Book Review: All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 7, 2025
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they’ve saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.

All the Water in the World takes place in a dystopian world after the glaciers have melted and water covers most of it. Nonie and her family live on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. They are trying to live off as little in the museum as possible so they can preserve the collections for future generations. When a superstorm hits, they must leave the museum and start a dangerous voyage to find dry land.

I found this book to be boring. The voyage they were on became repetitive – it was mostly rowing their boat and getting rained on. The world building, including the settlements they encountered along the way could have been more fleshed out. The simplicity read YA to me even though it is for adults. I could see what the author was trying to do but she didn’t quite get there. This book was not for me.

Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: July 21, 2020
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.

A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

Hamnet is the story of William Shakepeare’s family, centered on his wife Agnes and their children. Shakespeare is never named, referred to as “the tutor” or “the husband”, which serves to emphasize that he is not the focus of this book. When Hamnet, Agnes and William’s only son, suddenly dies of the Plague, they find themselves at loose ends, each dealing with their grief in their own way.

In much of the book, William lives away from his family in London, writing and performing his plays. His family stayed behind in the village he grew up in because his youngest daughter is too frail to survive the germs of the big city. After Hamnet’s death, we follow Agnes’s grief journey while she is largely alone. It’s a heart-wrenching exploration of what it’s like to lose a child. Agnes struggles to go on, while her husband is seemingly living it up in London. She wonders if he’s been affected at all by the tragedy.

Little is actually known about William Shakespeare’s personal life. He did have a son who died named Hamnet, which is thought to be a name interchangeable with Hamlet. He is thought to have named the character Hamlet after his son. While it’s not strictly necessary to have read Hamlet before reading this book, I did find it helpful to familiarize myself with the basics of it. I was able to better understand the ending of the book, which involves a performance of the play.

I thought about this book for a long while after I finished it, which to me is a sign of a great novel. The prose was beautiful and raw. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie, which is also supposed to be wonderful.

Highly recommended.

Audiobook Review: The Lafferty Girl: Surviving Trauma, Abuse, and My Father’s Crimes by Rebecca Lafferty

The Lafferty Girl: Surviving Trauma, Abuse, and My Father’s Crimes by Rebecca Lafferty
Narrator: Ivory Tiffin
Publisher: Union Square & Company
Release Date: September 30, 2025
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Rebecca Lafferty grew up with a volatile, erratic, and ultimately notorious father, Dan Lafferty. She carried the scars of her traumatic upbringing through childhood and into adulthood. But most of all, Rebecca carried the horror of learning about the cold-blooded murder of her aunt and infant cousin in 1984, perpetrated by Dan and Ron according to a revelation Ron had received—as profiled in the Jon Krakauer book and FX/Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven.

Now, in this riveting memoir, Rebecca tells her own story of survival and healing. Her correspondence with Dan—serving life in prison—insights from relatives, and most importantly, her own lived experience, give her an astoundingly deep point of view on the lead-up to the tragedy and its aftermath.

In this book, Rebecca hopes to encourage other survivors of abuse and trauma to chart their own path to healing and peace.

Rebecca Lafferty is the daughter of Dan Lafferty who murdered her aunt and baby cousin because God told him to. Dan’s story is the focus of John Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven. You don’t have to have read that book to understand this book. It is a really good book though so you should read it just for the sake of it.

Rebecca grew up in a strict Fundamentalist Mormon household. Her father, Dan, is clearly mentally ill and twisted Mormon doctrine to suit his needs. He was abusive and irrational. Her mother immigrated from Scotland and felt trapped in her situation. She stayed with him right up until he committed the murders.

The first part of Rebecca’s book is about her childhood. She is still in contact with her father and visits him in prison. Because of this, she was able to offer his perspective on her childhood. He is still not well and doesn’t seem to have remorse for what he did. He still feels like God was calling him to commit his crimes.

The second part of the book is about Rebecca’s life after her father went to prison. It’s been a journey to overcome the guilt and shame she feels because of what her father did. Because of that, she has made some poor choices throughout her life. She’s had a few bad relationships and has three children with different fathers. She sought healing from both traditional non-traditional methods, including hypnotherapy. She’s now a certified hypnotherapist.

I liked this book, but I was hoping for more on Rebecca’s childhood. That’s the main reason I picked this book because I love reading about cults and Dan Lafferty was a cult of two – him and his brother. A lot of Rebecca’s healing journey focused on “woo-woo” methods of healing and as a pragmatic person, that didn’t interest me.

If you’re interested in a more in depth look at Dan Lafferty’s crimes as well as the history of Mormon fundamentalism, I recommend reading Under the Banner of Heaven instead of this book. But if you’re looking to read a book about a woman’s journey to heal her childhood trauma that focuses more on her present than her past, then this is the book for you.

(I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for review.)

