BOOKLOVES

In the vast library of World War II historical fiction, few books dare to excavate the stories of women who led from the shadows. Natasha Lester’s The Mademoiselle Alliance doesn’t just dare—it soars. This meticulously researched novel resurrects the extraordinary life of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the only woman to lead a French Resistance network during WWII, […]

What if you could simply swallow away the suffocating weight of female guilt? Saumya Dave’s third novel, The Guilt Pill, poses this tantalizing question while delivering a psychological thriller that cuts to the bone of contemporary womanhood. Building on the foundation she established in Well-Behaved Indian Women and What a Happy Family, Dave ventures into […]

Kelsie Sheridan Gonzalez’s debut novel, The Gods Time Forgot, attempts to weave together the rich tapestry of Irish mythology with the glittering backdrop of 1870s Manhattan. The premise is undeniably compelling: Rua awakens with no memories, believing herself to be Emma Harrington, a missing debutante from New York’s elite social circle. Yet beneath this amnesia […]

Elin Hilderbrand’s latest offering, The Five-Star Weekend, promises the perfect girls’ getaway but delivers something far more complex—a tangled web of secrets, betrayals, and the messy realities that lurk beneath Instagram-worthy moments. What begins as food blogger Hollis Shaw’s attempt to gather her best friends from each life phase quickly transforms into a weekend where […]

Kate McKean opens “Write Through It” with a declaration that stops you dead in your tracks: “Writing is horrible. Most writers hate the act of doing it, and yet, so many will tell you that their dream is to publish a book.” Right there, in those first two sentences, she’s done something remarkable—she’s told the […]

Amy Mason Doan’s The California Dreamers is a luminous meditation on the complexities of unconventional family life, wrapped in the sun-drenched nostalgia of 1980s California surf culture. This latest offering from the author of Lady Sunshine, Summer Hours, and The Summer List demonstrates Doan’s remarkable ability to weave together intimate family drama with broader questions […]

Grady Hendrix has built his reputation on transforming familiar settings into landscapes of terror, and in “The Blanks,” he delivers perhaps his most unsettling work yet. This haunting short story, part of Amazon’s “The Shivers” collection, strips away the veneer of an idyllic summer community to reveal the horrifying compromises people make to maintain their […]

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar stands as one of the most unflinching portrayals of mental illness in American literature. Through the eyes of nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, Plath crafts a narrative that transforms the abstract concept of depression into something viscerally real and terrifyingly accessible. The novel’s central metaphor—the bell jar itself—captures the claustrophobic nature of […]