My very favorite Bossy July reads!
I did a lot of traveling and some great reading last month, but I didn't do a lot of reviewing. My Bossy takes on more great reads are to come--but I do have some fantastic July favorites to share with you here.
If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think!
And I'd also love to hear: what are some of your recent favorite reads?
01 Sandwich by Catherine Newman
Sandwich is beautifully wrought story of complications and familial adoration from Catherine Newman, with the unapologetically contradictory and menopausal Rocky at the heart of the messy, wonderful extended family.
Rocky's family has been vacationing in Cape Cod for twenty years. She's built years of happy memories in their low-key beach house rental.
This year, she's sandwiched between her half-grown children and her aging parents. And the carefree vacations of the past feel light years away, because Rocky's menopausal rage threatens to undo any joy she might gain from spending time in her favorite place.
To save their treasured family time together, Rocky may have to share secrets she never intended to reveal.
Sandwich made me laugh, twisted my heart, and kept me interested throughout. I just adored all of the heart and humor in Sandwich.
Catherine Newman is also the author of other books I love: We All Want Impossible Things, Waiting for Birdy, and How to Be a Person: 65 Hugely Useful, Super-Important Skills to Learn Before You're Grown Up.
For my full review of this book, please see Sandwich.
02 All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
Whitaker offers several interconnected storylines, and while each one individually appealed to me, I felt a growing lack of connection to the characters as the tales melded into another: young friendship, serial killer, outlaw search, small-town intrigue, and longtime mysteries revealed.
Chris Whitaker's novel All the Colors of the Dark builds a story of a deep friendship between two young outcasts in small-town Monta Clare, Missouri: Patch, a pirate-playing young man missing one eye, whose mother is unreliable and a substance abuser; and Saint, a tomboy raised by her fearless grandmother.
A kidnaper and serial killer intrudes on the quiet community and directly impacts Patch and Saint. The horrifying crimes seems to be motivated by religious fanaticism, and both Patch and Saint's futures are shaped by their ties to the darkly disturbing events.
I adored the early building of the deep connection and affection between Saint and Patch. And I was intrigued by the disparate-seeming story that soon emerges, beginning with the premise of a serial killer whose actions haunt our main characters and whose horrifying spectre looms over them.
But the storytelling frequently felt scattered to me, with overly dramatic moments, abrupt statements that are seemingly meant to add impact, and what felt like self-conscious attempts to be offbeat. Characters frequently offer grand speeches to each other about how the world works, and these didn't feel genuine or likely to me.
Yet the cast of characters is colorful, and I enjoyed the time I spent with them.
Click here for my full review of All the Colors of the Dark. Chris Whitaker is also the author of We Begin at the End, a novel I adored.
03 Grey Dog by Elliott Gish
Grey Dog begins as an immersive historical fiction story of a young teacher with a shocking past in 1900s rural England, but it becomes a haunting feminist, magical realism story about taking back power and letting go of restrictive expectations.
It's 1901, and Ada Byrd has accepted a teaching position in a rural community following a scandal and abrupt departure from her last post. Her cruel, controlling father is high up in the school board, so while he lords over her this "favor" of allowing her to serve a new role, he also forces her to be a teacher in the first place.
Ada boards with a staid, kind, slightly boring couple and also befriends the minister's wife. She's determined not to make any waves. But a young, half-feral female student and a shockingly unorthodox widow both seem to hold mysterious secrets--and both intrigue Ada.
Ada begins to learn delicate secrets of those in the community even as she protects her own scandalous past.
A haunting power seems to swirl through the small village, both disturbing and intriguing Ada. And the more often she encounters it, the more difficult it becomes for Ada to check her temper, her opinions, her yearning for freedom, and her desire to speak her mind.
This is a feminist historical fiction story in which women--long kept quiet and still, supervised to prevent their freedom, and dismissed and condescended to--strike back, lash out, and reject the constraints put on them. Magical realism allows the force that haunts, challenges, and pushes them to take the form of a beast, whose presence only the bravest women embrace and accept.
