Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle

In the latest romance, Expiration Dates, from author Rebecca Serle, 33-year-old Daphne Bell has had six important relationships, one weekend in Paris, and 42 first dates over a period of 20 years…all determined by some kind of cosmic force. Coming out in early March, the novel relies on  magic realism with names of men and the length of the relationships showing up on such things as slips of paper, a post card, and a fortune cookie, all describing the who and the length of the romance.

This phenomenon started in fifth grade when she received a post card that said “Seth 8 days” that pointed to a kid in soccer who became her very first boyfriend. Her relationship with Hugo is to last 3 months, with Noah, 5 weeks, with Martin, 3 days, and so on. Daphne relies on the messages from the universe telling her how long a relationship will last so she is always prepared and never heartbroken.

Then along comes Jake with no indication of time to be spent together making Daphne believe Jake is her forever guy. He is a great prospect, everything Daphne would look for in a lifetime partner. However, he has suffered a great loss before meeting Daphne, and she has a huge secret that could change their course.

What happens if Daphne reveals her secret to Jake who wants something more than a casual relationship? How will Hugo’s reappearance in her life affect her feelings about Jake? How can her secret compromise everything in life?

Rebecca Serle is the New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years, The Dinner List, and One Italian Summer. With the help of a writer-producer-director, Serle turned her young adult book Famous in Love into a TV series that lasted two seasons. Serle lives in Los Angeles.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 18, 2024.

I would like to thank Atria Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

After Annie by Anna Quindlen

 Annie’s four children, her husband, and her best friend must find a path forward after Annie suffers a fatal aneurysm in After Annie by Anna Quindlen coming out February 27. The novel covers five seasons as those left behind deal with struggle after struggle as they find their way without the woman they so dearly love.

While the community of Greengrass embraces the Browns, husband Bill finds life overwhelming as he is the sole keeper of the family now. He realizes more than ever before just how much Annie steered them all in their day-to-day life.

As the eldest at 13, daughter Ali assumes many of the daily responsibilities with the younger three children: Ant, Benjy, and Jamie. Annemarie, Annie’s lifelong pal and Ali’s godmother, falters in her sobriety without Annie to pull her back from the edge.

Within a couple of months, Bill allows himself to be pursued by his high school girlfriend Liz who tries to worm herself into the lives of the children. Ali is furious to learn that while she had gone to a sleepover, her father had left the boys home alone to be with Liz. Ali’s fury is unleashed as she watches her father kiss Liz in their driveway. Ant is terribly upset thinking that his father is going to marry Liz.

Ali continues to hold her own in her studies but is mandated by the school system to see the counselor because of her mother’s death. At first Ali tries to reveal nothing in these sessions because her best friend warned her that she doesn’t have to tell a counselor anything. Instead, Ali finds Philomena Cruz to be a guiding light as she steers Ali to talk about her mother when no one else can seem to. Eventually her brother Ant and her father will get guidance from Miss Cruz as well. A life-changing surprise steers Annemarie back on course.

Time does not heal all the Browns and Annamarie soon learn, but Annie’s love transcends death as her family and Annamarie move forward step by step to find their way once again. Quindlen’s deft hand is what makes this story work so that it is redeeming and hopeful rather than a downer.

Anna Quindlen, a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists, won the Pulitzer Prize as a columnist at The New York Times. Her semi-autobiographical novel One True Thing (1994) served as the basis for the 1998 film starring Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger. She lives in Manhattan.

 

The Guest by B.A. Paris

 The Guest in the latest from B.A. Paris due out February 20 is Laure, a long-time friend of Iris and Gabriel, who has left her husband Pierre in France having learned he has fathered a child by another woman. Welcome at first, Laure is soon trying her friends’ patience as all she talks about is Pierre, and she is making no plans to leave their British countryside home and return to Paris.

Gabriel is already stressed having left his medical practice suffering from burnout and trauma as his father has just died, his dog followed suit, and Gabriel could not save a young man named Charlie who Gabriel encountered on his daily run. Charlie had crashed his bike at the nearby quarry, and his last words before dying weigh heavily on Gabriel. Added to his burden is the guest who will not go home after weeks and weeks of staying with Gabriel and Iris. As Benjamin Franklin once said, ““Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.”

Having left Paris with nothing, Laure continues to borrow Iris’ clothes rather than go shopping,  follows Iris around like a lost puppy dog, and interferes with Iris’ interior decorating business. Worse, Laure quits her job in Paris with no plans for the future. Plus, Laure’s constant questions about Charlie’s death are unwelcome as Iris is doing everything she can to pull Gabriel out of his depression.

