What We're Reading: February 2025

"Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, forty-year-old Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny novel It's Hester's fortieth birthday when she's diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she's...

"From the acclaimed author of Hold My Girl comes a sweeping multi-generational story about motherhood, race, and secrets. When 24-year-old Kareela discovers she's pregnant with a child she isn't sure she wants, her struggle to understand her place in theworld as a person who is half-Black, half-white-yet feels neither-is amplified. Her mother, Evelyn, fled to Canada with her husband and their first-born child during the politically charged Jamaican...

Separated by war and reunited after 60 years, Haiwen and Suchi navigate decades of love, loss and survival across continents, as their shared past clashes with their hopes for a second chance at life.

"Maddy Banks is just like any other stressed-out freshman at NYU. It doesn't help that she's always felt like the odd one out in her picture-perfect Connecticut family. But Maddy's latest low is devastatingly low, and she goes on an antidepressant. She begins to feel good, dazzling in fact, and she soon spirals into a wild and terrifying mania that culminates in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As she struggles to find her way in this new reality,...

"A cozy winter rom-com about a ghostwriter who decamps to a Vermont lodge to work on her new project, but finds herself falling for the ski instructor next door"-- Provided by publisher.

"The four Endicott siblings--Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude--were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven't spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in...

"In the beginning of this epistolary book, we hear from Seth Edwards, a hungry young writer/editor who dreams of literary greatness. He's done all the right things-attended a prestigious graduate program, moved to New York City to work in publishing-but feels further than ever from the joy he used to associate with the written word. Seth decides that what will boost his faltering career and writing life alike is connecting with Edna Sloane, the author...

"Tessa Hulls delves into her own family history and the intergenerational trauma caused by mental illness and political strife"-- Provided by publisher.

Dr. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct -- and absolutely normal -- developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Providing realistic scenarios and advice on how to engage daughters in smart, constructive ways, Untangled gives parents a broad framework for understanding...

"Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America's feminist Gothic. It is the twilight of Europe's bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her...