By Amy Poeppel
Atria, 2023. 394 pages. Fiction.
In the Sweet Spot, a dive bar at the heart of Greenwich Village, three women, when a baby lands on their collective doorstep, rise to the occasion in order to forgive, to forget and to track down the wayward parents, unexpectedly finding their own happily-ever-afters along the way.
I enjoyed this book and loved watching the relationships between the 3 women start very contentious and transform into a chosen family. Even with a large cast of characters, the writing was clear and each person unique enough that it was not difficult to follow all the intricate plot details. The men take a back seat in this story and the women are the leads. A very feel-good read that is humorous and all about misunderstandings and new beginnings.
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By Laurie Frankel
Henry Holt and Company, 2024 386 pages. Fiction.
India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV star. But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do - she tells a journalist the truth: it's a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India's an adoptive mom herself and knows there's so much more to her family than tragedy. Soon she's at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her daughter Fig knows they need help - and who better to call for help than family? Because India's not just an adoptive mom. She also had a baby she gave up for adoption her senior year of high school. That baby is now sixteen, excited to meet her birth mother and eager to help, but she also has an agenda and secrets of her own.
By Jenny Jackson
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2023. 304 pages. Fiction.
Darley, the eldest daughter in the Stockton family, has never worried about money. The product of generational wealth and capitalist success, Darley renounced her inheritance when she married Malcolm, a first generation Korean American with a lucrative job in banking. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. Georgiana, newly graduated from Brown and proud to think of herself as a "do-gooder," has enough money from her trust that she's able to work for a pittance at a not-for-profit, where she has started a secret love affair with a senior colleague. But when a scandal derails Malcolm's career, leaving Darley financially in the lurch, when Sasha glimpses the less-than-attractive attributes beneath the Stockton brood's carefully-guarded fȧade, and when Georgiana discovers her boyfriend is married and still in love with his wife, they must all come to terms with what money can't buy--the bonds of love that can make and unmake a family. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of affluent WASPS in New York and full of recognizable if fallible characters (and a couple of appalling ones!), it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, about the haves and have-nots and the nuances in between, and the insanity of first love--Pineapple Street is a scintillating, wryly comic novel of race, class, wealth and privilege in an age that disdains all of it.
JK
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