BOOKLOVES

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 […]

Eleanor Pilcher’s debut novel “That’s What She Said” arrives with the sort of sharp wit and unabashed honesty that feels both refreshing and necessary in contemporary women’s fiction. The story follows demisexual Beth and her sexually confident best friend Serena as they embark on what they dub a “sexual odyssey” – a journey that begins […]

Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age, opens with a phone call that disrupts everything—a rock through a window, a frantic request, and twenty-five-year-old Emira Tucker reluctantly agreeing to take her employer’s toddler to the grocery store at nearly midnight. What should be a simple favor transforms into a viral nightmare when a security […]

Meredith Hambrock’s sophomore novel She’s a Lamb! is a masterclass in psychological horror disguised as dark comedy, following the catastrophic unraveling of Jessamyn St. Germain, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring musical theater star whose desperate pursuit of stardom leads to devastating consequences. Set against the backdrop of a Vancouver regional theater’s production of The Sound of Music, […]

Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger arrives as a literary earthquake, a memoir so unflinchingly honest about childhood sexual abuse that it demands to be read with the lights on. Winner of both the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023, this translated work from French author Neige Sinno represents her debut in English literature, […]

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca stands as one of literature’s most compelling explorations of how the dead can torment the living. This 1938 gothic masterpiece weaves a tale so psychologically complex that it continues to disturb and captivate readers more than eight decades after its publication. The novel’s opening line—”Last night I dreamt I went to […]