The Long Way Home / by Robin Pilcher

English-born Claire Barclay's mother remarried Leo after the family lost their father to cancer. It may have been a blessing in disguise because Leo became more beloved by Claire than her biological father could have been. So when Claire, now living in New York as a restauranteur with her adoring husband Art, receives word that Leo is ill and needs full-time care, she flies back to Britain, back to Leo's quaint Scottish manor, to be with him. The situation may seem relatively uncomplicated--Leo's physically incapable of living alone but refuses to leave his home--but it presents a problem for Claire and Art who, even though they agree to relocate temporarily to Scotland, are presented with Leo's lingering financial woes as well as his medical ones. To add to things, Claire's teenage love Jonas Fairweather is back on the scene as a local realtor/financier and Claire has to deal with her emotional feelings--she abandoned her romance with Jonas after meeting Art by chance just prior to her first year of college--as well as the logistical constraints relating to Leo.

Pilcher is actually the son of Rosamund Pilcher (cozy romance author of titles like Winter Solstice and An Ocean Apart) and shares many of his mother's stylistic charm and delicate relationship nuances. He's been well-received for previous titles and has found success in the mainstream as well as niche markets, however this book is a bit bland by comparison. While the plot is perfectly plausible, the story hovers too much around Claire's issues and though intermingling segments highlight her earlier life as well as her now happy partnership with her husband, there really isn't enough conflict to involve the reader in her story or emotions. The other characters read a little too formulaic. They're all a little too much like one another to provide any originality as the drama unfolds, leaving things a little too tame, even by cozy standards. The author's clearly not another Nicholas Sparks, nor is he Debbie Macomber, but his other titles may intrigue readers more than this one. (FIC PILCHER)

I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother / by Allison Pearson

Kate Reddy has to work very hard to keep her life how she wants it. A hedge-fund manager for one of London's leading brokerage firms, she's also a wife to a loving husband, also a corporate executive, and mother to two small beautiful but sometimes bratty children. That her mind is forever toggling between accounts, deadlines, foreign clients and bake sale cookies, show-and-tell projects and doctor's check-ups is a given. But she's someone who can do it. She's not like her friends (quitters) who've forsaken the rat race for homemaking and are no longer the 'friends' they used to be. And while she misses out on a few details here or there and might have bypass small engagements or miss a recital in the course of a work week, Kate feels she devotes the attention she needs to each facet of her world. Of course there are times when she truly hates her life, her husband and her kids (who are in the care part-time nanny much of the day, but still) for their very existence. Yet overall she needs the stress and, in a strange way, she likes the challenge and will readily admit to not imagining doing anything else.

So this book has kind of the same exact story as countless others already weighing down the shelves--modern working woman dramatizes her issues. But Pearson, author of I Think I Love You about pop culture-addict teenagers in the seventies, entertains her audience with some fairly humorous anecdotes and add-ons ("Any working mother who says she doesn't bribe her kids can add Liar to her résumé."; or, when speaking of her daughter's reaction to her out-of-town business trips, "Mummy's return is always a cue for an intricate sequence of snubs and punishments."). At least for a little while. Unfortunately Kate's narrative is only amusing for so long as the reader gets to know her character--a headstrong but vulnerable, resourceful yet forgetful, devoted though libertine twenty-first century woman--because the story doesn't really offer any kind of change-up. Things bog down a little in the second half by which time Kate's little introspections seem more like whining than gibing and her oh-so-busy-and-hectic life ceases to impress anyone. (FIC PEARSON)

Deep Down True / by Juliette Fay

Homemaker Dana Stellgarten has a tendency to be a little too nice. Consequently people, even the ones she loves, take advantage of her open, companionable nature and generosity, something which seems especially evident now at a particularly volatile time in her life. Her husband Kenneth recently left her for another, younger woman and now she and her two kids--Morgan, 12, and Grady, 7--have to get by on the meager monthly alimony checks. When Dana's teenage niece Alder shows up on the front door, wanting to move in after another falling out with her mom, it seems things can't get any worse. They do though. Before long, Dana learns that her daughter (only a sixth grader) is bulimic and Grady, whom she knows has been deeply wounded by the divorce (but how deeply?), has been fighting and causing trouble in school. Alder too, still sleeping on the couch a month after her arrival, has something going on which Dana suspects may not be entirely respectable. And what is she going to do now that her ex-husband's just told her that he's working at half his normal salary? A weaker mother might be reeling from the seemingly endless succession of woes but strangely, with Dana, that's not the case at all.

