Annabelle Tometich’s delightful sense of humor sweetens even the toughest, most humiliating moments of her life in her outstanding memoir, The Mango Tree (Little, Brown and Company, 2024). Beginning with an epigraph from her mother’s Facebook feed, the book announces its tone immediately: laugh-out-loud funny. “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts […]
“The Slip” by Lucas Schaefer
April 14, 2026 by Leave a Comment
To write a novel that both expands generations and centers on one person is always a hard thing to do. To do it so successfully with your debut novel is another thing altogether. The Slip (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Lucas Schaefer is a huge novel, not so much physically as mentally. You start the […]
“Ava: A Novel” by Victoria Dillon
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Just as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World invited us to imagine test-tube babies and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale invites us to imagine fertile women enslaved as breeders, Ava: A Novel by Victoria Dillon opens us to the possibility that in a post-Roe world, human birth might evolve into something entirely different. I mean, entirely […]
Read of the Month: “Art Work: On the Creative Life “by Sally Mann
April 1, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Almost without exception, seeing a book with the subtitle “On the Creative Life” I’d take a pass. But who can resist a book like Sally Mann’s Art Work Art Work: On the Creative Life (New York: Abrams Press, 2025), that begins with “This is a book about how to get shit done” ? Sally Mann, […]
“Well of Deception” by Cynthia Leal Massey
March 30, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Well of Deception (Stoney Creek Publishing 2025), by the multi-award-winning author Cynthia Leal Massey, is a new take on the classic small town murder mystery. A bullet shot in broad daylight seemingly out of nowhere kills turkey-breeder Maggie Schneider, and the prime suspect is missing. Everyone thinks they know who shot Maggie, but they can’t […]
“The Perfect Rom-Com” by Melissa Ferguson
March 30, 2026 by Leave a Comment
This book is totally aptly named, because it is The Perfect Rom-Com. I read it within twenty-four hours, laughed myself silly, wanted to be Bryony’s best friend because of her quick wit, fell a bit in love with Jack myself, cried through chapter twenty-five, and lobbed imaginary spit balls at Amelia’s “Choppy yellow hair that […]