Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner called Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death, including her own. Secrets start to unravel, and as the line between truth and lies blurs, Birdy feels compelled to right some old wrongs.
My Husband’s Wife is a tangled web of deception, obsession, and mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page. Prepare yourself for the ultimate mind-bending marriage thriller and step inside Spyglass – if you dare – to experience a story where nothing is as it seems.
So I’m back with a second Alice Feeney, as promised. This book was definitely better and didn’t make me pull my hair out with the ending. It still left me underwhelmed, but not disappointed and frustrated like last time.
From the acclaimed author of This Place is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.
Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions around her brother’s death.
So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be — popular, gregarious, unburdened — and a reminder of how lost she is.
As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.
Thank you to Books Forward for this copy. All quotes are subject to change.
I tell you that we are the only two people in the world who have lived the same lives. The same memories growing up. The same arc. We flew over the sea together, you and I. I think this must mean that even though you are gone, I carry the parts of you onward.
One thing I have come to enjoy about Xixi Tian’s writing is the way she interweaves the Chinese immigrant experiences into her characters’ lives. While it may not be everyone’s exact experiences, including my own, the heart of our people’s collective struggles is there and that is something I find truly powerful to see in an English novel where only a decade ago it would not have been a story easily shared for the masses.
All the Way Around the Sun features themes of grief and finding one’s way through life after momentous changes. Told from Stella’s perspective several months after her older brother had passed away in college, I thought the best part of this book was the slow unfolding of her and her brother Sam’s story. As children they had grown up in China with their grandmother while their parents had come to America to make money first so they could give their kids a better life before bringing them over. I know these are the experiences of some Chinese immigrants and I cannot imagine the depth of hardship it would be for the parents to sacrifice time with their children during momentous milestones in their youth, but also for the children to uproot their childhood into a foreign place with people that are family but also strangers.
The Precipice is a legendary, family-owned hotel on the rocky coast of Maine. With the recent passing of their father, the Bishop sisters—Iris, Vicki, and Faith—have come for the weekend to claim it. But with a hurricane looming and each of the Bishop sisters harboring dangerous secrets, there’s murder in the air—and not everyone who checks into the Precipice will be checking out.
Each sister wants what is rightfully hers, and in the mix is the Precipe’s nineteen-year-old chambermaid Charley Kelley: smart, resilient, older than her years, and in desperate straits.
The arrival of the Bishop sisters could spell disaster for Charley. Will they close the hotel? Fire her? Discover her habit of pilfering from guests? Or even worse, learn that she’s using a guest room to hide a woman on the run.
With razor-sharp wit, heart, thrills, and twists, Jamie Day delivers a unique brand of SUMMERTIME SUSPENSE.
I saw this ARC ready to be picked up on Netgalley and figured, why not? It sounds right up my alley. And overall, I’d say that it was, and it does kind of fit into that “summertime suspense” that is advertised above. Thanks to them for providing this in exchange for an honest review.
One Big Happy Family is an aptly named book, in two ways. It speaks of two families: the Bishops, who have just inherited the Precipice Hotel after the tragic demise of their father. It also speaks of the “family” that now finds themselves trapped at The Precipice after the storm, Larry, hits. In a typical closed-room fashion, strange things start happening, including deaths. How can these deaths be explained, and who will be next on the killer’s list?
Down the Rabbit Hole 