When Juliette Fay's debut novel Shelter Me, published in 2009, managed to distinguish itself from the other, always endless proliferation of domestic fiction novels, many readers and critics chalked it up as a one-hit wonder. It wasn't. With the same effortless storytelling of Anna Quindlen and the striking familiar-ness of Elizabeth Berg, Fay's Deep Down True attracts the reader with a welcomed magnetism, managing to do what so many other similarly written novels can't avoid: lose the interest of the reader mid-way through leaving the anticlimactic conclusion just that--a disappointing anti-climax. Dana as a character is both sympathetic but flawed, limited yet capable, thoroughly revealing that the disproportionate amoung of careless offenses and injuries tossed her way are very much felt and internalized like anyone else would feel them. There's a curious, yet entirely accurate, way in which Dana is affected by and reacts to her life circumstances. She's subjected to the very same social threshing floor her kids are confronted by, misled by her own judgments, plagued by her desire for acceptance and inept at expressing her emotions. And quite a bit of the book is devoted to just the type of extremely uncomfortable emotional navigation faced by people at all levels, a world of untrustworthy peers and awakened sensitivities which, as Fay is so apt at detailing, changes little with age. As it follows through very well on the world seen through Dana's eyes, the novel conveys a colorful portrait of an imperfect yet not despairing, broken-hearted yet willing-to-work-at-it character who grows up a little in her own way right alongside her kids. (FIC FAY)

The Island / by Elin Hildebrand

It's the event Birdie Cousins has been waiting for: her daughter Chess (Francesca) is finally getting married. Everything's been planned for the day of the wedding. All the elegant, lavish plans are set in motion for the refined ceremony and subsequent celebration to be held at the family's Nantucket island home with funds provided upfront by Chess's father/Birdie's ex-husband Grant. Then the bottom falls out. First Chess calls her mother to tell her she's broken off her engagement to heartthrob fiance Michael Morgan for no apparent reason other than prenuptual jitters. Next, Chess quits her prestigious editing job at a major lifestyle magazine, and then Michael himself dies tragically in a Rock climbing accident; the mini-vacation with his brother Nick was supposed to be a way of taking his mind off his recent heartbreak. Chess is now more than just a mess; she's become a wreck of emotional guilt and depression, pushed to drastic extremes like shaving her head and holing herself up in her apartment permanently.

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Birdie's unsure of what action should be taken--Chess has always been the responsible, got-it-together girl. Other than enlisting the aid of her second, younger daughter Tate, it's hard to think of the right thing to do. Finally Birdie decides a family retreat is what's needed. Mom and both daughters will spend a month long holiday on the same Tuckernuck Island beach house where the wedding ceremony was to take place. Birdie's sister India, an artist-socialite who's overcome the vast tragedy herself with the suicide of her celebrity sculptor husband, will complete the party.

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This is Hilderbrand's latest in a long line of successful "beach reads", all of which have been set in and around the same Cape Cod region where she and her family live year-round. The Island reads pretty much like the cover looks: everything's nice and non-threatening. Everyone is well-off and well-settled, if not downright rich and famous. Stuff happens for a reason with personal growth and lessons learned by all in the end. It's easy to get into the characters, all of whom are sympathetic in their own way, exuding warmth and positive qualities in nearly all situations. And Hilderbrand's language and prose moves things along at a pleasant pace. It's the kind of "never-never land portrait"* of life that can't help but find an audience. (FIC HILDERBRAND)

