LIFE OUT OF ORDER by Audrey Niffeneger is out October 6, 2026

 

I was so excited to get an ARC of this at ALA last month. Since the conference was held in Chicago and I ended up spending an extra few days alone in the city after, it was the perfect time to read a book set in that toddling town. I spent three very hot days reading this amazing tale of climate change, time travel, political activism and interpersonal relationships. 

Many of the familiar characters from The Time Traveler's Wife are on deck and there are some wonderful new additions. It's basically the second generation and things are not going well. There is divisiveness in the populace, global warming is out of control and time travel is more annoying than you'd think it would be. 

Niffeneger is able to avoid the patina of "grooming" that retroactively colored many readers' experience of TTW and even addresses it in the text. The daughter of Henry and Claire, Alba, is also a time traveler. She has a bit more control, or maybe awareness is a better word, of how her abilities work, but it still does a number on her. Her love interests are Zach - a sweet boy who anchors her to the present and another mysterious gentleman, the less said of, the better.

This doesn't have the sweeping romantic feel of her parent's story. And frankly, Abla is not all that interesting or loveable on her own. What is wonderful about this book is the sweeping narrative and the pockets of action that, while set in what is becoming a dystopian hellscape, echo into the world we live in today. 

I had a very hard time putting this book down. And while I don't think I'll ever get to the point of opening it and reading once scene to brighten my mood - the way I do with Claire and Henry's "first" meeting at the Newberry Library - I will definitely be visiting this world again. 

SEARCHING FOR SUNDAY by Rachel Held Evans and ENORMOUS WINGS by Laurie Frankel

 

I may have mentioned here that I was very involved in evangelical Christianity from the age of 12 until about halfway through my college career. My folks had a great awakening of spirituality when my Dad committed to AA in the 70s and gravitated to a conservative nuts and bolts, second Timothy 3:16-17 "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." kind of faith. There were many really wonderful things about this time - a sense of community is the first one, but also the feeling that there was a greater power  - thanks Bill W. - that could restore us. While it breaks my heart to read my adolescent diaries and read that it is no wonder that my life is a shit-show, because I am such a depraved sinner, I am so grateful that I retain faith in the higher power that gives my life comfort and meaning. 

So this summer, I am in the season of elderly-ness where I want to make sure I am doing right by my loved ones, and since Jesus is number one (much evidence to the contrary) I have been making a concerted effort to do more reading of a spiritual nature. However, my personal creed that I don't have to read more than 40 pages of any book that doesn't capture me precludes doing too much Bible reading and also the current political situation makes me really irked by many people who share my spiritual beliefs and background teamed up to make it something of a challenge to find something that both helps my relationship with Jesus and doesn't make me really snarky.

Enter Rachel Held Evans. Her book Searching for Sunday is the story of leaving the evangelical church while attempting to keep her faith intact. I found so many parallels in my own life. She was a popular blogger, like me. (I have a reader now! Hi, Constance!), she was deeply disturbed at how right wing politics had coopted Christianity and she loved the gays. 

To go on at length about the book would require me to remember specifics and while I loved her take on community and ...a bunch of other stuff that has now become an amorphous blob in my head... one thing that remains clear is her take on the interpretation of Scripture.

"Even the apostle Paul.. said in his letter to the Ephesians, "Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies...Ironically, this very letter is often invoked to support hierarchical genders roles in marriage, because earlier, in urging all members of a household to 'submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,' Paul describes a typical first-century Greco-Roman household, complete with a male head-of-house who has authority over his wives, slaves and children. In the past, some Christians referred to this passage to argue that the hierarchy between master and slave is God-ordained, and in the present, some continue to use it to argue that hierarchy between men and women is God-ordained. Paul is not arguing that the first-century Greco-Roman household structure is the best for humans flourishing and therefore God's design for all people everywhere. Such a question was not within his purview. Rather, he is explaining that when Christians imitate Jesus in their relationships, when partners in marriage serve one another rather than fight for dominiance, we catch a little glimpse of the mystery of Christ's relentless, self-giving love for the church."

