Girl’s Girl is a fever dream of a book by Sonia Feldman about three teenage girls spending a hot summer in suburban Ohio. Nothing really happens, yet everything happens, in this novel about female friendship, first love, the intensity of summertime, mother-daughter relationships and growing up with a smartphone. When two of the friends kiss one night, it upends the bonds between the friends and further complicates the already complex politics that develop among groups of three friends. I found Girl’s Girl to be a deeply nostalgic book (despite being set in the present, it’s kind of timeless) in which I could practically feel the heat coming off the sidewalk and the smell of a summer night full of promise. This book won’t be for everyone, but for the right reader, it hits all the right spots. We have a funny birthday card in the bookstore that says “It could be worse. You could be turning 15.” This book is why.

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For our recent Memoir Book Club at the store, we read The Other Wes Moore, a memoir by Maryland Governor Wes Moore about his childhood and career. Moore, who lived in Maryland in his early years before moving to the Bronx and then eventually back to Baltimore, lost his father as a young child and grew up with a single mother. Despite some early challenges with school and a brush with police, he straightened himself out after military school, went to college, and then pursued a career that led him to prestigious fellowships and, ultimately, the statehouse. Meanwhile, another man named Wes Moore, born in Baltimore a few years before the author, followed a different path. Also son to a single mother, he served time in jail more than once, and despite successfully completing a professional training program, was convicted of felony murder in connection with a robbery and sentenced to life in prison. The Other Wes Moore tracks these two men’s lives, parallel in so many ways yet wildly divergent. How did one Wes Moore make it to Governor while the other is in prison for the rest of his life? I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It raises a lot of questions about race, economics, opportunity and the lure of crime and drugs when there is so little hope for advancement or a better future. Moore also talks about the importance of mentorship, support and resources to provide alternate life choices for young people. It was a good pick for a group discussion, and everyone who came was glad they had read it. I highly recommend this one, especially on audio, as it is narrated by the Governor.

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The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is a debut novel about a couple – Rose and Landon – who meet in college in Vermont and fall in love. When the book opens, we learn that many years later, Rose has moved to Edinburgh and taken a pill that allows her to erase her memory and start over with a clean slate. She has cut ties with Landon, who, still in love with Rose, follows her to Scotland to try to win her back, presenting himself as a different person. The story is told in layers, slowly peeling back their history so that we eventually find out what caused the demise of their relationship. Meanwhile, in the present day, they start to build back their relationship on new footing. This is an interesting premise for a book – what if we could simply erase the bad things that happened to us and move on? Would we be the same people? The execution wasn’t as good as the premise, though. Normandin makes Rose pretty opaque in the present day, so I didn’t get much of a sense of what it was like to take the pill, or even to make the decision to take the pill. I didn’t mind all the big emotions in the book but in the end, I just didn’t feel that invested for some reason. Perhaps Normandin spent too long on the origin story and not enough on the end. And sad to say, I have hardly thought about The Good Parts since I finished it – never a great sign. So this one was just OK for me.

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I love a good memoir, and I saw The End Of Normal listed in someone’s Instagram post of their favorite memoirs, so I decided to pick it up. It’s by Stephanie Madoff Mack, the widow of Bernie Madoff’s son Mark, who killed himself two years after his father’s arrest for perpetrating the most damaging financial fraud scheme in history. In the book, she talks about how she and Mark met, marrying into the ultra-wealthy Madoff family, and how her father-in-law’s crime’s were exposed. But the focus of the book is on Mark and the toll his father’s actions took on him. Mark and his brother Andy always maintained their ignorance of the Ponzi scheme – in fact, they were the ones who turned him in – but their lives were completely destroyed by their father’s actions. Mark ended his life, leaving Stephanie alone with their two young children. The author doesn’t spend a ton of time ruminating on the other lives Bernie ruined – the thousands of people cheated out of their life’s savings – which is something she’s gotten criticism for. But this is a memoir about her life and her husband’s death, so I don’t fault her for that. And yes she sometimes comes across as whiny and self-centered, lashing out at people when she feels overlooked or unappreciated. But I did really enjoy reading The End Of Normal, for the intimate look into Stephanie’s life, the fall of Madoff’s house of cards and the destruction it left in its wake. And it’s hard to come away without sympathy for Mark, who found no way out of the situation, and the sad family he left behind.