*Publisher's Weekly

Family Album / by Penelope Lively

UK author Penelope Lively won the Man-Booker award for her riveting 1987 novel Moon Tiger about a globe-trotting woman's conflicted love affairs during the middle of the twentieth century. Known for telling stories through multiple points of view, her fiction predominately focuses on domestic spheres, most specifically families and small, concentrated social networks. Her latest book Family Album visits a sprawling family of six-children, all visibly well-adjusted but internally troubled and mutually encumbered by life's problems.
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Alison Harper is one of those women who's always wanted a large family. Something of a throwback, she thinks, to an era many years ago when large families of six or more children were the norm and everyone did things together (i.e., meals, housework, birthday parties, picnics, etc.) is her ideal. Reality isn't far from her dream actually. It's at Allersmead, their sprawling country estate highlighted by an old but spacious house, that Alison and husband Charles, a writer of obscure non-fiction books, live with their six children--two boys and four girls--and an au paire housekeeper, Ingrid. Things are nice from the outside looking in. Yet despite an external facade which fronts a flourishing home life, blissful childhoods for each of her kids and a happy marriage, Alison is being torn apart by the stress of a world beyond her control--one which can't hide her own violent emotional outbursts, shady secrets ongoing behind her back, and Charles' increasing emotional indifference.

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All the children are normal by relative standards, and even amiable toward one another, but problems are evident early on. Paul, the oldest, is something of a disappointment to his father who views his son's rebellious streak, poor academic record and experimental drug use with utter disdain and cool derision, a trend only furthering Paul's dissent into a problematic adulthood. And while the remaining siblings--the middle three girls Gina, Sandra and Clare followed by Roger and Katie, the youngest--are successful in their endeavours, few remain close as time passes, each choosing life outside the family sphere. Gina, Clare and Katie, foreign correspondent, professional dancer and teacher respectively, remain far away from Allersmead until each, not totally by their own choosing, return decades later. The beautiful Sandra lives abroad in the world of modelling and fashion design, always with a steady parade of male companions while Roger, a doctor, is now a continent away in Toronto. All have remained childless.

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Lively is good at depicting normal stuff, which is not-so-happy and unhappy stuff more often than not though at least truthful and accurate in many cases. Through the minds of each family member at various times ranging from the early years in the late 1970's to the present, multiple points of view are presented filling the reader in on the untidy bits of the family's existence. This manner of burrowing beneath the surface reveals the messy, unpleasant and even disappointing episodes in the family's tenure to go along with a smaller but still evident portion of jubilant times, but it's not as if the chiefly damaging issues are horribly scandalous or grossly disturbing. The Harpers, though not a terribly close-knit or even an especially loving modern clan, reflect the problems inherent in life at large, a vision Lively extraordinarily evokes in uniquely provocative and starkly compelling fashion. (FIC LIVELY)

Every Last One: A Novel / by Anna Quindlen

"Always is such a very long time." (p.186)
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Mary Beth Latham enjoys a good life. Residing in the same pleasant New England town she grew up in, she's a loving wife to all-around good guy husband Glynn, devoted mother and successful entrepeneur who strives to maintain quality business ethics. By all accounts she's faired a great deal better than her older sister Alice who's latest brainstorm netted a test tube baby and a disproportionate amount of stress and paranoia. The same goes for most of her friends, many of whom she's known all her life and are frequently divorced, cruelly discarded or otherwise tagged as "a mess", and always clamoring to Mary Beth for support.
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Though her time and attention are heavily in demand, things are more concentrated on her kids' lives (and her kids' friends) at the moment, each a teenager and embattled with their own dilemmas. 17-year-old Ruby is (for the most part) an all-around great kid, so much so that Kiernan, her sensitive, emotionally damaged and pathetically clingy boyfriend, is decimated by Ruby's honest and dignified decision to dump him. As the aftermath of the young couple's breakup gets ugly, Mary Beth's already strained emotional stamina becomes taxed while meanwhile twins Max and Alex, an alarmingly different pair, are both 14 and enduring their own complicated trials of youth. Max, the unathletic, indoor type, is seriously depressed enough for Mary Beth to engage the use of a therapist and Alex, though visibly the more well-adjusted, is actually the one growing more distant with each passing day. So it goes for Mary Beth (who wouldn't trade it all for the world) until the day everything changes.
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Quindlen is very good. Intuitive and substance-driven, she's tapped into the far less intact and far more amiss world of everyday lives, emotions, personalities and problems. It's the facile, gentle nature of her writing which most engages. Her stories are easy: easy to read, easy to follow, easy to identify with and, most importantly, easy to believe. As dramatic as the story gets (and it gets pretty intense), readers sincerely buy into the concepts and situations elicited. Everything's really a tradeoff in Quindlen's world; every life has its perks and pitfalls, peaks and valleys. People are often ill-equipped for failures and disappointments, are often marred by tragedy beyond repair. At the same time these same souls are realized as complete human beings, fitted with stronger attributes and capable of overcoming the many sad and troubling times though it's never guaranteed they will. (FIC QUINDLEN)

