Author: Stephanie @that_bookish_life

I come to Riley Sager as a horror enthusiast who just wants to be entertained by his twisty take on classic horror tropes.

This time, Sager takes his pen to the well trod Rear Window.

Actress Casey Fletcher, recently widowed after her husband drowns in the lake outside their home, is exiled to her family’s remote lakehouse manor following a tabloid scandal. Casey spends her time drinking the days away and spying on her new neighbors in the house across the lake (*snap snap*). After Casey saves the wife, Katherine, from drowning they strike up a friendship. Casey’s continued voyeurism has her increasingly worried Katherine’s marriage is abusive, she eventually thinks husband Tom killed Katherine after she goes missing and is determined to prove it.

The plot of The House Across the Lake is bound to be somewhat divisive, the ending gets kind of wild and the whole neighbor witnessing a murder, unreliable/drunk narrator thing has been done ad nauseam, but that’s exactly why I appreciate a fresh look at it. Just when you think you know exactly how everything ends Sager pulls the rug out from under you.

Not my favorite Riley Sager (at this point I think it’s bound to remain Final Girls – but I’m open so keep’ em coming!) but a fun little page turner on par with Sager’s other offerings.

Sam is the boy next door to Percy’s family’s summer cabin in rural Canada. They’re summer friends and eventually more over the course of their teen years until something big rips them apart. Decades later Percy returns to town for Sam’s mothers funeral, it’s the first time they’re seeing one another since things fell apart.

Every Summer After feels like summer. It will have you nostalgic for slow summer days, living in bathing suits and flip flops, you can practically smell the sunscreen and feel the mosquito bites. Percy and Sam’s story is told with a dual timeline, the frequent switches between then and now, plus a narrative covering “six summers and one weekend” in little more than 300 pages really keeps the story moving.

I wasn’t exactly blown away by this one (I mean, this is probably THE book of summer ’22, or at least a serious contender for the top and it’s so rare that a much hyped book fully lives up to expectation for me) but I did find  Every Summer After quite a treat for summer/beach reading – definitely peak toes in the sand reading! It has a lot of overlap with Christina Lauren’s Love and Other Words and I found that story to be more impactful.

I love time travel stories.

I love Emma Straub.

This Time Tomorrow was a highly anticipated read for me.

On the morning of her 40th birthday Alice wakes up in her childhood bedroom, the year is 1996 and she’s sixteen-years-old. Alice is thrust back to a world of SAT prep classes, high school angst, and teen boys she has idealized over the decades through a haze of nostalgia.

She’s also back in a time where her beloved father isn’t nearing the end of his life, but healthy, young, and very much alive. Alice wonders if she does things differently this time around whether she might be living a very different life than she does now. It’s delightfully reminiscent of Peggy Sue Got Married, in fact that movie is mentioned along with some other time travel favorites.

Time travel stories trod a fine line between value added and distracting. Sometimes the narrative relies on the time travel aspect far too much and the story becomes bogged down or repetitive. I don’t think that happens here. In This Time Tomorrow Straub utilizes time travel to explore the concept of time and mortality, the way relationships and perspectives thereof shift and evolve, and the FOMO of paths not taken.

At its heart the story is really about a father-daughter relationship. So many stories focus on mothers and daughters, I really appreciate this slightly different angle. Emma Straub has said she drew inspiration from her own father’s (author Peter Straub) illness.

A fun, touching, delightfully affirming story with all the interpersonal insight one expects of Straub, plus a healthy dose of 90s nostalgia to boot.

A young girl caught up by poverty and policing.

Nightcrawling is the story of seventeen-year-old Kiara desperately trying to keep the crumbling roof of their Oakland apartment over the heads of herself, her older brother, and the young abandoned neighbor boy, whose efforts lead her to become embroiled in a police scandal.

Nightcrawling is a story of struggling to survive against impossible odds and impossible choices – content note: it is not a happy story. The writing is gorgeous, author Leila Mottley is a poet laureate and it shows. What makes this book even more impressive is Mottley began writing it as a seventeen-year-old herself.

Nightcrawling is a remarkable debut that just made the Booker Prize longlist; Mottley is the youngest author to ever make the list at age 20!

I think it’s well established by now when I’m struggling with real world events reading about those same topics is some sort of weird coping mechanism for me.

Enter this 650+ page tome on abortion in America!

With painstaking detail author Joshua Prager covers 50 years of American history relating to abortion in The Family Roe fleshing out not only important players, such as Jane Roe herself, AKA Norma McCorvey, in the landmark Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion for all U.S. citizens regardless of geographical location, but also providing social and cultural context on the topic (pre-Dobbs which upended everything including the legitimacy of the Supreme Court! The Family Roe published in September 2021.)

I knew a good bit about the topic of abortion in America going into this book and The Family Roe further enriched my understanding.

One of the most interesting parts of this book for me is the discussion of the Roe adjacent case, 1992’s Planned Parenthood vs. Casey and specifically how conservative justices wanted to use it as an opportunity to overturn Roe, but ultimately felt it unconstitutional to do so, that it would erode the authority of SCOTUS and damage trust in our nation’s democratic institutions.  And yet… SCOTUS came to the exact opposite conclusion with Dobbs. Ain’t that some shit?

