In One Plus One, British novelist Jojo Moyes (Me Before You) once again introduces her readers to two mismatched lovers who have troubles of their own but find a safe haven in each other.

Jess is always just one missed paycheck away from disaster. A single mother with two jobs, a disappeared husband, a bullied stepson and a brilliant daughter, she is also desperate to deliver her daughter Tanzie to Scotland to take a math exam that will win her a scholarship to a good school.

In steps Ed Nicholls, one of Jess’ housecleaning clients—and a millionaire. Recently accused of insider trading, he’s lost his company and his best friend. Through chivalry or simply a desire to redeem himself, Ed decides to drive Jess and her family (and their gigantic dog) up to Scotland, a trip of several days. Jess accepts, but she has a secret: In an act of desperation, she registered her daughter for that school using money she stole from Ed’s wallet. The road trip that follows is part comedy, part tragedy.

One Plus One is full of quirky characters and absurd situations, but it is written with authenticity, humanity and warmth. It is impossible not to root for Jess, a compassionate woman who knows she hasn’t always chosen wisely, but who is determined to make life bearable for her kids. With her characteristic blend of heart and humor, Moyes takes her characters on a journey, and despite the roadblocks, they find their way home.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Emma Straub’s delightful second novel, The Vacationers, is the best work yet from this Brooklyn-based writer, who previously penned the quirky short story collection Other People We Married and the historical novel Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.

The Vacationers begins as the Post family is getting ready to leave their Upper West Side apartment for a two-week vacation on the island of Mallorca. Franny is a zaftig travel writer who treats food as a means of therapy; her husband, Jim, was just fired from his longtime job as a magazine editor after having an affair with an editorial assistant barely older than his daughter. Only mildly aware of her parents’ marital problems, Sylvia is focused on starting at Brown in the fall, far away from the brutality of high school bullies.

Joining the group is Sylvia’s older brother Bobby (a Miami real estate agent) and his personal trainer girlfriend, Carmen. Rounding out the bunch of vacationers is Franny’s best friend, Charles, and his husband, Lawrence, who are awaiting possible good news from an adoption agency.

But while Franny meant for the trip to celebrate her and Jim’s 35th anniversary along with Sylvia’s high school graduation, the vacation turns into something much heavier as tensions are inflamed, jealousies are ignited and, ultimately, those pesky family secrets are revealed.

Straub transports her readers to an idyllic paradise of cobblestone streets, olive-tree-strewn hillsides, stunning beaches and rich, foreign delicacies, even as she creates an all-too-real family drama. The Vacationers is as refreshing as a frozen strawberry daiquiri and full of crisply drawn characters you’ll feel you’ve come to know.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A liberated Asian at odds with her conservative family or homeland is not a new story. Literature abounds with such declarations of independence in prose, doggedly demolishing superstitions and customs. This is especially true when it comes to an Asian woman’s “proper” role in courtship and marriage, or non-role in the workplace. Jean Kwok’s entertaining second novel, Mambo in Chinatown, thus breaks no new ground, except perhaps that it is her father, not her mother, who proves the protagonist’s foil. Also: ballroom dancing!

Charlie Wong is a shabby dishwasher barely into her 20s when she applies for a job as a receptionist at a dance studio. A serial receiver of pink slips, incompetent and possibly dyslexic, Charlie braces for the worst. It comes, but not before the dancers recruit her to train with them. Charlie has dance in her blood, since her late mother had been a performer for the prestigious Beijing Ballet. At first scornful of Charlie’s calloused hands and appalling fashion-sense, the dancers soon make Charlie one of their flamboyant own.

She keeps her bourgeoning career a secret from her father, who despite his late wife’s occupation would shudder to see his daughter on display, not least because it would confound his intention to see Charlie married to a Chinese. Despite warnings from her fellow dancers, who frown on student-teacher fraternization, Charlie is (wait for it) swept off her feet by an earnest Caucasian pupil. Ooh la la!

The story here may reach escape velocity from Chinatown into Harlequin town, but you wouldn’t know it from the language, which is admirably even-keeled. Charlie’s wide-eyed persona conceals a shrewd and determined woman; her father ends up seeming less like a chauvinist than a straw man, consulting healers and slurping noodles while his daughter waltzes into the American Dream.

It was everywhere and always thus that children have rebelled against elders, from Cain to Holden Caulfield, so it’s perhaps unfair to suggest that this is a hackneyed theme in Asian literature. But even if it is, Cain and Caulfield couldn’t dance.

Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling author of 10 novels, goes a bit darker with her new book, a story about the price some women pay in the pursuit of having it all. In All Fall Down, Weiner tackles a growing epidemic in our society: middle- and upper-class suburban parents who abuse prescription medication to cope with their overworked and overstressed lifestyles.