Little Children / by Tom Perrotta

A native of the Northeast, Tom Perrotta has been a writer since his days editing his school's newspaper, a period of his life he would later chronicle in his novel Election. After graduating from Yale where he took classes from O. Henry award winner Tobias Wolff, Perrotta began writing fiction, tagging his work with the self-described label of "plain-language American tradition"* similar to Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler. Little Children observes the interconnected lives of several emotionally disturbed thirty somethings living in suburban Boston.

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"I am a painfully ordinary person." (p. 18)

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The local playground is the setting for quite a lot of drama during a brief period in one suburban Boston neighborhood. Sarah is 30, married and a mother when it hits her one day while pushing her daughter Lucy on the swing that she's become like every other woman at the playground--her friends!?!?--who caddily poke and prod about every little thing, pathetically over- obsessed with their trivial lives, or so it seems. So depressed is she by this revelation that she takes up a casual dare promoted by one of her counterparts to flirt with the handsome dad across the way. The lark becomes more than Sarah bargained for as she and the stranger, Todd, another unhappy spouse, enter into an affair, even accommodating their liasons around periods when their kids can play together. Soon discovering the fling is Kathy, Todd's exceptionally beautiful and domineering wife who reveals, in twisted fashion, that she's more insulted than angry over Todd's infidelity, viewing Sarah as a woman who's clearly "beneath her" in every respect.

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Meanwhile in the same neighborhood not too far away, 33-year-old Larry Moon is a former police officer whose life has been plagued with nothing but anguish and guilt after he mistakenly shot and killed a black teenager. To outlet his distress and to give his life a sense of purpose, Larry has become obsessed to the point of rage over the fact that Ronald McGorvey, a sex offender, is allowed to live in his neighborhood. Larry's continued harassment leads to an encounter with Ronald's mother, May, who ends up dead after suffering a fatal stroke. Shortly afterwards, Sarah, intending to tell husband Richard she's leaving him for Todd, discovers that Richard's already left her for another woman, a pornographic actress. Still intending to elope with Todd, Sarah embarks en route to their rendezvous point--the playground--only to find, instead of Todd, a lurking Ronald being followed by Larry.

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Little Children reads much like a Robert Altman film plays--think Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, etc.--with multiple, intertwined storylines played out over a relatively short period (Short Cuts was actually based on a collection of Raymond Chandler short stories). Perrotta's writing is a little less impartial than Altman's reserved, non-judgmental demeanor, but his characters can't help but resonate with the contemporary reader. Each indivdual is imbued with a sense of disillusionment, even with lives relatively free of problems and, in many respects, rather flourishing and prosperous. The central characters, Sarah and Todd, seem the most gutted by life's natural courses and transitions, each painfully realizing the lives they've had to "settle for", concluding that their weaknesses define them and their situations far better than any more positive personal attributes ever could. This novel, published in 2004, was ultimately made into a feature film starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. It garnered 3 Academy Award nominations including Winslet, as Sarah, for best actress.

