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

This is a story about a city pool except it isn't. It's a story about community and connectedness in the heart of London. Libby Page hits the nail on the head with the tone of The Lido , finding the perfect spot between sentimentality and determinism. Rosemary has been coming to the lido (a British word for municipal pool) for eighty years. She swam there as a girl during the second world war; met her beloved husband George at the lido and became engaged poolside; and

The Perfect Child by Lucinda Berry is a spine-tingling, unputdownable book. It sucks you in from page one and does not let go until the last one. Christopher and Hannah Bauer are a husband and wife who work at the same hospital. He an orthopedic surgeon and she a nurse. When a severely malnourished, battered and bruised child is brought into the emergency room one day, they can't help but be moved. Appearing to be no more than two, after Christopher performs surger