When we meet Charlie Goldwyn, he is hurtling through life at breakneck speed. Recently widowed, Charlie is pouring all his energy into his high-pressure, high-stakes job at a prestigious corporate law firm and clearly not dealing with his grief over his wife’s death. Nearly ’round-the-clock workdays have put a serious dent in his relationship with his quirky 5-year-old son, Caleb, and are not winning Charlie any father of the year awards. Pile on a complicated relationship with his own father and you have a portrait of the workaholic, emotionally out-of-touch, modern male. 

Of course, readers know that this “life” Charlie has created is unsustainable. Cue office party and a booze-soaked moment of truth that leaves Charlie humiliated, unemployed and an instant YouTube sensation. Now jobless, Charlie is stuck at home with Caleb for the summer. What ensues is a hilarious, touching romp of a journey that finds Charlie learning what fatherhood truly means. 

Cristina Alger, author of The Darlings, has written a big, heartfelt book that reads like your favorite sitcom. Charlie’s evolution to a secure, confident stay-at-home dad is wonderfully satisfying, and he is as relatable as Will Freeman in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. This Was Not the Plan is a familiar story of love, loss, parenthood, friendship—and of finally understanding what it means to create a life that is truly in balance.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Yes, the heroine of The Things We Keep, Anna, is a 38-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease who is confined to an assisted-living facility. But no, Australian writer Sally Hepworth’s second novel is not depressing, and while her narrative can be sad and even painful at times, it is never bleak. On the contrary, the story of Anna and her “boyfriend” at Rosalind House, fellow patient Luke, is tragic but also hopeful, positive and even romantic.

Anna and Luke’s relationship may be the heart of the novel, but its peripheral characters are equally compelling. First among these is Eve, a young mother who lost her identity after her husband’s precipitous fall from grace and reinvents herself as the cook at the assisted-living facility. Hepworth’s depiction of Eve’s spirited daughter, Clem, is also heartrending, as are her portrayals of the eclectic contingent of residents at Rosalind House.

Hepworth’s debut, The Secrets of Midwives, was critically acclaimed, and it’s always a formidable task to impress readers with a second novel. But with The Things We Keep, Hepworth proves that literary lightning can indeed strike twice.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Three American women become ensconced in the cultural mélange of Hong Kong’s expat community in Janice Y.K. Lee’s absorbing, character-driven novel, following 2009’s The Piano Teacher. The author, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, opens her novel with a spot-on description of that sprawling city’s expat contingent—the Chinese, Irish, French, Koreans and Americans—“a veritable UN of fortune-seekers.” They have come for their jobs, or their husbands’ jobs; for six months, a year, maybe three years or more. And they have no idea what to expect from their temporary new home.

Mercy, 27, is a Korean-American woman who has been trying to make a “new start” in Hong Kong for three years. She was raised in a cramped apartment in Queens and graduated from Columbia, a “fancy college with fancy kids who showed her a different world.” She is having trouble finding a steady job and is not yet feeling comfortable in her role as one of the few single expats.

Margaret Reade also arrived three years ago, following her husband, a higher-up with a U.S. multinational. On the surface they are living the enviable, seemingly perfect expat life, but they have suffered a recent loss, and Margaret is finding it nearly impossible to move on. 

Hilary and her husband, David, have been in Hong Kong for eight years, and she has been trying to become pregnant ever since their arrival. Her marriage has “cooled into politeness,” but she’s hoping a child might help.

In Hong Kong’s insulated atmosphere, the paths of these three women manage to cross in intricate and unexpected ways. As they tell their stories in alternating chapters, Mercy, Margaret and Hilary become so familiar, the reader seems to have met them before. We know them not just superficially but are privy to their inner thoughts, frustrations and dreams. Like Jodi Picoult and Kristin Hannah, Lee is a perceptive observer of her compelling characters and brings them vividly to life in this moving novel.
 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Janice Y.K. Lee about The Expatriates.
 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

That one of the recurring characters in The Portable Veblen is a squirrel tells you much about the experience of reading Elizabeth McKenzie’s clever second novel. Veblen, the 30-year-old protagonist who chats with the squirrel, describes herself as an “independent behaviorist,” translates for the Norwegian Diaspora Project in her spare time and “still favored baggy oversized boy’s clothes.” This novel is like vegetables cut on a bias: slightly skewed, pleasing to look at, and, thanks to its skilled chef, a joy to consume.