*Shanahan, Mark. "Adaptation: Tom Perrotta is growing accustomed to seeing his books on the big screen", The Boston Globe, 2006.

Never Change / by Elizabeth Berg

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Elizabeth Berg is an American novelist gifted with an ability to generate sympathy for largely unappealing characters. Her novel Open House was an Oprah Book of the Month in 2004. In Never Change, lonely middle-aged Myra Lipinsky plods through her spinster existence until her job as a hospice nurse reconnects her with an old friend from her teenage years, a man now terminally ill with a brain tumor.

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"I am the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom..." p.5

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Self-characterized as something of a dateless wonder throughout her youth and into adulthood (though she "would have gone if asked"), 51-year-old Myra Lipinsky has become accustomed to the reclusive, independent lifestyle. Her nursing career's been rewarding enough to acquire what she feels is relative contentment and she does have her dog, Frank, for companionship. But when, by chance, she becomes caretaker to her long-ago hearthrob Chip Reardon, Myra finds that the unrequited love she once had in high school is still going strong, even if Chip is dying of cancer.

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Thirty years later, Chip is still the same ("the boy Chip dressed up as the man Chip") and single, never having married though never lacking opportunities. His diminishing condition withstanding, Myrah finds to her delight that remnants of the pair's affable relationship from high school are still intact, progressively becoming more intimate as time passes. The mutual accountability warranted by Chip's illness and Myra's affection and compassion soon gives way to genuine chemistry shared by each, manifesting a "something-more-than-friends" kind of bond as Myra seizes the opportunity she'd secretly longed for so long ago while there's still time.

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Berg is a very pleasant writer, "reassuringly predictable"* in her premise, story arc and resolution, depicting ordinary, anti-glamorous protagonists amidst equally run-of-the-mill situations. Though unpleasant and perceivably heartbreaking events are guaranteed to occur, rarely does the reader sense that Berg's heroines, in this case Myra, won't be able to overcome it. Emotional growth and enlightened revelations are major spotlight issues (i.e., Chip really can love Myra the way he's loved more attractive women, Myra really is cared for at large, even the most severe grief can be gotten over, etc.).

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*Publishers Weekly

New African-American Fiction Titles!

Between Goodbyes

by Anita Bunkley
After a harrowing escape to Florida aboard a renegade boat of Haitians, Afro-Cuban Niya Loundres must now cope with unfamiliar surroundings and fair-weather ‘friends’. By chance she lands a waitress job at a floundering Jamaican restaurant where, with time, she works her way into a life as a nightclub dancer. Meshing natural ability with innate beauty, Niya becomes in-demand almost overnight; finding success to be as treacherous as it is advantageous.



What You Won’t Do for Love

by Wendy Coakley-Thompson
After another letdown in the romance department, Chaney Braxton moves to Washington D.C. hoping for a fresh start. One day while walking her sister’s dog, she meets Devin Rhym who, in addition to being a veterinarian, also has a penchant for Asian cuisine. As sparks fly between Chaney and Devin, so does the baggage as past relationships, family drama, and tragedy force each to re-evaluate their feelings.

Trouble Loves Company

by Angie Daniels
Renee, Danielle, and Kayla are three sexy, sassy thirty-somethings rolling with life’s ups and downs and together sharing life’s hard-learned lessons. Despite a devoted husband, romance author Renee is dissatisfied with marriage; viewing it more and more as the button-down lifestyle she’s always dreaded. Kayla just knows the Rev. Leroy Brown will leave his family for her until she finds him in bed with another woman (not his wife) and single mom Danielle struggles to raise her teenage daughter even as her own relationship drama heats up.



Gotta’ Keep on Tryin’

by Virginia Deberry & Donna Grant
Pat and Gayle are longtime best friends who co-own and operate a business together—Ell & Me, Inc., a children’s toy company based around a storytime character Gayle created several years ago. But trouble arises when secrets from the past emerge threatening to destroy both their business partnership and time-tested friendship.