It’s been a busy winter and early spring so I’m playing catch up with this list of books I’ve enjoyed since December. If you’re looking for a Mother’s Day gift for the mother or grandmother you love or simply want something to satisfy your hunger for a good read, there should be something here for you. These titles aren’t just for women; good books are for everyone.
A book I adored is How to Read a Book by Monica Wood. It’s the kind-hearted, caring novel everyone needs. The title is somewhat misleading as it isn’t a how-to book. Instead, it’s a delightful novel. Harriet, a widow, volunteers in a prison where she leads a book club. Violet, who’s in the book club, is in prison for killing a woman while driving under the influence. Frank’s wife is the woman Violet killed, and he’s lonely. After serving her sentence, Violet begins working and gains confidence despite her family shunning her. When Harriet, Violet, and Frank connect in a bookstore, our world enlarges. Humor, literature, and fine characters make what could have been sentimental drivel a stellar celebration of friendship, love, and community. It inspired me to reread Spoon River Anthology and consider my own epitaph. Harriet notes that “stories have a ‘meanwhile’—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.” This novel helps us see our own “meanwhile.”GPR, BC (2024)
Families, those we’re born into and those we find, offer a look at parental love. I particularly enjoyed these that were published this year unless otherwise noted:
Elizabeth Berg’s Life: A Love Story is a book I reviewed here in March. It shows how found families have much to offer .
Allegra Goodman’s This is Not About Us is told in interrelated short stories. The Rubinstein sisters and their families have gathered around their youngest sister Jeanne as she’s dying. Older sisters, Sylvia, 78, and Helen, 80, compete with each other by baking for the visiting relatives. After Jeanne’s death, Helen and Sylvia become estranged over an apple cake and their inability to forgive. The heartfelt stories of Sylvia’s son Richard, his divorce, his daughter’s bat mitzvah, both his daughters’ ballet lessons and performances, and his new romance made me yearn for a sequel with their quotidian lives taking center stage. GPR, BC
Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability follows a family in a self-driving car. Seventeen-year-old Charlie is texting while “driving,” then his sister Alice screams and he grabs the wheel. Their car veers and kills the elderly couple in the next lane. Noah, Charlie’s dad sitting in the passenger seat working on his laptop, wasn’t watching. Genius mother Lorelei was working in the back seat next to Alice who was “talking” with her AI “friend.” Later on vacation, Charlie falls for the daughter of a billionaire and a new crisis arises. The peppering of excerpts from Lorelei’s monograph on the culpability of artificial minds highlights the moral quandaries the characters face. I was riveted by the characters as their lives exploded within me. This would make a great book discussion on the positives and negatives of artificial intelligence. It also offers fascinating thoughts on parental love and sibling rivalry. GPR/R/SN, BC (2025)
Tayari Jones’s Kin is a beautifully written tale of two women who grew up in a small Louisiana town in the 1950s and 60s. Vernice’s father killed her mother then himself when she was a baby. Annie’s young mother left her with her grandmother and ran off to Memphis. The girls, inseparable and as close as sisters, took different paths while continuing their strong relationship. Vernice worked hard in school with the help of her strong, supportive aunt, and she earned a spot at Spelman College where she was welcomed into elite society. Annie went to Memphis in search of her mother with a ragtag crew and led a tough life. It’s a beguiling tale of friendship’s power and the ending brings the meaning of kin home. I adored Vernice. The descriptions of her trials traveling in the Jim Crow South almost undid me. I worried over Annie like she was family. This one will captivate readers. GPR/GS/PP, BC
Lily King’s Heart the Lover is a beautifully crafted novel that filled me with love and left me in tears during the last pages. While it’s related to King’s previous Writers & Lovers, it stands alone while being enhanced by the connection. Yash is ill and “Jordan,” a woman he loved in college leaves her own son, who’s awaiting a date for brain surgery, to travel to see Yash. The love Yash’s friends have for him is a gorgeous exploration of the power and joy of friendship. Jordan’s love of and connection with her family complicates and adds to the novel’s tenderness. The book renders deep friendship, parental love, grief, romantic love, and marriage in ways that will both bend and mend you. King’s melange of emotions and connections are a tribute to her immense skills and her compassion. G/GPR, BC (2025)
Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief was on the National Book Award short list and was the 2026 Carnegie Medal winner. In just 205 pages, this novel shows how fear, hunger, and death might lead anyone to become a thief when striving to guard loved ones. Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father finally receive their passports so they can escape the heat and scarcity of near-future Kolkata to join her husband in Michigan. Boomba, a thief who knows Ma has a secret, steals her purse containing the documents and their dreams collide. One paragraph encapsulated the book for me: “No, Boomba was no monster. All Boomba was, was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family. Wasn’t that the most ordinary thing in the world?” Moral quandaries make this one for book clubs, but many will find it devastating and depressing despite the extraordinary writing. Have we all become guardians and thieves? G/M/T, BC (2025)
Catherine Newman’s Wreck wrecked me in the best way. I enjoyed Rocky and her family in Sandwich. I adored them in Wreck. Rocky is grieving her mother’s death and her widowed father has moved in as has her daughter Willa. When Rocky deals with a messy dermatology condition and a health scare, she’s at her humorous and poignant best, Newman blends gallows humor with compassion and uncanny wisdom. I didn’t think page-turners could be this profound. I hope to read the last page of this book weekly to remind myself to live. GPR/S/SF, BC (2025)
Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants, Rachel dies giving birth to Gabriel, an 18 pound baby. Her 17-year-old son took her to Thomas, the veterinarian, when her labor was troubled, but he couldn’t save her. Rachel wouldn’t name either child’s father so she’d been excommunicated from her Amish community. Her mother Hannah, Thomas, Billy, the local bar owner who sponsors the T-ball team that Gabriel joins, and Trey, a disgraced former football coach who returns to town and sparks Gabriel’s football career, tell the story in strong alternating voices. Gabriel is raised by his strict Amish grandparents and as he continues to grow, he becomes a football phenomenon and eventually reaches almost nine feet in height. Gabriel loves and bonds with animals as he assists Thomas, but his superhuman athletic abilities create temptations on the football field and in professional wrestling for him and those who benefit from his abilities. The novel is a war between evil and goodness expressed through kindness as the mesmerizing characters struggle on what feels like an Old Testament battlefield. It’s spectacular. GPR/M, BC (2025)
Rainbow Rowell’s Cherry Baby is both a romance and a strong character-driven novel. Cherry, her mother, and her sisters are all plus-size women. Cherry recently separated from her husband whose popular comic strip is becoming a movie featuring her image. She begins dating Russ, the mayor’s chief of staff and everyone’s favorite guy who happens to be hot. The sex is steamy and the message of body positivity and self acceptance benefits from the heat. Rowell’s clever repartee makes the characters come alive even when life is hard. The “Gift of the Magi” twist on gluten-free Christmas food demonstrates Rowell’s subtle skills. The book is important in the way it conveys valuing self while being so entertaining the reader falls into the message seamlessly. “If you don’t believe that you deserve good things, how am I supposed to believe that I am a good thing?” I’ve met Rainbow and this book is a reflection of her kindness, brilliance, and humor. It might be as good as Eleanor and Park and that’s saying something. D/GPR, BC
Elizabeth Strout’s, The Things We Never Say comes out tomorrow Tuesday, May 5. Artie, a high school teacher who loves his job, family, and community, is lonely and contemplates suicide, but when he nearly drowns accidentally while sailing, he chooses life. Soon after the accident, his 27-year-old son Rob confides that he’s taken a DNA test that proves that he’s not Artie’s biological son. Artie can’t decide whether to tell his wife what he knows. Strout ties Artie’s concerns to the current U.S. under Trump when Artie opines that the “country was committing suicide” and it echoes the novel’s title that we’re lonely because there are so many things we never say as we feel no one wants to know them. As always, Strout captures the inner lives of ordinary people magnificently. You can feel Artie and Rob’s love.. GPR, BC
If your mother likes romance, these two are perfect gifts.