Veblen is named after Thorstein Veblen, the early 20th-century economist who “espoused anti-materialistic beliefs,” and is, like her namesake, a nonconformist. She lives alone in a bungalow in Palo Alto, but has fallen in love with Paul Vreeland, an ambitious young neurologist. Although they’ve known each other for only three months, they plan to marry. And Paul has another plan: He’s developing a device that will help medics perform emergency craniotomies on the front lines.

Paul’s device isn’t ready for the field yet, but the Department of Defense is interested, as is Cloris Hutmacher, a Tesla-driving pharmaceutical heiress. As Paul decides whether to enter into business with a firm that is the antithesis of Thorstein Veblen’s writings, he’s also grappling with his hippie parents and an emotionally challenged brother. Veblen’s side of the family presents challenges, too, most notably her mother, a hypochondriac who keeps a typed list of her medical history behind a ceramic bowl filled with pinecones and presents the list to Paul when they’re introduced.

The Portable Veblen has extraneous plot points, but for the most part, this is a funny and well-written novel about family, love and the perils of misplaced ambition. Adding to the experience are the many photographs wittily distributed throughout: Next to the paragraph in which Veblen’s stepfather offers her a chicken burrito is a tiny photo of a stuffed tortilla wrapped in foil. When you know what you’re doing, as McKenzie does here, to go against the grain is no bad thing.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Elizabeth McKenzie about The Portable Veblen.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Once in a while, a reader needs to dive into a book that makes her feel just a bit unclean. The book doesn’t have to be trashy—and Chris Bohjalian’s latest, The Guest Room, is much too well-written and psychologically astute to be close to trashy—but the author must have no compunction about dropping the reader into the muck and leaving her there. This Bohjalian certainly does, with glee.

The bad stuff comes early. Richard Chapman, a mild-mannered investment banker, allows his sleazy brother, Philip, to throw a bachelor party at Richard’s house in a tony New York City suburb. This predictably sordid affair takes a nightmarish turn when the bodyguards of the barely legal strippers are murdered in view of the guests. Because, see, these strippers aren’t strippers at all, but Armenian sex slaves—and the cue-ball-headed, no-neck bodyguards are their Russian overseers.

The point of view alternates, and Richard; his wife, Kristin; their daughter, Melissa; and an enslaved girl dubbed Alexandra by her captors all get a chance to tell the story. Richard has no idea what to do with himself. Kristin is freaked out—not so much because people were slaughtered in her house, but because her husband almost had sex with a girl half their age. Melissa is frightened and bewildered, which is perfectly OK because she’s 9. This, the book says, is how people who thought they had it made come unmade.

But consider what Bohjalian, author of the bestseller Midwives, does with the hapless Alexandra. She is the conscience in this conscienceless world, a girl who manages to hold on to her innocence and compassion despite the horror of her life. Her voice, with its sometimes uncertain, quirky English, is rendered with such perfection that it’s easy to forget that the author is male. This, the book tells us, is what happens to the innocent. It’s all very dark and greasy—and enjoyable.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jan Karon, author of the best-selling series of Mitford novels, is back with another that readers won’t want to miss. Come Rain or Come Shine picks up where Karon’s last novel left off—with the upcoming marriage of aspiring veterinarian Dooley Kavanagh and his longtime sweetheart, Lace Harper.

In true Mitford style, Dooley and Lace have decided to get married in a barn, on the farm they’ve just purchased for Dooley’s vet practice. They want their wedding to be simple, so they’re doing it potluck-style. Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it seems, and the threat of a torrential downpour and 60-mile-per-hour wind makes for a logistical nightmare, not to mention the already grueling task of shuttling guests to various locations on the 100-acre farm. But with seemingly inexhaustible help from those they hold most dear, the couple has vowed to savor every minute of it.

