their black sheep son Nate, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. When Lizzie discovers Zoe has been posting her recipes and photographs of her work without permission, she has to decide between compromising her values and unemployment.

Roberts’ debut is a sound entry in the young-women-finding-themselves genre, and is a good pick for fans of Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella, cooking shows, and reality television.

The Book of Summer by Michelle Gable [Book]

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Bess returns to Cliff House, her family summer home for four generations, to extract her mother before it slips off its Nantucket bluff into the north Atlantic, victim to the passage of time and ravages of weather and erosion. The Cliff House guest book, filled with letter style narratives rather than simple names and dates, illuminates the near century of lives it has sheltered. As Bess tries to protect her mother and save her family’s memories and heirlooms, she also grapples with the end of her four-year marriage. Coming home is a comfort and a distraction, as are the denizens of Nantucket, including Bess’s high school love. Told through contemporary narrative interspersed with transcribed entries from The Book of Summer and local news stories, the story of a family and its triumphs, tragedies, and secrets unfolds, drawing the reader into Cliff House from the 1920s through 2013. A sure bet for fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Nantucket, families who brushed shoulders with the Kennedys, and the female side of the story.

By Any Name by Cynthia Voigt [Book]

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Voigt, a revered writer of teen fiction (Homecoming, Dicey’s Song), presents her first novel for adults. By Any Name is the story of a woman’s life told primarily through the eyes of her youngest daughter, Beth, with remembered interjections from her other three daughters, Meg, Jo, and Amy. Rida was an orphan who, by virtue of the heightened emotion and reduced social barriers of World War II, finds herself married to Spencer Howland, scion of a large and wealthy New England family. Consistently described as unconventional, Rida resists assimilation into Boston and Cape Cod society, supporting her professor husband in a comfortable lifestyle through strategic investment and management of his trust fund. She fiercely advocates for her daughters, rousting a lecherous teacher and disrupting a debutante ball as a protective parent. A compelling woman equally admired, loved, and resented by her girls, she allows them to grow into themselves, strong and uncompromising and ultimately happy. The story will appeal to now-grown Voigt fans, as well as teens interested in tales of large and complicated families.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple [Book]

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Semple returns to ground she covered in Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (2012) with an artistic antiheroine fumbling through her life of privilege as a NYC transplant to Seattle. Married to a celebrity hand doctor and ten years separated from her career as a groundbreaking animator, Eleanor Flood spends her days studying poetry with an untenured professor and thinking acerbic thoughts about the other moms at her precocious son’s private school. Having lunch with a former minion breaks something free in Eleanor’s past, and her life falls apart over the course of an afternoon. The reader learns details of her backstory and sympathizes, despite the seemingly trivial nature of her troubles (Sticking her foot in her mouth with her poetry teacher! Estrangement from her sister! Her husband’s absence from his practice! Her son’s enjoyment of makeup!).

Hilarious and touching, this will satisfy Semple’s numerous fans and gain her new ones. Great for readers of women’s fiction, Seattle denizens and aspiring residents, and people reviewing their lives and choices.

The Forever Summer by Jamie Brenner [Book]

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Over the course of a summer, seven women gather in a sprawling bed and breakfast in Provincetown to reconcile their complicated family relationships. Marin Bishop’s perfect life has fallen apart all at once with the appearance of a surprise half sister, Rachel, and the loss of her prestigious job. She and Rachel leave Manhattan to meet their grandmother Amelia on Cape Cod, stay for a few days at her inn, and forge connections neither knew they needed. As they gradually extend their stay week by week to the entire summer, Marin’s parents, boyfriend, aunt, Amelia and her wife Kelly, and seemingly all the other residents of Provincetown variously participate in their journey. Kelly teaches Marin the family craft of mosaic construction, and Marin’s completion of a long-planned gift wraps up her visit and sets her on her course, while great changes also come to the lives of Marin’s mother, Amelia, and Rachel. An engaging and emotional read with characters who stay with you.

This is a good fit for fans of Elin Hilderbrand, beaches, summer, and women’s stories.

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly [Book]

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Spanning more than twenty years in the lives of three women, and based on real people and events, Kelly’s debut brings historical facts to startling life. As the narrative begins in 1939, Caroline Ferraday is a former Broadway actress and New York socialite who works with the French consulate, Herta Oberheuser is an ambitious young German doctor, and Kasia Kuzmerick is a fifteen-year old Polish girl just getting involved with the resistance. As World War II progresses and Hitler’s army proceeds through Europe, circumstances draw these women together. Caroline’s relief work becomes more necessary. Herta secures a position as camp doctor at Ravensbrück, and Kasia is transported there with her mother and sister after her courier activities are reported. When the war ends, and the camp is liberated, the story continues. Caroline pursues reparations and justice for the displaced, Herta is tried and convicted of war crimes, and Kasia attempts to return to a normal existence in now-Communist Poland, marrying and having a baby. Details of fundraising efforts, immigration issues, Reich politics, camp life, and interpersonal relationships render a gripping read that lingers well after the book ends.

This is for World War II aficionados, biography fans, and book clubs, as well as teens looking for more after The Diary of a Young Girl.

Keep Me Posted by Lisa Beazley [Book]

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Stay-at-home mom Cassie and her expat sister Sid make a drunken Christmas pact to reconnect by corresponding only through handwritten mail for a year. Cassie scans their letters for posterity, saving them to a private blog.

Cassie has three-year-old twins, a tiny West Village apartment, and a caring husband. She feels vaguely dissatisfied and uncertain how to cope. Sid has a teenage son, a toddler, and a distant husband. She’s easygoing but has to confront her husband’s infidelity. Their correspondence is intimate and open and safe for them both. When a technical glitch makes the blog public, the sisters become famous without their knowledge. Cassie discovers it through a magazine blurb and has to come clean to her husband, Sid, and their families.

A satisfying debut in the field of women’s fiction, Beazley creates some real moments of concern for our heroine and her relationships with her loved ones.