This spoke to me SO HARD! I could go on at length about my own thoughts on Biblical interpretation and the incredible damage of assuming that Christians are a monolith, but I shan't because this is ostensibly a book review. Suffice to say, I am a huge RHE fan and have her A Year of Biblical Womanhood up next on my nightstand. 

Searching for Sunday is a memoir about leaving the toxic aspects of organized religion aside and finding a faith community that allows for many voices and interpretations and it also made me laugh out loud. 

Which brings me to Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel. The premise is that Pepper Mills (yes, her name is addressed) is a 77 year old woman who moves to an old folks home, falls in love and gets pregnant in fairly short order. It has that "finding community" vibe that I love so deeply and it is hysterically funny in places. It also brings up the specter of abortion in all its divisive glory. 

In three of the four educational institutions I attended in my adolescence, it was a given that we were all anti-abortion, I mean pro-life. We watched The Silent Scream in science class and there was an active group on my college campus that picketed Planned Parenthood as a regular activity. But I also know many people for whom abortion was a life-saving procedure. It's almost as if having different experiences gives people different attitudes about life. 

Frankel is clearly in the bodily autonomy corner, and she does a wonderful job of showing how different people's experience (or lack of) inform their attitudes about women's choice. I picked this up because I have been spending a fair amount of time in an assited living facility and the details ring true. I thought the idea of having a baby at an advanced age (one of my own personal nightmares) would be fun to read about - and it was - but I was rewarded with a lot more to think about than I expected. 

THE POOLS by E. Lockhart comes out October 2 - and you had better gird your loins...

 

...because it's weird! I read this in nearly one sitting and I will be going back to read it again. It is a novel in verse that had some weird formatting in NetGalley, but I got a paper ARC at ALA (signed by E. Lockhart, no big deal. I was first in line at her signing. I made her laugh. Whatever. It's not like I have been revisiting that glorious moment for the past 5 days...) and the formatting was lovely. But that's not the point. 

So Lexie and her family move to a new town to share . Her mother is ill and she is essentially parenting her younger sister, I think there is a dead dad, but I can't remember specifically. Luckily, she meets Chester and they fall in love. But one day Chester and the little sister and some other folks go to the local healing "pools" and as a result they turn into birds. Yep, I told you it was weird. Some stuff happens and it stays weird and some things get better and some things never do. I stan a pair of lesbian swans and I felt like I needed to read it again, but I don't know if I will. 

This felt very literary to me and Lockhart's note about the poetic formats she used was helpful in determining that I was correct. I read some reviews that mentioned parallels to depression and other issues and I can see it in retrospect, but as you know if you have read any of my other reviews, I'm about as deep as a wine pour at a chain restaurant so I rarely see those things when doing a first read. Hence the inevitable reread. 

The enjoyment factor, strong story and well defined characters are usually huge for me. I didn't necessarily enjoy this book. The story, however, was strangely captivating. And while the characters didn't spring to life, I think because of the format, there were several that I fell in love with - the aforementioned swans, the little sister and her best friend and the no-nonsense aunt. It was a strange, sad read and I couldn't put it down and, for me, that is key - the insistence on knowing what happens and why. Well, Lockhart gave me the first part and, ever since reading it, the second part has been swirling around in my head in a most gratifyingly mysterious way. 

Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC and E. Lockhart her damn self for the print ARC. 

I HOPE THIS EMAIL FINDS YOU IN HELL by Mackenzie Reed comes out September 1

 

I love a road trip. I'm on one now! Headed to Chicago for ALA and currently hunkering down in rural Michigan. I do not love hell. Raised, as I was, in Christian evangelicalism, I fear you-know-who and his minions. Do I believe they walk among us? Well, I've been spending the last 40+ years convincing myself that they do not. But yes, when I hear a funny noise at night, I have been known to mutter, "Get thee behind me, satan." just to be on the safe side. 

