January 2023 Recommendations Roundup

Is there anything better than curling up and reading inside while it’s cold outside? I don’t think so!  Here are a bunch of new fiction reads to explore!  First up, new year, new thriller from a favorite author…

Jake Hayes is missing. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he is blowing off steam at a friend’s house after their heated fight the night before. But then a day goes by. Two days. Five. And Jake is still nowhere to be found. Lily Scott, Nina’s friend and coworker, thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two decide that nobody can find out what happened leading up to Jake’s disappearance, especially not Nina. But Nina is out there looking for her husband, and she won’t stop until the truth is discovered. You can read more and get your copy here.

Between the World Wars, the six Mitford sisters—each more beautiful, brilliant, and eccentric than the next—dominate the English political, literary, and social scenes. Though they've weathered scandals before, the family falls into disarray when Diana divorces her wealthy husband to marry a fascist leader and Unity follows her sister's lead all the way to Munich, inciting rumors that she's become Hitler's mistress. As the Nazis rise in power, novelist Nancy Mitford grows suspicious of her sisters' constant visits to Germany and the high-ranking fascist company they keep. When she overhears alarming conversations and uncovers disquieting documents, Nancy must make excruciating choices as Great Britain goes to war with Germany. You can read more and get your copy here.

Paige Lancaster, single mom and prodigal daughter, has returned to the East Coast from her prestigious, well-paid job in Los Angeles, writing for the smartest detective series on television. Something terrible happened to her back in Hollywood and now she’s broke, homeless, and living with her widowed mother and eight-year-old daughter in her Connecticut hometown. Paige needs to buckle down and find a new writing gig but first, she meets the movers and shakers of Izzy’s school’s Parent Booster Association, run by the intimidatingly gorgeous Ainsley Anderson, who just happens to be married to Paige’s old high school flame, John. Then she shows up at the annual Parents and Pinot fundraiser, held at Ainsley and John’s dazzling mansion in the toniest part of town; later that night, Ainsley turns up dead at the bottom of her own driveway. Did she fall? Or was she pushed? In a fast-paced new novel in the vein of Big Little Lies, a single mom goes undercover to investigate a host of disturbing secrets held by the leaders of a local suburban parent-school association, including embezzlement, bribery, adultery, and murder. You can read more and get your copy here.

Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page.  But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary’s simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline—a guidebook for getting started on a new path. A must read for anyone who wonders about the life that got away. You can read more and get your copy here.

London, 1799. Dora Blake, an aspiring jewelry artist, lives with her odious uncle atop her late parents’ once-famed shop of antiquities. After a mysterious Greek vase is delivered, her uncle begins to act suspiciously, keeping the vase locked in the store’s basement, away from prying eyes—including Dora’s. Intrigued by her uncle’s peculiar behavior, Dora turns to young, ambitious antiquarian scholar Edward Lawrence who eagerly agrees to help. Edward believes the ancient vase is the key that will unlock his academic future; Dora sees it as a chance to establish her own name. But what Edward discovers about the vase has Dora questioning everything she has believed about her life, her family, and the world as she knows it. As Dora uncovers the truth, she comes to understand that some doors are locked and some mysteries are buried for a reason, while others are closer to the surface than they appear. You can read more and get your copy here.

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first modern First Lady. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours. Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. She dated and traveled relentlessly before scandalizing the world by marrying a foreigner, living abroad, climbing ruins, cruising the oceans, and wandering Europe braless and barefoot. But Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together. Jackie’s story—treated like a national soap opera and transmitted through newspapers, magazines, images, and TV during the 1960s and 1970s—became wired into America’s emotional grid. Here, in Finding Jackie, she’s rediscovered as an adventurer, a wanderer, a woman, and an idea in whom many Americans and people around the globe have deeply, fiercely wanted to believe. You can read more and get your copy here.

For most of Jen Sookfong Lee's life, pop culture was an escape from family tragedy and a means of fitting in with the larger culture around her. Anne of Green Gables promised her that, despite losing her father at the age of twelve, one day she might still have the loving family of her dreams. Princess Diana was proof that maybe there was more to being a good girl after all. And yet as Jen grew up, she began to recognize the ways in which pop culture was not made for someone like her—the child of Chinese immigrant parents who looked for safety in the invisibility afforded by embracing model minority myths. Ranging from the unattainable perfection of Gwyneth Paltrow and the father-figure familiarity of Bob Ross to the long shadow cast by The Joy Luck Club and the life lessons she has learned from Rihanna, Jen weaves together key moments in pop culture with stories of her own failings, longings, and struggles as she navigates the minefields that come with carving her own path as an Asian woman, single mother, and writer. And with great wit, bracing honesty, and a deep appreciation for the ways culture shapes us, she draws direct lines between the spectacle of the popular, the intimacy of our personal bonds, and the social foundations of our collective obsessions. You can read more and get your copy here.

And finally, there is this fascinating unraveling of a family mystery…

At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land—and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich? You can read more and get your copy here.

Thanks to those of you who brought two more book to stream adaptations to my attention! You’ll want to check them out…

The Lying Life of Adults is based on the novel by Elena Ferrante. Set in Naples, Italy, the narrative centers on teenager Giovanna. As Giovanna's adolescence progresses, her relationship with her image-obsessed parents begins to suffer. After overhearing an unflattering comment made by her father, Giovanna is determined to track down the one person who might hold all the answers. You can watch the trailer here.

The teaser for the adaptation of The Last Thing He Told Me (starring Jennifer Garner) just dropped this week. You can watch it here.

Fleishman is in Trouble author and creator Taffy Brodesser-Akner was recently interviewed on Fresh Air. You can listen here.

The Scooby gang is back! Well, except for Scooby. Velma has a murder mystery on her hands in the first full-length trailer for Velma, Mindy Kaling’s animated series centered on the origins of the beloved brainiac from the Scooby-Doo franchise. Co-creator and executive producer Kaling voices the titular character, now South Asian, and recounts the story of the "bone-chilling events" that led her to assemble "the greatest team of spooky mystery-solvers ever" in the trailer. You can watch it here.