A new couple in the neighborhood brings some relief as they welcome Laure to visit. However, the downside is that Laure takes up with their gardener Joseph, a young man who was sacked from his previous gardening job at a school after becoming too friendly with a student, giving her his phone number and planning a trip to Thailand with her.

Before the thriller plays out, more characters will wind up dead, Pierre is indeed a father, and everything readers thought was true turns topsy-turvy thanks to an unreliable narrator.

B.A. Paris, known for her page-turning plots, does not disappoint with The Guest. The author of Behind Closed Doors, The Breakdown, Bring Me Back, and The Dilemma, she was a bank trader and teacher in France before turning to writing fiction. She  lives with her husband in a cottage in Hampshire, England.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 6, 2024.

I would like to thank St. Martin's Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 In New York City after the end of World War II, Fanny Fabricant, along with her daughter Chloe, welcomed her husband Max home from the war in The Trouble with You by Ellen Feldman arriving on bookshelves February 20. A college graduate, Fanny thought she was prepared for a life as a wife and mother until tragedy struck the young family.

Fanny soon finds herself selling her home and in dire need of finding work. With a cum laude degree in the liberal arts from Barnard College, she could not find a job calling for that kind of background. With the help of her Aunt Rose who knows Alice Anderson, a writer of radio serial scripts, Fanny secured the job of Alice’s secretary to support herself and Chloe.

 

Two men eventually attract her attention: Charlie Berlin, another script writer who is a step away from being blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, and Ezra Rapaport, a pediatrician who wants to marry Fanny partly to rescue her from working to support her child who is his patient.

 

But Fanny does not want to quit work if she remarries because her boss is giving her a chance to write some scripts, and Fanny genuinely enjoys her job. Charlie appreciates Fanny’s efforts at script writing and soon talks a reluctant Fanny into being his “front” once he is blacklisted. While both men love her, Ezra wants to turn her back into a housewife, and Charlie cannot marry her or she would be blacklisted by association. Which pathway forward will Fanny choose?

 

Ellen Feldman is well educated like her protagonist Fanny as she attended Bryn Mawr College, from which she holds a B.A. and an M.A. in modern history, and she did graduate studies in history at Columbia University. Having  worked for a New York publishing house, Feldman writes both fiction and social history, and has published articles on the history of divorce, plastic surgery, Halloween, and many other topics. She lives with her husband in New York.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 5, 2024.

I would like to thank St. Martin's Griffin and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

The Last Caretaker by Jessica Strawser

 

Kate’s life needs a reboot as she moves from web pages to caretaking in The Last Caretaker by Jessica Strawser that was published December 1. Recently divorced, Katie is lucky enough that her best friend Bess has recommended Kate for caretaking at the 927-acre Grove Farm Nature Preserve in Ohio. While not a big outdoor fan, Katie guesses the job would be a nice change of pace.

The job comes with a farmhouse in which to live, but it looks like the last caretaker left in such a hurry that many personal items abandoned. Katie and house cleaners pack up Grace’s things in hopes she returns for them.

When a scared and battered woman arrives at the caretaker’s farmhouse in the middle of the night, Katie is surprised the woman is expecting a safe place to hide. As Katie follows the clues, she becomes aware that Grace had been part of an underground network to move abused women to safe places.

Shall Katie fill Grace’s shoes in this endeavor? What has happened to Grace as calls to Grace’s sister go unanswered or returned? Why is the groundskeeper Jude, a police academy dropout, always finding reasons to be at the caretaker’s place? Who can be trusted: the hikers, the dog walkers, the nature photographers? Katie will have to dig deep to solve these mysteries. There is more to the job than meets the eye as Katie searches to find out about the last caretaker.

Jessica Strawser  is Editor-at-Large for Writer’s Digest and a popular speaker at writing conferences, book clubs, and book festivals. Not That I Could Tell was a Book of the Month selection, and The Next Thing You Know was a People magazine pick for 2023. She lives with her family in Ohio.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting December 27, 2023.

I would like to thank Lake Union Publishing  and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

The Teacher by Freida McFadden

The Teacher by Freida McFadden is a story of twisted secrets and revenge coming out in February. The teacher referred to in the title could be Eve Bennett or her husband Nate in this psychological thriller set in Caseham High School where she teaches math and he teaches English. She’s a tough-as-nails, take-charge teacher while he uses his charm and intelligence to become the most popular teacher at Caseham, especially now that Art Tuttle was fired for messing around with his student Addie Severson.

Eve believes her marriage is on the rocks as Nate’s affection for her has grown cold. To fulfill the needs that are not being met at home, she indulges in shopping for stiletto heels and having an affair with the shoe salesman. Since both are married, they confine their relationship to the shoe storeroom once a week.