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Oh man, where to start with this one… Chris Whitaker’s beloved All The Colors Of The Dark is the story of Patch, a one-eyed boy growing up in rural Missouri in the 70s, who saves a classmate from being kidnapped on the way to school one morning. This act of bravery changes the trajectory of many lives in his small town and sets him off on a lifetime of yearning and seeking the truth about what happened that fateful morning and the months that followed. This long book is full of twists and turns, drama and coincidences, and a cast of flawed but memorable characters. While I found it propulsive and hard to put down, I also grew frustrated with the way it was told. Whitaker enjoys keeping his readers in the dark, imposing a low grade level of confusion throughout that is only resolved by reveals and explanations that happen many (very short) chapters later. While some enjoy this writing style, I grew frustrated by the author’s intentional vagueness and opacity. That, combined with some unrealistic plot points and convenient coincidences, knocked All The Colors Of The Dark down a notch or two for me. I also took issue with a few ideological stances that Whitaker took throughout the book, as well as his almost glorified, saintly treatment of women. I am glad, though, that I finally read it after hearing about it for so long, and to its credit, it has really stuck with me in the weeks since I finished. (How’s that for a mixed review?)

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Kin by Tayari Jones is a novel about two women, Vernice and Annie, who grew up as “cradle friends” in a small town in Louisiana in the 1950s. Both are motherless (Vernice’s mother was killed by her father, Annie’s mother abandoned her as an infant), and as they grow up, they become each other’s sister. After high school, Vernice goes to college while Annie moves to Memphis in search of her mother. Kin follows their parallel lives as they move into adulthood, always a presence for each other despite the physical distance between them. Through the women’s sporadic letters and alternating chapters, Jones tracks Annie and Vernice’s two very different trajectories, ultimately showing that the strength of their friendship, borne from almost identical circumstances, is not enough to even out their adulthoods. While I enjoyed this book, for me it didn’t pack the emotional wallop of An American Marriage, a book I still think about often, 8 years after I read it. I’d still recommend Kin, though – it’s a compelling and at times heartbreaking look at the Jim Crow South through two very different lenses.

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Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán is a disturbing book that stemmed from the author’s attempts to find the Nigerian man who had conned his well-educated, confident Spanish mother online for months. Barragán sets out to understand how these “Yahoo Boys”, so named because they develop so many online identities, prey on lonely white Americans, and why those Americans fall for the ruse. He interviews several Yahoo Boys, exploring their backgrounds and how they fell into scamming, and even tracks down a few of their victims. What emerges is the depiction of surprisingly complex economic and social forces that combine to bind scammer and victim together in a depressing cycle. Barragán has compassion for everyone involved, persuasively identifying chronic loneliness, poverty, social media and government corruption as the larger forces behind this phenomenon. A very interesting, if sad, read.

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[Warning: spoilers ahead!] I picked up Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild based on glowing online reviews that described it as a cross between a literary romance and a psychological thriller. Tom and Honor, a wealthy couple living in London, go to Paris to celebrate Christmas with their young daughter. While there, they experience a tragedy that affects their relationship and lives forever. However, aside from this shocking early twist, the rest of the book played out rather dully. I kept thinking something really unexpected would happen and, well, it didn’t. Rothschild makes an unusual narrative choice that could have lent itself to a more complicated and interesting plot, but that sadly wasn’t the case. Finding Grace was just a mildly interesting story that ended as it seemed it would. Did I read the same book as everyone else?

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The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline is a fictionalized recounting of the life of Sarah Yates, one of the two sisters who married famous conjoined twins Cheng and Eng in mid-1880s North Carolina. What could convince a woman to marry a man with whom she could never be alone, signing up for a lifetime of sharing her husband not only with his brother, but with her own sister? Kline does a great job of getting into Sarah’s head and understanding how someone could not only accept these circumstances, but even grow comfortable with them and have 11 children with a man who is permanently attached to another. The story is told against the backdrop of the Civil War, nicely incorporating issues of freedom, autonomy, power and duty on both a personal and an ideological level. Some parts made me physically uncomfortable to read, a sign of Kline’s vivid and compassionate storytelling. This is the third historical fiction written by Kline that I have read, and I really appreciate her painstaking research and focus on people and situations that have not gotten a lot of attention.

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I chose You With The Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate as the June memoir book club pick for Wonderland Books because I had heard great things about it, and it delivered. Applegate, an actor known best for her roles on Married… With Children and Dead To Me, has faced a lot of challenges in her life despite her onscreen success. She and her mother were abandoned by her father when she was a baby. She worked hard through her childhood and teens to support the two of them. She witnessed and endured abuse from her mother’s violent partner, and then found herself in an equally abusive relationship as a young adult. She also survived breast cancer, only to then face the most devastating challenge yet: a diagnosis of MS. Applegate opens and closes You With The Sad Eyes talking about the disease and how much it has robbed from her. I really liked Applegate’s honesty and unapologetic tone throughout the memoir, as well as her lack of self-pity. She’s angry, yes, but she’s aware of the gifts she’s been given, and is trying to make the best of a very tough situation. Our book club discussion was robust (which you might not always get with a celebrity memoir), with everyone in attendance glad that they had read it. There is some Hollywood gossip in here, but really it’s a book about a talented, kind woman who has been dealt a very mixed hand.

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