Author: Tirzah Price

Every year, Mae and her family head to a cabin in Utah for the Christmas holidays, where they spend the week with her parents’ college friends/chosen family and their two sons. It’s been a really rough year for Mae, who has always had a crush on Andrew, but after a drunken Christmas night, it’s not Andrew she sleeps with—it’s his younger brother Theo! Mae wakes up the next day feeling absolutely miserable at how she’s messed things up, and then she gets even worse news: The cabin is being sold, and this was their last Christmas there. Desperate, she wishes for the universe to show her how to be happy…and she wakes up on her flight to Utah, at the start of the holiday she’s just lived through.

At first, Mae thinks she knows just the perfect way to steer her holiday break to a happier conclusion, but things don’t go as planned, and when she starts having to repeat her holiday again and again, she has to learn to let go of her expectations and try and do what’s right for everyone, even if it means giving up things she values most.

This was my first Christina Lauren book, but I liked it so well I’ll definitely seek out others. Mae is a down on her luck heroine who you definitely feel for—a year’s worth of sad events and frustrating turns have left her in a funk, and she makes some choices she’s not proud of. But I also really liked that her chance at a holiday do over didn’t start to turn around until she took control of the things in her life that were causing her unhappiness rather than try and steer others to actions she thought would make everyone happy. I also loved the cast of characters and how her parents’ friend group fought for their holidays together, even when divorce and major life changes changed their relationships with each other, and how they modeled that kind of enduring friendship to their kids. The relationship between Mae and Benny, her parents’ bachelor friend who serves as an uncle to Mae, was also really sweet and provided some unexpected magic to some of Mae’s problems.

Overall, this book is grounded enough in real-life relatable issues that I was able to click with it and really sympathize with Mae, but it was also just magical enough to whisk me away, which is the perfect balance for Christmas books and movies, in my opinion. I loved the tension between Mae and Andrew, and how the moments she least expected were the ones that ultimately brought them together.

Bonus: It’s a great audiobook listen, narrated by Patti Murin!

Twin sisters Ruth Macallister and Iris Digby couldn’t be more dissimilar, even as children. But they never thought that one argument in Rome in 1940 would result in years of estrangement. When Iris and her family disappear from London in 1948, Ruth is as surprised as anyone else. But she has a suspicion that the rumors swirling around her sister’s husband are true, and they defected to the Soviet Union.

Four years later, Ruth herself is living a somewhat charmed life in New York City, running things behind the scenes at a swanky modeling agency. So when she gets a postcard from her sister out of the blue, she’s shocked…but she knows something is wrong. And so does FBI agent Sumner Fox, who begins asking questions about Iris. It turns out that her sister really is in Soviet Russia…and she’s desperate to get out.

As Ruth and Sumner come up with a daring extraction plan that will have them posing as newlyweds, we also get Iris’s side of her marriage, going back to 1940 when she fell in love with a dashing young American diplomat with rather unconventional ideals…and between the two sisters, a bigger story emerges.

I know that a ton of WWII and post-war fiction has been published in the past few years (I love Kate Quinn!), and it can sometimes be difficult to sort through what’s good and what’s meh, but I really enjoyed this one. I liked the tension between the dual narratives and timelines, and Ruth’s breezy tone contrasted against Iris’s more serious, but passionate voice. The spy elements were very interesting but not overdone, and I kind of enjoyed that, actually. I suspect that in reality, spy craft is probably 99% boring and 1% thrilling, and for me the pull of this book was in the sisters’ dynamic and the fact that they were constantly misunderstanding and misreading each other in profound and fundamental ways…but they also still care deeply for each other. They just happen to be caught up in greater forces and ideologies beyond them, and the choices they made kept driving them apart, but didn’t break their relationship. The book had its moments of suspense, and a few little twists that I didn’t see coming, and it was enough that I was manufacturing all sorts of excuses to keep listening to the audiobook.

Krys Malcolm Belc and his partner Anna wanted to have children. When their son Sean, whom Anna carried, was just a few months old, Krys found out he was pregnant with their second child. This experience of being nonbinary while going through the medical system for pregnancy and childbirth clarified to Krys his own gender identity, as he felt like his experiences didn’t always fall under the umbrella of “motherhood.” In a series of probing essays, Krys deconstructs his experience with pregnancy and what it means for him, his family, and his identity.