So I get really nervous about books where demons are super hot and conflicted. A friend told me that it's fine to fool around with demons in otherworld books, but in real life books they are bad. This seems like kind of a gray area for me, so I have sworn off fooling around with demons altogether. Spoiler: Brie does not!

So the background is that Brie works at a shit company. Her parents died in a car crash and she is too scared to drive at night now. She has cut ties with everyone from her previous life and is pretty isolated and messy. She has one friend at work who tries to get her to rejoin the land of the living and has great hair. She is the only one who ever refills the water jug and fixes the fax machine. And her boss is hot!

He ends up being a demon hunter, her friend gets kidnapped and dragged to hell and Brie and Luke (the hot demon-hunter boss) have to go save her. Guess what happenes??? I mean, a lot happens. There is plenty of action here, which I usually find exhausting. But it is delivered from Brie's perspective and she mostly just hits the high points. Which I appreciate. 

No need to go into the details of plot, it's The Sure Thing except instead of hooking up with Nicolette Sheridan, Luke needs to repair the veil between the underworld and the overworld - potato/potahto... There's even a creepy bar scene when they are staying at a hotel. And the chemistry is excellent. You know what a delicate flower I am regarding the spicy bits, but this one didn't go overboard but did offer something for the naughty reader to sink their teeth into. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this. There is definitely room for more adventures in this world, but if not, the ending was satisfying. I would watch this Netflix series, even though I would complain about how murdery it is. 

ATTACHMENTS by Rainbow Rowell

 

Since this is a reread, I am not legally obligate to review it, but I want to because it was my first adult Rainbow Rowell and it made me realize that this woman writes from a place that I absolutely love. 

Beth and Jennifer and best friends who work at a newspaper in different departments in 1999. Even though they know that the powers that be may be flagging and reading their emails, they can't help but write each other hysterically funny, honest emails most days. Lincoln, the IT guy hired by the powers that be finds he looks forward to reading their flagged emails and even goes looking for the ones that aren't flagged because he is really interested in Beth. He has never seen her, but he starts to fall for her based on her writing, which is a delightful way to fall in love with someone. I did it myself back in the 80s and never looked back.

There are stories of bad boyfriends, selfish girlfriends, pregnancy, movie theaters, living with mom as an adult, Y2K, and overarchingly, the importance of kindness. Beth sees Lincoln at the paper and starts to refer to him as her "cute guy" and his joy and wonder when he realizes she means him is a balm to his soul as well as to the soul of the reader. These crazy kids just might make it work!

It was a pure pleasure to see Lincoln take control of his life, to see Beth realize she deserves better and even see Jen relax into the life she wants but won't allow herself to expect. Rainbow Rowell is a national treasure. 

Skip this part if you haven't read Slow Dance. I thought the character of Lincoln's ex girlfriend was the prototype for Shiloh in Slow Dance and it made me so happy that even though Sam was pretty unremittingly awful in Attachments, she got a bit of sympathy and redemption later in Rowell's work. 

MY FRIENDS by Fredrick Bachman

 

So many people told me this book is amazing and would make you feel all the feels and they were right. So I don't know why it took me nearly a month to read. In retrospect, I think it is because it is so very, very sad. 

There is a young girl, Louisa, who has run away from foster care to see a painting that has inspired her to be an artist and has given her comfort throughout her shitty, shitty life. There is Ted, the best friend of a world renowned artist who dies in like the third chapter, and then there are Ted's friends who are a collection of wonderful kids, encased in amber in the painting, who support each other when no one else does. 

The story slips around in time as Louisa and Tim make their way back from the art show where the artist expired, with his ashes and the painting that made him famous. Their stories are bleak and funny, but wind out slowly. 

I think this book made me so sad reading it that I was unprepared for the ending which was beautiful and well deserved. I think if I had powered through and read it in a couple days, I would have loved it more. As it was, it was still a moving and funny read. I think this one is on me because I just wouldn't devote my reading time to it. But I throughly understand why everyone loves it so much. 