Book Review: The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch

The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch
Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: November 1, 2022
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

When college sweethearts Frankie and Ezra broke up before graduation, they vowed to never speak to each other again. Ten years later, on the eve of the new millennium, they find themselves back on their snowy, picturesque New England campus together for the first time for the wedding of mutual friends. Frankie’s on the rise as a music manager for the hottest bands of the late ’90s, and Ezra’s ready to propose to his girlfriend after the wedding. Everything is going to plan—they just have to avoid the chasm of emotions brought up when they inevitably come face to face.

But when they wake up in bed next to each other the following morning with Ezra’s grandmother’s diamond on Frankie’s finger, they have zero memory of how they got there—or about any of the events that transpired the night before. Now Frankie and Ezra have to put aside old grievances in order to figure out what happened, what didn’t happen…and to ask themselves the most troubling question of all: what if they both got it wrong the first time around?

College sweethearts Frankie and Ezra broke up on the day of their college graduation. They’ve hated each other ever since and have not spoken in the ten years since then. They both come back to their college town on for the wedding of mutual friends, which is on New Year’s Eve of 1999.

The morning after the rehearsal dinner, they wake up in bed together in one of the college’s dorm rooms. The engagement ring that Ezra intended to propose to his current girlfriend with is on Frankie’s finger. Neither of them can remember what happened.

I cannot get over the unrealistic premise of this book. After Frankie and Ezra wake up in bed together, they think they must have gotten married because Ezra’s grandmother’s wedding ring is on Frankie’s finger and Ezra has a gold band on his. Neither can remember anything from the night before so they set off on a journey retracing their steps around town to see if they can jog their memories and find out if they are really married.

Hello?! They are in New England, not Las Vegas. You need a marriage license to get legally married and I’m pretty sure you can’t get one at midnight. Are they dumb? Ezra went to law school for Christ’s sake! All I could think about while reading this book was how stupid they both are.

Additionally, Frankie is not a nice person, and I never felt that she redeemed herself. I was rooting for them NOT to get back together. They hated each other up until the last couple of chapters. This was a romance with no romance.

From the publisher’s description, I thought that this was going to be a time-loop novel and that they woke up in bed together because they were transported back to their college days. That’s on me I suppose for not reading the description close enough. But it was still disappointing.

You can skip The Rewind. If you’re looking for a cute romance set around New Year’s Eve, check out The Second Chance Year by Melissa Wiesner.

Book Review: James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: March 19, 2024
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. 

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. It’s not necessary to read Huckelberry Finn first but I did and I think I got more out of it that way. It’s still a five-star read no matter what. In Huck Finn, Jim is portrayed as naive and not very smart. In James, we discover that it’s all an act. Enslaved people act dumb and speak in the slave dialect as a form of self-protection. They know that white people would feel threatened if they knew that their slaves were just as smart, if not smarter, than them. I loved seeing James’s point of view of his interactions with Huck. For instance, in Huckelberry Finn, Huck convinces Jim that an incident that actually happened was just a dream. Jim freaks out and thinks he’s going crazy. Then Huck tells him the truth and feels bad for tricking Jim. In James, James knows that Huck is tricking him and goes along with it because he has affection for Huck and knows that it’s fun for Huck to pull a prank like that on him. He also knows that it’s expected that he’s dumb enough to fall for something like that.

I think James is a more realistic portrayal of Black people in those times than Huckelberry Finn. Of course they were intelligent. But if people acknowledged that, it might be harder to treat them as subhuman. I wondered reading Huck Finn if enslaved people actually talked with that dialect. I had to switch to audio because I couldn’t even understand Jim’s dialogue as it was written. In James, when James speaks in the slave dialect, it’s written in a way that you can understand what he’s saying.

James was my book club’s February selection. It’s a great book for discussion – we had a lot to talk about. I don’t want to tell you too much about the plot, but a lot happened to him that was eye-opening for us. Some of us had read Huck Finn so we could compare and contrast it with James as part of our discussion.

James deservedly won almost every book award there is in 2024. I highly, highly recommend it.

Book Review: Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: September 10, 2024
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 
Publisher’s Description:

In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served his time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, this book is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

In Sky Full of Elephants, society was changed when a year ago all of the white people walked into the nearest body of water and drowned. Now the world is adjusting to the after effects of that event. Sydney, a bi-racial teenager, is left behind when her white mother and stepfamily walk into the water. She’s been holed up in her house, afraid of the new world. She’s heard that there is a civilization in Alabama and asks her estranged father to help her get there. She’s never met him and holds a lot of anger towards him for leaving her mother. She plays on his guilt to convince him to take her there even though the journey will be dangerous. Raised by white people, Sydney has internalized racism that she doesn’t recognize but those around her do. She doesn’t say it outright, but it’s clear that she’s hoping the settlement she and her father are traveling to has white people living there.

