Kathleen

In Leigh Himes’ The One That Got Away, Abbey Lahey is an overworked, overwhelmed mother of two. She and her husband, Jimmy, are at each other’s throats and barely making ends meet. To add insult to injury, Jimmy shames Abbey…

In his debut novel, Rich and Pretty, Rumaan Alam presents a curious exploration of life-long friendship. Lauren Brooks meets Sarah Thomas when they’re both eleven. It’s Lauren’s first day at a fancy New York City prep school. Her parents have scrimped and sacrificed to…

There’s considerable buzz around Angie Thomas’s debut young adult novel, The Hate U Give. The Times (UK) reviewer says that it could very well be the YA book of the decade, and The Atlantic calls it “incisive and engrossing.” This is a novel…

I had a good case of the February blahs, and I needed some sunny reading with snappy prose and compelling plots. Enter Taylor Jenkins Reid, recommended by Anne Bogel of the  What Should I Read Next? podcast. Anne describes One True…

After Carrie Fisher died in December, I read many tributes to her witty and affecting literary voice. It seemed a shame that I’d never explored her work, so I put Wishful Drinking, her well-reviewed 2008 memoir, on hold at the…

I heard Elisabeth Egan, author of A Window Opens, give an interview on The New York Times Book Review Podcast in the summer of 2015. She seemed like someone I would want to be friends with. Funny and determined, she wrote her…

You’ve made a resolution to read more, but… there are kids to shuttle, endless work, dinner to cook, and, of course, The Bachelor to watch. What to do? Today, I’m sharing my favorite strategies, as I begin my fourth year with…

I’m doing this thing where I’m reading debuts. I’m doing it because I’m trying to write my own first novel, and it seems like a good idea to read the first novels of other people. You know, the novels of people…

I’ve been meaning to read The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown since it came out in 2013. My students have been loving both the young…

In a story that’s at once sprawling and hyper-local, Anna Quindlen renders an immensely likable main character. Our narrator is a girl, bound-and-determined to both hold on to the dearest things, and to shake off the oppressive habits of her family’s…