Memoir Monday... Taking a Roadtrip with Lindy West

Adult Braces by Lindy West... In New York Times bestselling author Lindy West’s ambitious memoir, she brings readers along on an uproarious cross-country road trip as she unpacks her last few tumultuous years, rediscovers herself, and reinvents her marriage in the process.

 Through Shrill—the book and then the Hulu series—Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and hailed as a beacon of empowerment by women who felt badly for not conforming to a narrow set of societal norms—thin, straight, compliant. But behind the scenes, Lindy never felt like she was the self-actualized woman fans made her out to be. When she found herself in the throes of a deep depression, with her marriage and sense of self-worth hanging in the balance, she knew she needed to make a change.  

 In Adult Braces, Lindy shares the story of her rock bottom, and of the journey she took to claw her way out of it. With her trademark candor and sense of humor, she examines her post-Shrill emotional implosion, her shifting feelings about traditional marriage, and her search for her long-lost self. She also tracks the highs and lows of her journey, from eye-opening natural wonders and kitschy roadside attractions to lackluster tourist traps and campground epiphanies.

 The result is an engaging and laugh-out-loud narrative of becoming as Lindy transforms from a passenger into the active navigator of her own life.

I didn't know who Lindy West was until I read about this (her) book. BUT any girl who hops in a van and takes a roadtrip alone has got my attention and admiration. Reading the first few chapters and I am all in. Great writing, funny, sad... and I look forward to reading about the whole journey Lindy takes... Look for Adult Braces by Lindy West, published by Grand Central Publishing  and available at your favorite bookstore March 10th!

Book Release Day! Three Books You NEED to Add to Your TBR Pile!

I am so excited to share these books that are available NOW from your favorite bookstore!

First a new book for all the Anna Quindlen fans!   More Than Enough ..."A woman who confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life— 

No one knows you like your book club. High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.

But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us."

I just received a copy from Random House today and started reading. Right from beginning, Anne Quindlen's writing and the story just grabbed me. If you belong to a book club, if you have ever done your genealogy or taken one of those DNA tests, you will love this. I've just started and I love these women in the book club already. Of course it's the individual characters, but also the interactions between them. Put this on you TBR list!

Next, we have Tayari Jones, who wrote An American Marriage. Her newest novel out today is Kin, and is about "Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction."

I just love stories about friendships, especially the ones that start from childhood. This book has lots of great buzz around it and I can't wait to start reading this one too! Published by Knopf, who were nice to send me an eBook to read and review. This is one of the next on my TBR list and should be on yours too!

Finally, we have Dollface by Lindy Ryan. How can you resist a book that's been described as Barbie meets Scream with a 90's nostalgia twist?!! "Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends.

But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she might just be the last woman standing.

A delightfully murderous novel that is equal parts scathing and salacious, Dollface will win you over with its gossip and gore, one body at a time."

Lindy Ryan is a new author to me, but she has a few books under her belt already and has contributed to a few horror anthologies. I was first drawn to the book by that gorgeous cover! And then I happen to be a horror movie fan, AND a fan of those Scream movies, so this is a no brainer to read. Published by Minotaur Books, Dollface has gotten good reviews from early reviewers and I can't wait to start reading this too!!

Check these books out and stay tuned for reviews coming soon to share what I think! 

Happy Reading... Suzanne

 

Memoir Monday... Hannibal Lecter?

Hannibal Lecter: A Life by Brian Raftery... From Kirkus Reviews:  A famed cannibal gets the biography treatment. It’s been 44 years since Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer with a taste for human flesh, was unleashed on the world, but he’s never far from the public imagination. Consider President Donald Trump’s repeated, seemingly admiring invocations of the murderer during his 2024 campaign, which journalist and author Raftery writes about (with understandable confusion) in the prologue to this book about the killer who first appeared in Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon. Raftery writes that “as modern pop culture menaces go, Lecter’s as recognizable as Harry Potter’s Voldemort, as imitated as Halloween’s Michael Myers, and as quotable as The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg.” (Is there a Facebook reaction for “ouch”?) Raftery traces the evolution of Lecter, originally a “shadows-dwelling second banana” in Red Dragon who took the main stage in Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006). He also looks at the screen adaptations of Harris’ novels, and the actors who portrayed him: most memorably Anthony Hopkins, of course, but also Brian Cox, Gaspard Ulliel, and Mads Mikkelsen. Raftery shows remarkable insight into historical and cultural forces behind Lecter, who, he writes, “had not been invented so much as been summoned up from the country’s bloodstained terrain”—a reference to the rash of American serial killers in the 1970s. Raftery’s book is based on older interviews with people involved in the books and films, as well as new ones, but he was unable to convince the famously media-shy Harris to talk to him. It turns out not to matter—his research is so dogged that the book succeeds anyway. The title of the book cheekily suggests this is a biography, and it is, but it’s more than that: It’s a beautifully written and intelligent work of literary and film history, and an incisive look at American culture writ large.

A fascinating book, perhaps best enjoyed with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I remember seeing The Silence of the Lambs in the movie theater. OMG, talk about terrifying!! When I saw this STARRED review from Kirkus Reviews of a biography/memoir of Hannibal Lecter, I had to read what it was about. Definitely for movie buffs, and anyone fascinated by the character, this seems like the perfect read. Mysterious, it seems, is the author behind the character, who refuses to talk about Hannibal. And that "mysteriousness" would also include the actor who brought Hannibal to life on the screen, Anthony Hopkins. I'm so curious about this book now. Are you curious too? On my TBR list...

Published by Simon & Schuster this past February 10th.