Sky Full of Elephants was very thought provoking. A world without white people is different than I imagined when I first heard about this book. It’s almost like a zombie apocalypse without the zombies. White people control so much in the United States that when they are gone, a lot of things cease to exist – like the government, utilities, and public transportation. Other consequences are good. For instance, all of the prisoners were set free, instantly solving the mass incarceration of Black people problem. The stress of living in a racist society has been lifted for people left, making the negative aspects worth it.

I loved this book. The concept was unlike anything I’ve read before and executed perfectly. Weeks after reading it, I’m still thinking about it. Highly, highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church
Narrator: Susan Bennentt
Publisher: Recorded Books
Release Date: November 4, 2025
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife. Despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations, she keeps her husband happy, her household running, and her gelatin salads the talk of the neighborhood. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu’s carefully crafted life begins to unravel.

When a new neighbor, Bitsy, moves in, Lulu suspects that something darker lurks behind the woman’s constant smile. As her fixation on Bitsy deepens, Lulu is drawn into a web of unsettling truths that threaten to expose the cracks in her own life. The more she uncovers about Bitsy, the more she questions everything she thought she knew—and soon, others begin questioning her sanity. But is Lulu truly losing her mind? Or is she on the verge of discovering a reality too terrifying to accept?

In the vein of The Bell Jar and The Hours, The Mad Wife weaves domestic drama with psychological suspense, so poignant and immersive, you won’t want to stop listening.

The Mad Wife follows Lulu, a 1950s housewife and mother who lives in the suburbs. She keeps a clean house and has a homecooked meal on the table every night for her husband when he gets home from work. She’s also known as the “queen of molded foods”. Her specialty is the perfection salad – gelatin filled with carrots, celery, cabbage, green olives and radishes. (Why was the food in the ’50s so gross??) Lately, Lulu’s grown listless.

When a new family moves across the street, Loulou is suspicious. Bitsy, the wife, seems strange and distant and her five-year-old daughter does as well. And Bitsy is just a little too perfect. The neighborhood women welcome her with open arms, which makes Loulou jealous. Soon Lulu is obsessed with finding out what is going on behind the scenes with Bitsy’s family.

The Mad Wife was riveting. I listened to the last half while I was driving on a road trip, and my heart was in my throat the whole time. The twists are amazing. It was read by Susan Bennett who has the perfect 1950s housewife voice. She sounded just like Donna Reed. Loulou basically was Donna Reed until Bitsy moved in and got her discombobulated.

I cannot stop thinking about this book and how good it was. Highly recommended.

(I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for review.)

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake
Narrators: Rita Amparita and Stephanie Nemeth-Parker
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Release Date: October 21, 2025
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.

After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she’s taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.

Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner’s new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane’s clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she’s apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves.

As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.

First of all, do not read the New York Times’ review of Girl Dinner before you read this book. It has major spoilers – I’m glad I read the book first.

Girl Dinner follows Nina, a college sophomore rushing a sorority referred to as The House and Sloan, an adjunct professor at Nina’s university. Both are struggling with what it means to be a “Good Woman”.

Nina finds herself wanting to be perfect to impress her future sorority sisters, especially Fawn, the president. Much to the chagrin of her feminist twin sister Jas, Nina is starting buy into the tenants of the The House. Meanwhile, Sloane, a new faculty advisor for The House is struggling to balance her career and motherhood. She feels like she’s failing at both. Her husband, a tenured professor at the university, is no help. To give an idea of the kind of man he is: one night Sloan forgets to put the silverware on the dinner table. Her husband gets up and gets one fork. For himself.

Both Nina and Sloan wonder about what it means to be a Good Woman. Is that even possible in world full of men content to hoard their power? The characters in Girl Dinner philosophize about this throughout. While all the deep thinking is going on, the sorority is up to some gruesome rituals that also ask the question of how far is one willing to go to become a Good Woman.

I’m still thinking about Girl Dinner weeks after reading it. I’m realizing that I prefer social horror that is on the realistic side – no monsters or demons. Girl Dinner is a great example of this type of horror.

The audiobook is narrated by two women which worked well since there are so many female characters. I think it would have been hard for one woman to have a distinct voice for all of the them.

Highly recommended.

(I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for review.)

Audiobook Review: Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley
Narrator: Priscilla Beaulieu Presley
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release Date: September 23, 2015
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Priscilla Presley’s divorce from Elvis left his fans incredulous. How could she leave the man every woman wanted? From the outside, life in Elvis’s mansion looked glamorous and enviable, and in many respects, it was. But inside the mansion, her husband was constantly surrounded by a male entourage while at the gates, lines of beautiful women waited hopefully for an audience with the King. From the time she was seventeen years old, that life was all Priscilla had known. During her ten years with Elvis, it became painfully apparent that she had no idea who she was outside Elvis’s world. The only way to find herself was to leave that world and seek a new life of her own, because leaving was the only way to survive, for herself and for her daughter.