INTO THE BLUE by Emma Brodie

 

This was my book club book and I think some of my church lady friends are going to clutch their pearls when they read how spicy this gets! Or maybe not, several of them had babies back when we read the Outlander books back in the aughts and you and I both know that was no coincidence!

I loved this book. It has family drama, video stores, improv and love, true love. AJ works in a video store in high school and she meets co-worker Noah who is the tortured son of an acting dynasty. His Aunt Eudora who was in the famous space improv show Astronomicals. She offers AJ and Drew improv lessons and they are amazing at it. They have ridiculous chemistry, but life gets in the way and Noah disappears just as AJ realizes she loves him like crazy.

Flash forward seven years and they are brought back into each other's orbits on a prequel show of Astronomicals called Into the Blue. Sparks fly, but there are a LOT of issues and miscommunication and it takes a long time for them to get where the reader NEEDS them to end up. But after a lot of really interesting acting, coms and family tragedies, they learn to lean on each other. And there is a dog. 

This was damn near perfect and even the spice - which is done well, but not overdone - didn't make me feel icky. I had to laugh in the acknowledgements because Brodie talks about the awkwardness of writing it. Which makes me like her even more. Yes, I will be reading Songs in Ursa Major after a 25 week wait. I love you, Libby, but you really make me consider doing some Kindle purchases. Good thing I'm so cheap!

VALLEY OF THE MOMS by Hannah Selinger

 

Well, I hate Hamilton, and even I found this book to be a little heavy-handed. I enjoyed it and read it in 2 days, but man, it was humorless. Of course, it is the story of a young mother who may or may not have been murdered by the president of the PTA and her bereaved husband's quest to clear his name, but I like my murders with a few yucks. I'm not proud of it.

So Anna is kind of a self-righteous judgy bitch, but she is also a pretty good mom and a good wife. She lives in a town that is way too full of itself (just like the real Hamilton!) and the thing that made me buy this on the recommendation of Thalia from Paper and String (in Hamilton!!) is that there is a pivotal scene that takes place in the very health club that I call my beloved home away from home! Just to get this out of the way, they kind of nailed the vibe at Life Time. At first I was irritated that Selinger didn't smush the space from between those words. I have always typed it LifeTime  - show some freaking respect, Hannah! - but I just looked it up and I have been wrong all along! Anyhow, she has clearly been on the pool deck and has seen the horror show when the whistle blows for adult swim. 

The mystery was good. Her husband Denny has to deal with all kinds of complications after her death and when it turns out that it was foul play, he was - as everyone knows from Dateline - the prime suspect. So he goes about trying to find out what happened. And he is not overly stupid or careless about it, which is refreshing. 

The book starts with Emily being pissed that she can't sign her daughter up for "Ziti with your Sweetie" an embarrassingly named PTO fundraiser, and she finds out that there is a prestige level of PTO membership that you have to pay for and those folks got to register first. Well, her indignation turns to action and she decides to run for president of the PTO. If this were played for laughs, written by someone with Selinger's chops, it would be one of my reads of the year. Sadly, no. It just gets murdery. I read the occasional mystery and I don't mind them, but I like a little sauce. This was very well written, it just wasn't quirky enough. That being said, I thought the structure of alternating viewpoints between Anna and Denny to be well done. I loved that the ending was solid and while I was left with questions, they weren't the questions I thought I would be left with. And the cover is to DIE for!

This would be a GREAT book club book. Maybe not in Hamilton, though.

THE INTROVERT'S GUIDE TO KISSING IN EUROPE by Brenda Janowitz comes out August 18

So I have been trying to review every new book I read this year and I have a bit of a backlog, but I just finished this little delight and I want to write what I loved about it before I forget. 

I love the title. It's cute, even though Emily seems more nervous than introverted. At first. This girl, doing a gap year across Europe after high school, sheds her inhibitions pretty quick when she smacks one on the lips of a cute boy in a train station in Spain. He is Chekov's cute boy and you can bet he comes back around. Meanwhile, she befriends Penny, aka @PennyForYourThoughs, an instagram travel influencer. And she meets all the expats that Penny is traveling with. So she spends the whole book almost never alone and doesn't seem to have an issue with it. Hence, not an introvert.