Allison Weiss is a doting mother to her 5-year-old daughter, Eloise, and a devoted wife to her handsome husband. She’s also a blogger and developer for a website that has taken off overnight. As she struggles to keep everything going, Allison begins to abuse pain pills she was given for a back injury in a “Jump & Pump” workout class. Before she knows it, Allison is taking so many pills a day that she has to resort to hiding money from her husband to buy them illegally online.

In today’s world, blogs, Facebook, Instagram and other social media outlets serve as online “brag books” for people to portray seemingly idyllic lives. Weiner puts into words the pressure many women feel to maintain a Facebook-worthy life—which means being a supermom as well as a supportive spouse who “leans in” at work, maintains a pre-baby body and throws a nightly meal on the table that would make Julia Child swoon. While struggling for sobriety, Allison tries to convince herself she’s not as bad as the addicts around her. She got her pills from a doctor, not on a street corner, right?

All of Weiner’s books are entertaining, emotional and funny, but her latest is a truthful snapshot of the high-functioning addict. All Fall Down asks whether it is possible to take the online reels of other people’s perfect lives and view them for what they are—just part of the story.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The socks we say the dryer ate, coins forgotten in the couch cushions, an engagement ring, a home, family, even a life. What if all the things we lose, the mundane and the important, were waiting to be returned? What would we do if we found ourselves in the place that they end up? Such is the inspiration for The Lost, Sarah Beth Durst’s imaginative first novel for adults.

Her disillusioned protagonist Lauren Chase is running from the reality of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Driving off into the desert one day instead of to work, Lauren gets caught up in a freak dust storm and summarily deposited in the town of Lost. Here, foreclosed or abandoned homes of various styles sit side by side; the last pieces of pie are served at a celestial-themed diner; and stray dogs and kids roam about. Like the town’s other inhabitants, Lauren is unable to leave until she discovers what she has lost. For that, she needs the help of the enigmatic Missing Man, who has inexplicably disappeared—a fact that many of the town’s residents blame on Lauren. Claire, a young girl who carries both a teddy bear and a knife, befriends Lauren and convinces Peter, a brooding young man known as the Finder, to help her. The three form a family of need.

Durst, the author of several YA novels, knows how to captivate readers. As the first in a planned trilogy, more questions are left unanswered than resolved in The Lost, though the author unfolds her fast-moving tale in a beguiling way. The world Durst has envisioned is often disturbing and bizarre, but at times surprises with its beauty and poignancy.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Not quite as creepy as the Overlook Hotel, but with its own history of unpleasantness, the Bellweather Hotel in upstate New York dominates the pages of Kate Racculia’s quirky new novel, Bellweather Rhapsody. Here, the really Bad Thing happened in Room 712, some 15 years before the main action of the book, which takes place in 1997. While the tragedy does haunt the hotel, it is in a realistic and not supernatural way, right down to the monster blizzard that socks everyone in for the weekend. Instead of the alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, we get teenaged musicians at different stages of careers that may or may not pan out. Even the cataclysm that harkens back to the Overlook’s malfunctioning elevators isn’t caused by evil spirits as much as rotting infrastructure. Insurance should be able to take care of it.

The action revolves around the talented Hatmaker twins. There’s bassoonist Bertram, also known as Rabbit and his sister Alice, a singer. They’ve both been chosen to participate in the Statewide festival, which is traditionally held at the Bellweather, and from the moment they arrive, Rabbit and Alice are confronted with situations and people who aren’t what they seem. Is the Ichabod Crane-like Scottish conductor with the maimed hand as mean and crazy as he seems? Did the second Bad Thing to happen in room 712—where Alice is staying!—happen or not? Did the big fat lady with the deaf dog have anything to do with it? Is the new head of Statewide really a psychopath?  I will spare the reader the suspense here and answer with an emphatic “Yes.” She’s one of those villains whose comeuppance—which couldn’t possibly be too ghastly—the reader prays for.

All the while Alice, a somewhat insecure girl who hides her insecurities with an outsized personality and an outsized voice, strives to get to the bottom of it all.  Rabbit, having come to terms with his gayness, is more interested in getting next to a handsome tenor who looks like Ralph Macchio and standing up to the screwy conductor.  How folks cope, or not, keeps the reader turning the pages of Racculia’s weirdly enjoyable and fast-paced mystery.

The automobile is one of the inanimate objects most subject to the practice of personification. How many besotted car owners have referred to their shiny vehicle as “she” and stroked the hood as one would perhaps stroke a woman? In All I Have in This World, novelist Michael Parker’s eighth novel, a sky blue Buick Electra is as much a character as any other. Readers follow the car, in nonlinear fashion, from its birth to death; what comes in between is compelling, although the story takes a bit of time to rev up.