Softly, As I Leave You, is the deeply personal story of what Priscilla lost and what she found when she walked away from the man she loved. Despite the legal separation, their love for one another transformed into a touching and tender dynamic that endured until Elvis’s untimely death four years later. Shattered by Elvis’s passing, she had to reinvent herself a second time as the single mother of a talented, often headstrong daughter who never really recovered from her father’s death. Priscilla’s dedication to motherhood was enriched by the birth of her second child, and she gradually found her footing as a businesswoman, actress, designer, and legislative advocate. She transformed Graceland into an international destination and helped guide the development of Elvis Presley Enterprises. But the unexpected, shattering loss of three immediate family members years later brought Priscilla to her knees. She shares her journey with a quiet dignity that will comfort and reassure anyone who has suffered–and survived–seemingly unbearable loss.

A compassionate, and inspiring story of finding your place in the world, Softly, As I Leave You, is a sweet Southern melody that will take the listener with Priscilla on her long road home.

Softly, as I Leave You is Priscilla Presley’s second memoir. Her first, Elvis and Me, was published in 1985. She does write a little about her childhood and early life with Elvis in Softly, as I Leave You but it’s covered in a lot more detail in her first book. I’ve read Elvis and Me and it’s not necessary to have read it to enjoy Softly, as I Leave You.

One of the things Priscilla writes about is her relationship with her daughter, Lisa Marie. Lisa Marie’s memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, came out in 2024 after her death and was already out when Priscilla was writing her book. In some ways, it feels like this book is a response to Lisa Marie’s book. For instance, Lisa Marie says in her book that Pricilla’s live-in boyfriend Michael Edwards sexually abused her, and she told Priscilla, but Priscilla says that she had no idea that had happened until she read Lisa Marie’s book. There are other situations discussed where their viewpoints were different as well. It’s not often you get both sides of the story like that, and I thought it was cool, having also read Lisa Marie’s book.

She also talks about her son and grandchildren as well as her acting career. She narrates the book herself – a celebrity memoir is almost always better when the celebrity narrates the audiobook and that is the case here. She has a slow, dreamy voice – I was able to speed up to 2x speed and I’m normally at 1.5x!

Celebrity memoir fans and Elvis fans alike will enjoy this book.

(I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for review.)

Book Review: Til Summer Do Us Part by Meghan Quinn

Till Summer Do Us Part by Meghan Quinn
Publisher: Bloom Books
Publication date: June 3, 2025
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Scottie Price just started a new job, and it’s a real sausage fest. She’s the only woman on a team filled with Brads and Chads. Expecting a bachelor pad atmosphere, she is quickly corrected when she finds out everyone is happily married.

In an effort to impress her boss, Scottie mentions her nonexistent husband in a company meeting. But eagle-eyed Chad points out her lack of wedding ring. Panicked, Scottie creates a story about her unhappy marriage. Unfortunately for Scottie, her boss has a solution―a one-on-one session with the best marriage counselor in the Northeast, who happens to be her boss’s husband.

With no way out of her lie, Scottie agrees to see him. Frantic, she calls in help from her best friend who sets her up with his brother, an improv-obsessed millionaire.

Enter Wilder Wells. More than happy to take on the job, he teaches Scottie the main rule of improv: always say yes. But the rule backfires during the session when Wilder signs them up for an eight-day summer marriage camp with all of Scottie’s co-workers where she’ll have to share a cabin with her way-too-handsome fake husband.

Til Summer Do Us Part is Meghan Quinn’s latest book. Scottie feels left out as the only unmarried person in her office. To make it worse, she works with all men and they’re all kind of douchey. In a meeting where the talk turns to marriage, she lies and says that she’s married too. She didn’t mean to; it just slipped out. Her boss is married to a marriage counselor, and she insists that Scottie and her husband join everyone else at a weeklong couple’s retreat. Scottie needs to find a husband and fast.

Enter her best friend Mika’s little brother Wilder. Even though he’s only in his twenties, he’s retired after selling the app he developed for millions of dollars. He’s bored and looking for something to do. When Mika asks him to be Scottie’ s fake husband and go on the retreat, he jumps at the chance. He’s taking an improv class, and this will be the perfect chance to practice.

Predictably, Scottie and Wilder don’t get along at first. She’s a little up-tight and worried about embarrassing herself in from of her coworkers and Wilder takes his improvisation a little too far. This lead to hilarious banter between the two of them. I had tears streaming down my face from laughing so hard.

Fake dating/marriage and grumpy/sunshine are my favorite tropes, and Meghan Quinn has written them perfectly in Til Summer Do Us Part. She is the queen of banter, and I can’t wait to read more by her. This is my fifth of her over 75 books, so I have a lot of Meghan Quinn ahead of me to enjoy.