This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to nonbinary and trans, and how the world isn’t always set up for those who don’t fall into the boxes society prescribes. It highlights many of the practical barriers to queer and trans parents, but it’s also a deeper look into Krys’s own coming of age and coming to be process, as he reckons with many facets of his identity and confronts his relationships with his parents, siblings, partner, himself, and ultimately, his children. Carrying his son gives him clarity to start taking testosterone, and the confidence to live his authentic self, but the journey isn’t always clear. I’ve not been so mesmerized by a memoir since I read In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and if you’re looking for a read alike to that book, this is it—literary, nonlinear, but ultimately an absorbing look at queer life and identity, and the formation of a family.

In 1972, Jean McConnell was a thirty-eight-year-old mother and widow with ten children. One evening, she was dragged out of her apartment in one of the larger high-rise housing buildings in Belfast by masked intruders. No one intervened, and her captors promised that she’d be able to return home to her children in a few hours. She was never seen again. Her disappearance was one of the most egregious crimes committed during the Troubles, which spanned for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Everyone knew the IRA was responsible, but it wasn’t until her body was found forty years later and highly secret accounts of the Troubles surfaced across the Atlantic in Boston that the truth would finally emerge.

I admit to not knowing much about the Troubles before reading this book beyond a shaky understanding of the fight for Irish independence and the conflicts between Catholic and Protestants. I was partly motivated to pick up this book because I love the TV show Derry Girls, and because I watched the Netflix documentary This Is a Robbery (about the Boston art heist, but it does have a connection to Northern Ireland!). Keefe’s book gave me a lot of context for the Troubles and the politics and social dynamics of Northern Ireland in the post-war era that led to decades of violence, and he did a great job of balancing big picture events and players with individuals who were affected and their lives and struggles. Jean McConnell’s death is used as a hook and as a way to ground the narrative, always bringing readers back to her family and their struggles after she disappeared. At times I wondered when Keefe seemed to stray far from McConnell’s story, but then he’d draw connections back to her in a masterful way, and the way all of the elements came together was really impressive.

This is a big, complex time full of many moving parts and many different people, and I think it’s impossible to feel as though you completely understand all that happened in Northern Ireland at this time from reading one book. But I think that Keefe made some great choices in how he told this story because it just can’t be told in a linear fashion. That means while reading you might get a little confused (I re-read certain sections a few times to clarify things in my mind) and you might not breeze through this book because it’s pretty detail-packed. But the writing is deeply compelling, and and if you’re an American like me who doesn’t have firsthand experience or knowledge of this bit of history, then this is a really informative read that has stuck with me for some months now.

Happy reading!
Tirzah

Candice isn’t thrilled about spending her summer in Lambert, SC in the wake of her parents’ separation, but her mom says they need space and a change of scenery, and staying in her late grandma’s empty house is the perfect getaway. But Lambert is a town with some dark secrets, and people haven’t forgotten that Candice’s grandma left years earlier in shame. Then, Candice discovers a letter addressed to her grandma in the attic. It describes a secret about a family run out of town sixty years earlier, and a millionaire who wants to right a very old wrong…but he’s going to make the town work for it. If someone can unravel the clues he’s left behind, there will be a big reward. Candice is intrigued, and together with the bookish kid next door, Brandon, they begin to uncover the clues…and the past.

This is such a brilliantly written novel that truly evokes the excitement and mystery of The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, but in a fresh and exciting way. I am in awe of how Johnson constructed a whole town, a history, and such great riddles and puzzles that kept Candice and Brandon (and readers!) guessing. At the same time, he manages to balance the excitement of the mystery with a much more sobering history of a small Southern town in the 1950’s, and how resistance to discrimination inspired a hateful response. There’s injustice in this book, and at times it’s very ugly, but Johnson always writes it so that it’s age-appropriate for his kid readers, who get to process it alongside Candice and Brandon, and some of the scenes moved me to tears. The dual timeline of Candice and Brandon’s story and what really happened in the past really works, and the unraveling of the decades-long mystery is very satisfying. I love reading books where kids and teens discover their personal connection to history, and this book exemplifies this beautifully. I highly recommend it to all the kids in your life, but also to adult readers as well!

Happy reading!
Tirzah