The Lovely Bones: A Novel
by Alice Sebold.
On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey.
Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
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Diary of a Mad Bride
by Laura Wolf.
Amy Sarah Thomas, a magazine editor, is going to marry Stephen Stewart, a computer programmer that is, if planning the wedding doesn't kill the romance. Told in diary form over the course of a year, with many iterations of a 70-point Things-to-Do list, Wolf's first novel seems determined to provoke an epidemic of elopements. The pre-wedding jitters are endless: obscenely expensive shoes and humiliating dresses, in-laws even more upsetting than one's own parents and siblings, bitchy co-workers and a stoned caterer, and the inevitable onslaught of redundant kitchen gadgets. |
Girls' Poker Night : A Novel
by Jill A. Davis.
Ruby Capote, the narrator of Girls' Poker Night, is your quintessential New York cynic. This persona serves her just fine in her job as a humor columnist; she's unafraid to write the most humiliating details about herself or her friends, because she truly doesn't care. But over the course of a year or so of Wednesday night poker parties with her pals, Ruby is forced to face her past--especially her sorrow over her father, who committed suicide after he left Ruby's mother. Meanwhile, Ruby comes to terms with her budding feelings for Michael, the editor of her newspaper, who, in a neat twist, turns out to be estranged from his only child (shades of Ruby's lost father). Davis, a former writer for The Late Show, does a fine job of maintaining Ruby's sharp humor while leading her through a minefield of emotional discovery.
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The Dive from Clausen's Pier
by Ann Packer.
Carrie Bell is the worst person in the world. Or so she would have you think. In the gripping, carefully paced debut novel of personal epiphany, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, by O. Henry Award winner Ann Packer, Carrie's very survival is dependent upon her leaving her fiancé, even after he dives into shallow water at a Memorial Day picnic and becomes paralyzed. Things hadn't been going so well for the Madison, Wisconsin, high school and college sweethearts. Carrie knew, deep down, that she wasn't going to become Mrs. Michael Mayer. But expectations and pressure from all sides--his family, her mother, her best friend Jamie, Mike's best friend Rooster--force Carrie to shut herself up in her room and sew outfits of her own design as if in a trance. Then one night she slips out of the only universe she's ever known.
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Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel
by Rebecca Wells.
Wells is a Louisiana-born Seattle actress and playwright; her loopy saga of a 40-year-old player in Seattle's hot theater scene who must come to terms with her mama's past in steamy Thornton City, Louisiana, reads like a lengthy episode of Designing Women written under the influence of mint juleps and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. The Ya-Yas are the wild circle of girls who swirl around the narrator Siddalee's mama, Vivi, whose vivid voice is "part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah." The Ya-Yas broke the no-booze rule at the cotillion, skinny-dipped their way to jail in the town water tower, disrupted the Shirley Temple look-alike contest, and bonded for life because, as one says, "It's so much fun being a bad girl!"
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Little Altars Everywhere: A Novel
by Rebecca Wells.
Little Altars Everywhere is a book that stuns - aesthetically, emotionally, psychologically. At its core is Siddalee's dysfunctional Southern family. Now thirty-eight, Siddalee lives in New York and tries to understand a childhood dominated by her beautiful, dramatic mother, Viviane, who drank and then beat and sexually abused her children. Then there's her father, Big Shep, an alcoholic as well, a sensitive Louisiana farmer who can never quite say what he wants, unless it's to yell at his wife.
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Bridget Jones's Diary
by Helen Fielding.
In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and "Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way)." In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man. Alas, here Bridget goes severely off course when she has an affair with her charming cad of a boss. But who would be without their e-mail flirtation focused on a short black skirt? The boss even contends that it is so short as to be nonexistent.
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Her Father's House
by Belva Plain.
Beloved storyteller Belva Plain understands the rich tapestry of the human heart like no other. Her many dazzling New York Times bestsellers probe the shifting bonds of marriage and family with insight, compassion, and uncommon grace. And her new novel is no exception. A tale of fathers and daughters, lovers and families, acts of love and acts of betrayal, Her Father’s House is Belva Plain’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.
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Shopaholic Takes Manhattan
by Sophie Kinsella
The world is a different place since Helen Fielding triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic, but the torrent of benignly self-indulgent Bridget Jones's Diary knockoffs has not subsided. In this sequel to Kinsella's bestselling Confessions of a Shopaholic, Becky Bloomwood, a personal finance "expert" with her own TV show, is more of a financial mess than ever: she can't stop shopping, even though she can't afford anything. She's even assigned her flatmate, Suze, to monitor her spending, but to no avail: Becky is full of cute rationalizations, like "Foreign money doesn't count, so you can spend as much as you like," and can't stop herself from sneaking into posh boutiques.
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Chains Around the Grass
by Naomi Ragen.
Based on novelist Ragen's own experiences growing up in an ethnically mixed low-income housing project in the Rockaways, this novel opens a window into the bittersweet world of the Markowitz family as they struggle to make ends meet in 1950s New York City. A first-generation Jewish immigrant with incredible reserves of optimism and ambition, David Markowitz trades in his religious identity for the promised gold of America, believing that "if you really wanted to, if you worked your can off, you could not only get out of Brooklyn, but get Brooklyn out of you."
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The Nanny Diaries: A Novel
by Emma McLaughlin, Nicola Kraus
The Nanny Diaries is an absolutely addictive peek into the utterly weird world of child rearing in the upper reaches of Manhattan's social strata. Cowritten by two former nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the novel follows the adventures of the aptly named Nan as she negotiates the Byzantine byways of working for Mrs. X, a Park Avenue mommy. Nan's 4-year-old charge, the hilariously named Grayer (his pals include Josephina, Christabelle, Brandford, and Darwin) is a genuinely good sort. He can't help it if his mom has scheduled him for every activity known to the Upper East Side, including ice skating, French lessons, and a Mommy and Me group largely attended by nannies.
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If Looks Could Kill
by Kate White.
Bridget Jones meets Nancy Drew in Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief White's impressive debut novel, which provides plenty of New York glamour and glitz, besides a smart, sexy heroine and a cleverly constructed murder mystery. When Cat Jones, editor of Gloss magazine, calls, employees jump. And when she calls freelancer Bailey Weggins on a Sunday morning with a frantic plea for assistance in a personal matter, Bailey responds quickly. Cat has found her live-in nanny, Heidi, dead. When it turns out that Heidi was poisoned, Cat freaks out and insists that Bailey, whose specialty is true-crime reporting, help her discover who's done it.
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White Oleander
by Janet Fitch.
Oprah Book Club® Selection, May 1999: Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch's engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid's boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes.
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