A+ for effort on this one. The Family Roe is a 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Nonfiction and it shows. The balance of comprehensive reporting plus engaging narratives woven throughout is truly impressive.

You’ll definitely want this one on your radar for Spooky Season reading!

Mallory Quinn is fresh out of rehab when she lands a summer job as a live-in nanny to an affluent family with a precocious five-year-old. Said child spends afternoons in their room drawing and before long those pictures go from the typical kindergarten offerings to something more detailed and sinister.

Hidden Pictures is what I’d consider to be a horror thriller. Mallory piecing together the significance of the pictures keeps the pages turning quickly. I liked the inclusion of actual illustrations, they really up the creep factor, and the balance of classic horror elements blending with more of a modern thriller twist.

Liv wakes up in the back of a cab with no idea how she got there or where she’s going, the only clues a bloody knife in her pocket and messages scribbled on her body, many of which urge her to “STAY AWAKE” (*snap snap*)

Meanwhile, detectives are investigating the murder of a man who was stabbed in his bed, the same “Stay Awake” message left at the crime scene. Is Liv a victim or a murderer? Not even she knows the answer.

Stay Awake is a well plotted and paced, twisty thriller. It held my interest and had me anxious to find out how all the pieces fit together. Thrillers aren’t always my jam, but I quite enjoyed this one.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced review copy.

I’ve sat on reviewing this book for a long time because I struggle to find the words to convey my thoughts about it in a succinct way.

I’m giving up on a comprehensive review and instead I’ll say Against the Loveless World is beautiful and wrenching, an immersive story of a Palestinian woman displaced by politics, colonizers, and patriarchy trying to survive, live, and love in an inhospitable world.

The title comes from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. The writing is gorgeous and impactful; both the writing and reading of this story is a political act.

Against the Loveless World is a 2021 Aspen Words Prize Finalist.

Thank You for Listening is my first experience with Julia Whelan, both as an author and audiobook narrator, and I now understand the love!

Sewanee was poised to become the next It Girl in Hollywood until an accident left her physically and mentally scarred. Years later she’s a successful audiobook narrator, content in her life and career if not exactly thriving or chasing dreams any longer.

While normally eschewing romance books with their unrealistic HEAs Sewanee accepts an offer she can’t refuse to narrate a romance book for which she has been handpicked by a beloved novelist opposite Brock McKnight, a lusted after voice in romance narration whose real identity is a well kept secret and who has secrets and scars of his own. Over the course of their audiobook production Sewanee and Brock’s relationship develops from professional, to friendship, to something more.

I especially enjoyed the behind the scenes look at the audiobook world Thank You for Listening provides and the way Whelan plays with common romance tropes within the story, and I always appreciate some witty repartee of which this story has plenty.

I listened to most of the book on audio and Whelan’s narration really does elevate the story. Having come to enjoy audiobooks somewhat reluctantly and relatively recently, this experience has given me new appreciation for the value a skilled narrator can add.

Julia Whelan has narrated more than 400 audiobooks and her catalog consists of many familiar bestsellers, very impressive!

Thanks to Netgalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for an advanced review copy and Libro.fm and HarperAudio for the advanced listening copy.

Bookish People is a book about, well… bookish people. Set at an indie bookstore in Washington D.C. the week in 2017 which began with the white supremacist Unite the Right Rally of Charlottesville, VA featuring “very fine people” like neo-Nazis and Klansman, and Trump enthusiasts, et. al., and ended with the once in a century solar eclipse (what a week, huh?) The story features a cast of bookstore employees but primarily focuses on owner Sophie, who at 54 has recently been widowed and is grieving the loss of her husband while ever so subtly carving out a secret room behind shelves where she can go into hiding, and her much younger events manager Clemi, an aspiring author, who is hosting an event featuring a controversial poet who might bring protestors to their door and who might also be her absentee father, there’s also a tortoise named Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I didn’t realize this going in, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, Bookish People is a character driven work of satirical literary fiction. I feel like perhaps the cover or synopsis may have given me a different impression, but once I caught the vibe I was really very pleasantly surprised by this story!

It’s very of the literary world, Readers will recognize some of the employees and customers (they may even find themselves within the pages) and humorously peppered with gems like describing a new buzzy author as “Lauren Groff meets Haruki Murakami meets Jodi Picoult” or fictional fiction such as a speculative work featuring Vice President Dan Quayle as an undercover narcotics agent, and of course, there’s this seasons bestseller which everyone is reading and the store just can’t seem to keep stocked: The Girl in Gauzy Blue.

The humor is sharp and sophisticated, the characters relatable and endearing, I just really enjoyed this book!

Recommended for fans of Tom Perotta, those who enjoyed Backman’s Anxious People (somewhat similar vibes, I think!) and bookish people everywhere!

This one is severely underrated on Goodreads those reviewers just aren’t getting it!

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Muse Books for an advanced review copy.