The two main human characters here are Maria and Marcus, who meet in the West Texas car lot where the 20-year-old Buick Electra has most recently landed. Maria is a young woman returning to her hometown for the first time since an extremely traumatic event drove her away 10 years ago. Marcus is a middle-aged man whose North Carolina business venture has failed, leaving him homeless, jobless and aimless. When his bad luck extends to having his truck stolen in Texas, he sees the Buick as his possible salvation. Maria, having lived a life of walking and taking public transportation, is at the lot to purchase her very first car. She, too, is instantly attracted to the Buick. It isn’t long before they make the improbable agreement to purchase the car together and alternate the days they will drive it.

How that seemingly preposterous agreement came to be is told through their backstories and the history of the Buick itself. Each previous owner has an emotional motive for unloading the car, some more believable than others but all pointing to the tradition of auto anthropomorphism.

As these stories weave into those of Maria and Marcus, both before and after the Buick purchase, another theme emerges as well: that of the past attached to so many objects we come to own. When you buy a used book or piece of furniture or article of clothing, how often do you consider the lives of those who possessed them before you? Or of those who created them? This initially slow-going but ultimately rewarding novel allows the reader to ponder this in a fresh and moving way.

The story of the once-successful novelist trapped in the throes of writer’s block, personal woes and emotional contemplation is a favorite of many novelists, from Stephen King to Michael Chabon, but lesser versions of the tale often veer into the realm of plodding semi-autobiographical navel-gazing and serve the writer more than the book itself. With her latest novel, Tatiana de Rosnay not only avoids the pitfalls of the struggling-novelist story, but also obliterates them with a lush, beautifully rendered saga layered with secrets, scandal and, yes, an exploration of what it means to be a writer who’s terrified of having nothing left to say.

When Nicolas Duhamel was 24, he made a discovery that shook everything he knew about his family. This shocking revelation inspired a novel that rapidly became an international bestseller. A few years later, Nicolas is a wealthy author with a hit film based on his book and throngs of adoring fans, but the next novel, the one he’s been promising his agent, isn’t coming. Hoping to revitalize his creativity, Nicolas takes his girlfriend to an exclusive coastal resort in Italy, but what he finds there is far from the peace he was hoping for. As his personal life rapidly changes, the old secrets begin to haunt him again, and Nicolas realizes that if he hopes to rediscover that creative spark, he must contend not only with a frightening new future, but also with an increasingly haunted past.

By jumping between past and present tense to tell the dual stories of Nicolas pre- and post-fame, de Rosnay tells us right away that this novel is a meditation on time, legacy, memory and what the stories of our youth do to us when we’re older, but The Other Story is much more than a saga of past and future. By showing us the world through Nicolas’ eyes, de Rosnay is able to give us portraits, both of a deeply flawed man and the world around him through the perceptive lens of a storyteller. Throw in a remarkably complex cast of supporting characters, a series of juicy new developments in Nicolas’ life and always engaging dialogue, and you’ve got a brilliant combination of page-turner and character study.

It has been 20 years since Julia MacDonnell wrote her first novel, A Year of Favor. But readers will find her highly entertaining and heartfelt second novel, Mimi Malloy, at Last!, well worth the wait.

At 68, Mimi Malloy finds herself divorced, forced into early retirement and spending her days fending off check-in phone calls from her six daughters and four surviving sisters. Having lost her husband to a much younger secretary, she bides her time in her Quincy apartment drinking Manhattans, listening to Frank Sinatra and puffing away on True Blue cigarettes. Her eldest daughter, Cassandra, is adamant that her mother needs to be placed in an assisted-living home. Despite Mimi’s recent “spells” of forgetting things (like how to start her car) and a MRI showing that she’s got the atrophied brain of an 86-year-old, Mimi stubbornly claims that she is just fine on her own.

Then Mimi finds herself at the center of a grandson’s genealogy project. Packed to the brim with repressed memories from a traumatic childhood, Mimi refuses to outline her Irish ancestry or explore her Depression-era upbringing. But when she discovers an antique pendant that had once belonged to her mother, Mimi takes the first tenuous step down an extremely crowded memory lane. Bit by bit, she unveils the secrets that she has struggled to hide: a mother who died in childbirth, a secret sister sent away to Ireland and an abusive stepmother.

With the help of her sisters, Mimi slowly begins to piece together the mystery behind the disappearance of their beloved sister Fagan. In the background is a budding friendship between Mimi and her widowed superintendent, Dick Duffy.

MacDonnell truly shines in creating a cast of unforgettable characters who struggle to forgive each other, spinning a story that recalls The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, though with a bit more of an edge. Mimi Malloy, at Last! will ensnare readers with its human drama and fascinating references to Irish folklore—even as the vulnerable and brassy Mimi Malloy steals their hearts.