In other news, her grandma was in an early rock duo with her sister back in the 60s and Emily wants to go to all the places her grandma played. Oh, and she had a sister who died. And part of the book is written in her grandma's journal entries. And she is Jewish. She doesn't talk much about the belief system, but she is observant of the holidays and you can tell her Judaism is an important part of her identity. 

Okay, I didn't read any of the Goodreads reviews yet, but I did notice that mine will be the first 5 star one. Not only because I give out 5 stars like tee-ball coaches give out trophies, but because I just LOVED the opportunity to see a bunch of expats wandering around Europe. I spent the fall and early winter of 1990 in Brussels, which is a bit of the kissing-your-cousin of expat experiences, but I did make very close friends with a bunch of other expats who I never spoke to again after those months. I found it fascinating to see it in fiction. I just thought I was great at making friends and bad at keeping them. 

Yes, WAY too much happens in this book. There are so many issues, some of them quite serious, but they are handled in such a blase way that they didn't hurt my feelings. The cover makes this look like absolute fluff and even though I got it from my best friend NetGalley and didn't see the cover that prominently, it must have influenced my reading. This seemed like a light fun read that occasionally went deep. And I found that kind of refreshing. Did it matter that I read this on the last day of school and first day of vacation, my own personal high holy days? Perhaps. But I still closed it with a feeling of utter satisfaction!

SEASON OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS by Jillian Cantor comes out August 4

 

The Handmaid's Tale was one of the first adult books I read as an adult and it has really stuck with me. I feel like there wasn't a lot of dystopian YA when I was growing up and the bleakness of the world really hit me hard. Well, there is a LOT of dystopian YA now and yet, it is still a kick in the teeth when I see so many parallels to the world we are living in and hopefully not becoming.

You would have to be living under a rock to not recognize patterns between the start of this book and the current American experience. Substitute greed for pride in the overblown buffoon in office, substitute racism and fear for, I don't know, scientific understanding and gender roles, and we're nearly there!

But because this is YA, the lines are drawn pretty simply and the story boils down to a resistance adventure. In a good way! 

I try not to wallow in the doom that many folks gobble up and I don't judge those that live in fear now, but I appreciated the stark black and white of the fictional world. There is an elected "dictator." People are given "reeducation" (involving what sounds like some pretty good drugs) to make them more amenable to the new world order. Everyone is painted in black and white so that it is easy to see if they are a goodie or a baddie. It's kind of refreshing to know exactly who to hate. 

And the story kicks butt! It appears to be about Ellie, a girl who was frozen with her family to wait out an administration who hates science with the passionate intensity of a thousand burning suns. Which half the country would not ever be able to calculate because girls don't get to go to school anymore. But it is half the story of Scott, her little brother who ran away before he could be frozen and now lives in the wilderness with the partisans. Stir in an unstoppable grandma and sweet plot twist involving food allergies and you have a nonstop adventure in how to resist fascism. 

There are some great details in here. My favorite is that all women, who are expected to be married by 18 at the latest, are required to dye their hair blonde. The hatred of science is the main thrust of the police state, and it is explained by the end of the book, but it doesn't hit as hard as a more realistic idealist lynchpin. But no matter, this book isn't about defining the paradigm of the overlords so much as the freedom intrinsic to resistance. Wow, those last two sentences might be the word-salad-iest sentences I have ever written, but they are accurate. 

TLDR - I loved this book and will 100% be nominating it for the Mass. Teen Choice book award list. And I can't wait for the inevitable sequel, even though I will have to reread this one before reading it unless Jillian Cantor already wrote it and is going to release it before I forget all the salient details. Unlikely, but I live in hope!

Thanks to Netgalley for the digital ARC.

MOONSINGERS by Robin J. Pritzker comes out June 14, 2026

 

Well this was a cozy one! I am not the sort of reader who constantly seeks out the cozy, but I can appreciate the appeal. I think I am guilty of assuming a cozy read will be a simple story and yet there is a lot going on here.