This beautiful novel examines a Southern tradition—the do-it-yourself, at-home wedding—in all of its intricacies, from the cast of characters who make the big day a reality and the new relationships that form in such intimate settings to the surprises that wedding guests will tell stories about for years to come. In this case, readers encounter two unexpected wedding guests, including the farm’s first bull, Choo-Choo, who nearly crashes the wedding at the most inopportune moment.

Karon has a gift for breathing life into small moments that make readers both laugh and cry. In one moment, just days before the wedding, Dooley and Lace test the lights that they’ve strung up in the trees and exchange a heartfelt set of promises that are built on years of history. In another, the couple’s good friend Harley vaults a fence at a near-sprint to get away from the horns of the almighty Choo-Choo.

Come Rain or Come Shine is about immeasurable love, the inevitability of change and the extraordinary power of ordinary moments. 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, October 2015

The seedy, soap opera-tinged underbelly of Hollywood is fertile ground for fiction. Los Angeles resident Alex Brunkhorst makes the most of that setting in her second novel, the suspenseful and romantic The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine. It’s the star-crossed story of two lives that are wildly different yet forever intertwined.

Thomas Cleary is a journalist who’s never lived the high life. He comes from the working class, and despite being surrounded by the Hollywood elite, he’s never really mingled with them. That all changes when he’s assigned to write an obituary for a Hollywood mogul, which leads him to Matilda Duplaine. Matilda is beautiful, charming and instantly memorable, but she’s also a mystery, a young woman who has never left the grounds of the estate where she grew up. As Thomas’ fascination with Matilda deepens, he yearns to show her the outside world, even as he comes to discover that her very existence contains a secret that will shake both of their lives.

Thomas’ narration lends the story personality, sensitivity and wit. We see the alien world of Hollywood’s richest through an outsider’s eyes, giving the novel a vicarious appeal. And Brunkhorst, who has worked as a luxury real estate agent in California, knows that glittering world well enough to make it feel real to readers. Matilda is a fascinating character, full of Golden Age Hollywood affectations and eccentricities that stem from her life in exile, but we see her only through Thomas, who first mythologizes her, then strips her down to who she really is, odd upbringing and all. This creates an interesting dual perspective and a sense that we’re watching not one, but two people slowly come to grips with reality. When that reality finally hits, it’s shattering.

The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine is a fascinating, bittersweet journey into the heart of modern-day Hollywood—the perfect treat for readers who love both doomed romances and Tinseltown fables.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Board the Alaska-bound Zuiderdam, a luxury cruise ship, alongside Harriet Chance. The 78-year-old widow has set sail using a pair of tickets purchased by her late husband, Bernard. Although he never mentioned the trip, Harriet is touched by his thoughtfulness and determined to take advantage of his last romantic gesture. Despite her children’s worry that Harriet is infirm, she sets sail alone, accompanied only by a letter from her best friend, Mildred.

Well, that letter and repeated visits from—hallucinations of?—her late husband. It seems both Mildred and Bernard have something to say.

In This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, author Jonathan Evison (The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here) alternates between a cheeky narration of Harriet’s past and present. The chapters reveal Harriet at different ages and are written with unfussy candor when examining the present and recent past. When Evison portrays Harriet’s younger days, however, he employs a more hopeful, boisterous tone that underscores the exclamation point of the novel’s title. It echoes the cinematic approach of Evison’s previous work, painting a vivid picture that’s easy for a reader to immerse him or herself in.

Through carefully constructed vignettes of Harriet’s life, Evison peels away layers. What’s left is a core understanding of who Harriet is, and the layering of those events and defenses that led to her becoming that person. A book of secrets, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! reveals how one or two choices can dramatically alter not only the course of your life, but the lives of many others.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As the stack of Jennifer Weiner bestsellers grows (14 and counting), one wonders how many more tricks she has up her sleeve. When will her books start feeling like retreads? How many times can she write about women, love and Philadelphia?

The answer, it seems, is as many times as she wants. Weiner delivers yet another fresh, funny winner in Who Do You Love, the story of Rachel Blum, who grows up with a heart defect, and Andy Landis, the biracial son of a single mom. Rachel and Andy both feel perpetually different from other kids at school, so they instantly bond when they meet as kids in the hospital, where Rachel is having yet another surgery and Andy is brought to the ER with a broken arm after falling off a hotel balcony.