Kimbra Drake’s Where the Heart Meets the Sea embeds the reader on Lyngōr, a tiny, picturesque island off Norway’s coast. Ella plans to sell the seaside home she’s just inherited from her grandmother who raised her from infancy in Colorado after her mother died. She visits Norway for the first time and knows nothing about her mother or the cottage. When she meets Leif, a boat builder, sparks fly. People who might have known her mother shun Ella and incidents threaten her. Debut author Drake shows how Ella’s art makes the natural world real in a romance that beautifully reflects its setting and immerses the reader in it. D/R/SF
Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, Alice and Hayden are competing to tell famed recluse Margaret Ives’s story. This one’s a touch steamier than Henry’s previous novels and that steam expresses how Hayden and Alice fall so deeply in love. The book also builds a nuanced look at the effects of trauma and childhood loss on the characters and is a great, big, beautiful exploration of parental and romantic love. D/GPR/R (2025)
If your mother likes mysteries and thrillers, Nick Petrie’s The Dark Time, A Peter Ash Novel would be a wonderful gift. Death threats against Katelyn, an investigative journalist, and her 13-year-old daughter alert Peter Ash and his girlfriend June who find a conspiracy that threatens our entire civilization. Peter and June bring in Lewis, the threatening, tough, and capable genius. Petrie’s superb pacing, tension, complex characters, and attention to detail pull off another brilliant adventure. This one will make you think about the challenges of parenthood. Petrie’s characters always make me want to be a better person. CC/GPR
Even if Mom hasn’t read any of William Kent Krueger's previous Cork O’Connor mysteries, she’s sure to love Apostle’s Cove, the 21st in the series. Decades previously when Cork was the new Sheriff of Tamarack County, he was instrumental in the imprisonment of Axel Boshey, an Ojibwe man convicted of killing his white wife. Cork’s son, an attorney, is certain the conviction should be overturned, but Boshey who’d confessed won’t cooperate. Cork’s seven-year-old grandson is sure that the mythical Windigo has a part in the crime. This is one of Krueger’s best. GPR/SF/SN, BC
Nonfiction
Alice Hoffman editor, The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love. If your mother loves dogs, she needs this book. It elicits all the emotions loving a dog engenders. The lives of the fifteen dogs portrayed are funny, sad, messy, sweet, and outrageous—just like the dogs who fill our lives and tear them asunder. Essays written by authors including Isabel Allende, Chris Bohjalian, Bonnie Garmus, Jodi Picoult, Elizabeth Strout, and Paul Yoon make their dogs come alive. Savor this one. Put it on your nightstand and read a chapter when you need it. It's a gem, a perfect gift for every dog lover. There is no one best dog in the world; there are as many as our hearts allow. GPR/SF
Roy, Arundhati, Mother Mary Comes to Me is the lyrical memoir of Roy’s life that formed the basis for her 1997 Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things. Mary Roy, known to her students at the school she ran in the hills of eastern India and to her own daughter as Mrs. Roy, inflicted emotional abuse on her daughter while also making her yearn to succeed. In a lesser writer’s hands, the abuse would have been impossible to read, but Roy’s masterful writing and her introspection make the memoir sing. I started reading it then switched to the audio so Roy could tell me her spectacular life story. I felt that she was standing beside me sharing her life. When Roy read the last words, I sobbed and felt her love for her mother despite her faults. If you give this one to your mother, let her know you don’t think she’s Mrs. Roy. G/R/SBP/SN, BC (2025)
Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir celebrates the love immigrant families show by the sacrifices they make to give their children a better life. When Javier was one, his father moved to the U.S. Javier’s mother joined his father when Javier was five. He lived with his grandparents in El Salvador for four years and at age nine he’s traveling alone in a group of adults and children on the way north to the U. S. to live with his parents. Javier tells the story from his own perspective at age nine as he learns to tie his shoes and keep his fears in check. Some of his fellow travelers supply the love and kindness he needs and others don’t. Javier learns to live with all of them. He is an exceptional poet and only a poet could tell this story with the poignancy, truth, and spareness it deserves. I intended to read this when it came out. I’m glad I didn’t because it means more to read it in the current political climate. Yes, it’s emotionally tough, but Javier Zamora makes it beautiful. He also reads the audio version with tender care. Your mother will love it as will you. G/R/SN (2022)
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