Ismay has come to Glenmaidens Village to work as a teacher for three wild girls in hopes that she can put in minimal time and get out of there with a reference that will allow her to find more a more conventional teaching job going forward after an accident with one of her former students derailed her previous job. 

Needless to say, she falls in love with her new charges and gets embroiled in the life of the village, which is, complicated. Since the jacket copy informs us up front that the family she is working for is fairies, I can share that it really complicates things. 

Ismay has a bad train experience getting to the village and, as any good educator will do, she writes a strongly worded letter suggesting that the line be extended into the village. But there is a magic tree that is the portal to the fairy world and as cool as a fairy world sounds, it's a weird place to visit and I wouldn't want to live there. 

By the time she has realized that this is a problem, the train company - society? I don't know what they are called - sends a guy to figure out how to do this. He is Hamish Breck (awesome name!) who is fascinated by both train efficiency and Ismay. There is a slow-burn romance and a race against the clock as Ismay learns the error of her ways and tries to stop the extension to help her employers. 

The magic aspects of the book are far less interesting to me than the minutiae of rail planning (Hamish, too) and the way that the girls get into the whole process shows a wonderful aspect of teaching - often the best thing you can do is get kids fascinated by something and then let them take on ownership themselves. 

The story was delightful, the setting was comfy and the whole thing gave me a sweet feeling of coziness right down to my soul. And that cover is delicious!

ONCE UPON A K-PROM by Kat Cho

 

Now this was a high school book I can get behind. It has a lot going on. A teenage girl who doesn't like to be the center of attention, a much cooler sibling, a friend from way back who gets famous and love, sweet love. However it is rife with the kind of miscommunication that I find so annoying, but is kind of necessary to propel the plot. 

Elena is just trying to get through high school and maybe save her beloved community center when Robbie Choi, her childhood bestie and first crush, comes back to town and asks her to prom. Several times. Publicly. He is now a huge K-pop star and her refusals are broadcast to all his followers, complicating her life immeasurably. She has been volunteering at the local community center and comes up with the great idea that her classmates could take all the money they would overspend to go to prom and donate it to try to keep the center going while they wait to hear if it will be funded going forward. Shockingly, her classmates find this annoying and her social stock, already embarrassingly low, falls further. 

The publicity inherent in having Robbie seem somewhat obsessed with her adds to the equation and if you have even read a book before, you are going to figure out what happens. But it is a delightful ride.

What I loved about this is the inside look at the life of an idol. It is a very narrow range of acceptable behaviors and you are constantly under scrutiny. This is horrible for Elena who likes to stay under the radar, but it is also stifling for the other characters who live in this world full time and are chafed by all the monitoring. It plays out sweetly and made the book a little more of an educational process for me rather than just a puff read. I put this down with a satisfied feeling of connections made and a desire that these crazy kids just might make it work. 

YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke

 

As much as I didn't enjoy much about Yesteryear, I did enjoy the experience of reading it. I am not usually a fan of an unlikeable narrator and I usually just don't even bother with books that have them. Olive Kittridge is about as unlikeable as I get and there is a core of decency in her that made me love her. I don't think there is really a core of anything in Natalie. I mean, she has a core of steel and she appears to be a woman of faith, but mostly she seems single mindedly obsessed with herself and her own success. Maybe the joy of this book was supposed to be in seeing her brought low, but I didn't. 

I found the whole thing fascinating, but I wish the book had continued to focus on Natalie and her real life BEFORE the throwback times began. It was interesting to see her try to make a go of it in the actual homestead experience, but I didn't get off on her suffering the way I think I was supposed to. I just felt bad for her. You are allowed to feel bad for people who also are kind of insufferable and I feel like the book didn't want me to. 

It was very well written and a fascinating commentary on, well, a lot of things. I kind of want to read it again, knowing how it ends, but I also don't really want to spend more time with these people. I can see why it has been kind of polarizing and kudos to Burke for making that conversation happen. But it wasn't for me.