While Eve loves teaching math, she does not love seeing Addie’s name on her class list. Eve knows from the Tuttle scandal that Addie cannot be trusted, she lies, she hurts people, and she destroys lives. Worse, Addie struggles in math, having engaged Mr. Tuttle for some tutoring.

Addie has not been able to live down the scandal of the previous school year, and she knows returning to Caseham is going to be tough. No one befriends her, and one student in particular bullies Addie openly. School is a living hell for Addie but when Nate encourages her poetry writing in his English class, she finds some satisfaction. She even joins the poetry magazine that Nate supervises, providing just the right circumstances for the student and her teacher to enter a forbidden relationship.

When Eve encounters Addie and Nick alone in his classroom, she snaps some photos. What if she exposes Addie’s part in a doomed student-teacher scandal? How will Nate’s career survive? His marriage?

Freida McFadden, a writer who uses this pseudonym, writes psychological thrillers and medical humor novels. A brain injury doctor, she self-published her first book on Amazon in 2013. Best known for her book The Housemaid, she lives with her family in a house overlooking an ocean.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

 Reviewing The Women by Kristin Hannah is proving to be a hard task to serve this epic tale being published in February the justice it deserves. In Part 1, Frankie McGrath decides to join the Army Nurse Corps to go to Vietnam, inspired by the enlistment of her brother into the Navy as well as the importance her father places on being a hero. The narrative follows Frankie throughout her service with the Army Nurse Corps, with Part 2 dealing with her struggle to rejoin the world she left behind for Vietnam.

Frankie, who was raised on a walled and gated estate on Coronado Island in California, is unprepared for just how primitive all the facilities are when she arrives at her post in the Thirty-Sixth Evac Mobile Hospital in Vietnam in 1967. She is soon overwhelmed by the absolute horror in the aftermath of the wounded arriving in a background of screaming injured, shouting of orders by the nurses and doctors, and the smoke, all the smoke. Two nurses, Ethel Flint and Barb Johnson, school Frankie in combat nursing, and the three build a friendship that will take them into life after the war where people keep telling them, there were no women serving in Vietnam.

The war is raging during Frankie’s first tour of duty. Often the only thing she can do for injured soldiers is to hold their hands until they die. The damage inflicted by mortar and bullets is at first overwhelming, but Frankie, like all the other military nurses, is forced to step up and do things she was never trained for like removing a spleen and closing the operation. With only three doctors assigned to her location, she learns more and more under their direction. After her time is served, she extends her tour because she realizes with the shortage of medical personnel, she is sorely needed.

Romance enters the picture when Frankie is pursued by Dr. Jamie Callahan, one of the doctors she works with. When she learns that he is one of those “war bachelors” her father had warned her about, she shuts down the relationship before it blooms. The last time she sees Jamie, his helicopter starting his pathway home has been shot down, and he becomes just another soldier with devastating injuries that will most likely claim his life.

Soon after, Frankie is assigned to the Seventy-First Evac near Pleiku, nicknamed “Rocket City,” where the fighting is even heavier than her first posting. There, Frankie reunites with one of her brother’s Navy buddies, pilot Joseph Ryerson Walsh. After Rye swears he is no longer engaged to a woman in the States, Frankie allows herself to enter into a relationship with him, spending R&R together in Hawaii.

As if life in Vietnam is not hard enough, the women start hearing about how the homeland they left behind becomes divided by war and politics, how Vietnam heroes are not given the welcome back that they deserve. Barb becomes extremely active in protesting the war once she becomes a civilian again, and as often as she can, she includes Ethel and Frankie in the activities of the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

While waiting for Rye to return to America, Frankie learns his helicopter was shot down, and there are no remains. Between the devastation to men’s bodies, the change of the Americans’ hearts about the war, and her own heart broken not once but twice, Frankie spirals down, becoming dependent on the pills, booze, and cigarettes she was introduced to in Vietnam. When she seeks help from the Veterans Administration, she is turned down once and then twice as only the men who fought in the war were recognized as veterans.

There is so much to unpack in this historical fiction that pays tribute to those women who served and sacrificed only to be overlooked by others except for those they nurtured and those with whom they served. One day, Frankie will visit The Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., which includes the names of eight women, all of them nurses.

Kristin Hannah started her writing career solidly in women’s fiction with books like Firefly Lane but she moved to combining her women’s stories with  historical fiction, giving readers works about World War II in The Nightingale (2015) and Winter Garden (2010), and the Great Depression in The Four Winds (2018).

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting December 9, 2023.

I would like to thank St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.