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

This quote, attributed to Confucius, is one that frequently comes to mind while reading Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Questions of Travel.  The two central characters do make major geographic changes—yet no matter what their external surroundings are, their internal worlds remain stubbornly rooted.

Written as a double narrative, Krester’s hefty tome is ambitious in both scope and style; at times the passages are wry and beautifully rendered and at others they fall flat in a torrent of florid prose. The story is thus alternately absorbing and tedious.

The opening sentence is an interesting hook: “When Laura was two, the twins decided to kill her.” This leads to the tale of our female protagonist: the dowdy, artsy and affection-starved Laura Fraser, whose older brothers plot to murder her after their mother dies of breast cancer. After that plan is unsuccessful, Laura continues on with her lonely existence in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s, continuously inspired by her great aunt’s stories of world travel. The author, in a true-to-life passage, intersperses Aunt Hester’s seemingly glamorous yarns with the far less appealing situations and emotions behind them.

Fittingly, when Aunt Hester dies and leaves Laura money, she uses it to travel. From London to Naples to Bali to Paris and back, she adopts a peripatetic lifestyle that leads to a freelance travel-writing career. Along the way, she becomes, in some ways, as jaded about journeying as her aunt was.

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, Ravi Mendes grows up in the same era as Laura—without going anywhere. This changes when his relatively tranquil existence as a husband, father and website designer is shattered by a horrifying, violent tragedy. His escape then is to Laura’s native Australia, where she has returned to work for a travel guide company. And thus their parallel lives begin to converge.

The novel unfolds much the way real life does—there isn’t always a lot going on but there are flashes of great beauty, misery and discovery. Unfortunately, the true, relatable humanity of the characters is sometimes hidden behind the literary acrobatics performed by de Kretser. The reader may be impressed by the prose while also craving more depth in the characters.

Andie Miller is not the type to see ghosts, let alone talk to them. But then she agrees to spend a month in her ex-husband North’s creepier-than-creepy ancestral home, taking care of his recently orphaned niece and nephew. North has offered to pay her $10,000 so she can pay off debts and start married life free and clear with her fiancé.

Seems like a win-win situation to practical, beautiful Andie, until she arrives in the southern Ohio mansion and meets her strange charges. Eight-year-old Alice screams at the slightest provocation, while her 12-year-old brother, Carter, prefers to bury his nose in comic books.

Andie quickly learns that Carter is ignoring not just her, but also a few extra souls in the centuries-old house. The kids’ Aunt May, who died in a suspicious fall months earlier, is still hanging around, and then there are Miss J and Peter, two ominous spirits who are unwilling to let the kids leave the house.

Now that you’re thoroughly freaked out, let me assure you: Jennifer Crusie has produced a story that is both chilling and wickedly funny. Andie is a no-nonsense free spirit, and the heat between her and North is palpable. As they join forces to break the kids free from their past, the long-divorced couple realize they have some unfinished business of their own.

There’s no maybe about it: Maybe This Time marks Crusie’s long-overdue return as one of the most deeply satisfying writers around.

When The Nanny Diaries was first published in 2002, the term “chick lit” was just gaining ground. Hot on the heels of Bridget Jones and the Shopaholic series, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus drew from their experiences as nannies and put their own spin on the burgeoning genre, laying bare the seedy side of childrearing in the Big Apple. The novel was a hit, shooting to the top of bestseller lists across the country and spawning a feature film.

Now, in Nanny Returns, McLaughlin and Kraus revisit Nan 12 years after her disastrous fallout with the loathsome X family. Nan is blissfully married to her Harvard Hottie . . . that is until their return to New York kicks his desire to become a daddy into high gear. The problem? Nan isn’t sure that motherhood is for her. And between starting her own consulting business and trying to get their fixer-upper home in Harlem actually fixed up, Nan’s hands are full. As if that weren’t enough, one night Grayer X, now 16, shows up at her door, and before she knows it, the past is rearing its ugly head and Nan is once more tangled in the insidious web of the Xes.

Sequels can be tricky, but fans of the original will likely find this reunion as amusing and diverting as the first. It’s interesting to see where all the characters have ended up, and the situations Nan faces in her attempts to navigate the Upper East Side as well as the Xes manage to be outlandish yet believable, given what we know of the characters and the world they inhabit. Nanny Returns once more relies on the combination of humor and heartbreaking truth that made the first installment of this series so successful, and McLaughlin and Kraus do a good job of examining the ways in which the rich are truly poor, as well as Nan’s attempts to make peace with her past.

In the end, despite a bumpy road, Nanny Returns affords Nan—not to mention fans of the series—the closure she’s been looking for.

Stephenie Harrison writes from Nashville.