By Emma Pattee
Marysue Rucci Books, 2025. 227 pages. Fiction.
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there's nothing to do but walk. Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she's determined to change her life.
Very quickly in chapter one, this massive, life changing earthquake takes place on the West Coast of the United States. This book was a quick read because it was hard for me to put down but fair warning it is emotionally intense! We experience the story through Annie’s point of view but we jump back in forth through time. The book is more about Annie and her experiences before, during and after the earthquake. The descriptions of the natural disaster feel realistic and you can tell the author has done her research. Annie is a sympathetic character and despite her flaws and shortcomings you can’t help but love her and cheer her on as she searches for her husband among the wreckage of Portland.
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By Kimberly King Parsons
Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. 269 pages. Fiction.
The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and--most heartbreaking of all--her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago. When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine--long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in--and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?
by Fran Littlewood
Henry Hold and Company, 2023. 256 pages. Fiction.
Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled--the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she's really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away. Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she'll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them … and, most important, remind herself.
JK
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