Table for Two by Amor Towles is a collection of short stories that encompass Towles' signature style: subtle humor, charm, and action abound. The first unrelated half takes place in (or ending up in) New York and the second half follow Eve, the 1939 protagonist from Towles's Rules of Civility . At the end of that book readers learn she stays on the train from New York to L.A., instead of getting off to return to her parents in Indiana like was expected. The characters

Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier packed just enough punch in the plot to keep me going. The characters were decently drawn (although recognizable) and the narrative came together nicely. Right up until the very end. At the start of the novel, Geo is at her own trial for being an accessory to a murder that happened fourteen years prior. The killer was her high school boyfriend, and the victim was Geo's best friend. Geo is sentenced to five years and right after she

Every once in a while, I discover an author who's new to me, and they become someone that will now always jump off the bookshelf. Abbi Waxman immediately won me over with Other's People's Houses . Her hilarious and whip-smart writing made me an instant fan. This story is about a neighborhood and the people that live there. As the title hints at, one can never tell what's going on behind closed doors. This becomes glaringly clear after Frances Bloom, the main charact

I love a good soapy drama. A wicked, gossipy neighborhood tale just hits the spot sometimes. I was drawn to The Mother Next Door by Tara Laskowski because of its comparison to Big Little Lies , which is a favorite of this reader. In some ways it was similar, the school mothers forming cliques with a hierarchy of women. And they certainly had secrets to keep. But halfway through this novel my interest was waning, perhaps because the characters seemed like stereotypes