Rachel lives in Florida, and Andy lives in Philadelphia. It’s several years later and totally by chance when they meet up during a youth group mission trip to Atlanta. They engage in heavy flirtation and even heavier petting, but then go their separate ways. Fate continues to bring them together and push them apart over the years, even as they go to college, find partners and careers, and, in Rachel’s case, have children. Andy becomes an Olympic runner and Rachel a social worker, both finding satisfaction in their work but not their love lives.

Who Do You Love is a little steamier than most of Weiner’s books, which is to be expected in a story about two star-crossed lovers who don’t even live in the same town til they’re in their 20s. And while it is filled with Weiner’s sparkling brand of humor, it also delves into some heavy issues: Race, poverty, adultery, the perils of fame. (Although she is famously one of the godmothers of the chick lit genre, it is not unprecedented for Weiner to explore deep themes—prescription drug abuse in All Fall Down, rape in Best Friends Forever).

Although the ending feels hurried, Who Do You Love is, ultimately, a great summer read by a storyteller who may have big sales, but hasn’t always gotten enough credit for her ability to spin tales that are heartfelt, funny and satisfying. 

Best-selling authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (The Nanny Diaries) have delivered another fun and frothy read with How to Be a Grown-Up, a story in which mommy-lit meets “Sex and the City.” 

Our heroine, Rory McGovern, is living in New York with her actor husband, Blake, and their two small children. She’s a part-time magazine editor; he’s an actor struggling to land the big role that will catapult his career. When Blake loses an acting job that was sure to make him famous, he decides he needs a break from fatherhood, responsibility—and financially contributing to the family. He moves out, leaving Rory shocked and paralyzed by the potential destruction of their seemingly idyllic Manhattan life. 

Driven by a dwindling bank account, Rory takes a job at JeuneBug, a “children’s lifestyle” start-up run by two 20-something business school grads who wear shoes that cost more than a week-long vacation. Rory spends much of her day trying to decipher terminology like design vertical, branding ops and backloading appendixes, and her impossibly immature bosses make her re-entry into the working world less than smooth. 

Meanwhile, Blake seems to be slipping further away from his role as father and husband. When Rory discovers that Blake is on Tinder, she decides to play the field and finds herself juggling a group of suitors that includes her boss’ 24-year-old boyfriend. 

McLaughlin and Kraus have given us late 30-somethings a little summertime indulgence. As The Nanny Diaries did for readers in their 20s, How to Be a Grown-Up hits the midlife sweet spot. 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Nature tells us that a mother can’t part with her children. Like a lioness with her cubs, a mother is supposed do anything and sacrifice anything to protect her kids. But what about a mother who feels out of her depth? A mother who believes that the only way she can protect her children is by abandoning them? 

These are the themes Vanessa Diffenbaugh explored in her book club-friendly debut, The Language of Flowers, and they’re the same themes we see again in her new novel, We Never Asked for Wings. This time, we meet Letty, a woman who became a mother as a teenager and never really grew up—in fact, she regressed—as she handed responsibility for her children to her mother, a tactic that seemed to work until her mother and father left for their childhood home in Mexico. Letty is left with two children she barely knows, let alone knows how to mother.

The clearest character for much of the novel is Alex, Letty’s teenage son. He’s abandoned with his younger sister, Luna, and seemingly doomed to repeat his mother’s mistakes. He’s grown up in poverty with a brilliant scientific mind and no way to exercise the experiments he dreams up. He’s without a father, without resources, and when his grandfather leaves the country, he’s left without his only connection to the qualities he values in himself.

Initially, Letty’s methods for dealing with her situation and reconnecting with Alex are pretty abysmal. She leaves her children to their own devices. Her decisions don’t get better immediately, either, as she bonds with her children through bribery and bad choices. But Diffenbaugh doesn’t wait for us to process our shock at this behavior—she, and her protagonist, move on. We see everyone in this family striving to be better, and we root for them.

Diffenbaugh takes big political questions about child protective services, poverty and immigration and weaves them through the story of one multigenerational family. The question is, can Letty and her parents undo the damage they’ve spent a lifetime building, or are some mistakes too big to come back from? 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.