I loved the setting and detail of the historical fiction story, but I became fully hooked as the tale morphed into something wonderfully eerie and unusual. I couldn't wait to find out how it ended.
Click here for my full review of Grey Dog. If this book sounds appealing to you, you might also be interested in my Bossy reviews of other historical fiction books set in the 1900s or my Bossy reviews of Gothic stories.
04 Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles
Amor Towles revisits a character from the wonderful Rules of Civility and also offers multiple New York-set tales. Towles's evocative stories drew me in, sometimes made me uncomfortable, and illuminated characters' true natures.
In Table for Two: Fictions, Amor Towles offers six short stories set in New York City and a novella featuring a beloved Towles character that's set in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In the novella Eve in Hollywood, Towles imagines the events following Rules of Civility, which ends with Evelyn Ross's departure from New York in 1938 and the train journey she extends to Los Angeles.
The six New York-set stories all take place around the year 2000, and they consider the impacts of chance encounters, the complications of modern marriages, and more.
Towles's writing is so lovely, I'm willing to follow his stories and his characters anywhere. This one took me a while to finish, but I savored each word.
Amor Towles is also the author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, a book I really liked, and Rules of Civility, which I was even more taken with--the old NYC setting was so vivid, it felt like its own character.
Please click here for my full review of Table for Two.
05 The Goddess of Warsaw by Lisa Barr
Lisa Barr's World War II-set historical fiction follows a Jewish resistance fighter and spy through the Warsaw Ghetto to her second act as a Hollywood movie star, linking the story's two timelines and revealing long-held secrets and mysteries.
In Lisa Barr's newest historical fiction, The Goddess of Warsaw, the author tells a story in two timelines.
In 1943 Warsaw, socialite Bina Blonski is imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto with her husband and thousands of her fellow Jewish citizens. She becomes a spy and begins to resist against the Nazis--but when she falls for another resistance fighter (her brother-in-law), things get even more complicated.
In 2005 Los Angeles, Sienna Hayes is a Hollywood actress looking to direct. When she meets Golden Age movie star Lena Browning, she becomes determined to make a documentary about Lena's life. But Lena is actually Bina--and her life has been far more complex than almost anyone knows.
Some moments felt overly dramatic--as with Bina's frequently explored obsession with her brother-in-law Aleksander (and her unwise diary entries concerning her passion for him), as well as when Bina immediately inserts herself into the resistance as a key player--but the issue of these elements, which distracted me, paled against the intrigue of the story.
The details of World War II and of resistance to the Nazis are heartstopping, and I was hooked on each of the two timelines in this interconnected story. I loved that brave women that drive the novel in both timelines.
Lisa Barr is also the author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreakables, and Fugitive Colors.
For my full review, check out The Goddess of Warsaw.
06 In Memoriam by Alice Winn
Alice Winn's account of the unrelenting slog of World War I and the beautiful young men set against each other in the trenches serves as a backdrop for a tentatively begun, deep love story born in a British boarding school and blossoming amid the cruelties and horrors of battle.
Alice Winn's gorgeous, brutal, captivating historical fiction In Memoriam is set during World War I.
Henry Gaunt, Sydney Ellwood, and their classmates came as young boys to their sometimes claustrophobic, cruel, and lonely English boarding school; now that they're close to the end of their schooling, they are playful, treasuring each other's friendships.
But by 1914, World War I is drawing most of these young boys into a swirl of wartime horrors. They trade their hesitant confidences and youthful search for comfort and affection within an unforgiving school environment for the cruelties of battle.
Characters struggle with vulnerability and to allow feelings to grow, and all is shaped by the constancy of life-and-death danger and the deep-seated fear of destroying a friendship that both young men cling to more deeply than living itself.
In Memoriam is beautiful, frequently painful, and offers a layered, complicated version of happy ever after. I loved this.
I listened to In Memoriam as an audiobook.
For my full review, please see In Memoriam. You might also be interested in these Bossy reviews of books set during World War I.
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