Everything I Read in April - Eloise
We were hit hard by a virus this month, which wasn’t great, but it meant that I had lots of time for reading! Between laying next to Cece while she napped (the only way that I can get her to fall asleep during the day is to sit with her so she doesn’t think she’s missing out on anything fun) and being sick myself, I got to dive deep into a lot of exciting thrillers and mysteries and then come back to reality with an autobiography about boarding school. -Eloise
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel
When Zoe wants to escape a tragedy and a break-up, she impulsively signs up for a semester abroad in Berlin. Her roommate, a wealthy American classmate, is fascinated by the Amanda Knox trial and determined to leave her mark on the art scene in Berlin. When they score an amazing apartment rental from a famous author, the girls are so close to reaching their dreams. But things get dark and twisty very quickly and the girls get more than they bargained for in their landlord. This book had some parts that dragged for me and it made me never want to go to Berlin, but the speed picked up towards the end and it went in unexpected directions that kept me reading to the last line.
Grade: B+
The Maid: A Novel by Nita Prose
Molly is such a good character-she grew up watching Columbo with her grandmother, is unable to pick up on social cues, and is currently a maid in an expensive New York hotel, which is a job that she loves and that utilizes her incredible attention to detail. When she finds a famous client dead in his bed, she gets entangled in a mystery that she’s determined to unravel. I was rooting for Molly from the first page and wanted to jump into the pages to help Molly decode what was going on around her. Grade: A
The Club by Ellery Lloyd
The world’s most exclusive (and expensive) club is about to open it’s newest location- a private island off the coast of England, and there’s an enormous amount of pressure riding on a successful opening weekend when a tragic mystery strikes and disrupts that celebrations. Told mostly from the view of the staff, with a sprinkle of interviews with the celebrity members, it’s very quick paced and engrossing and I stayed up way too late reading it. Grade: A-
Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James
Kendra James was the first black legacy student at Taft, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Now working in school admissions in New York, James revists her boarding school experience-from uncomfortable situations to microaggressions and much more to the good friends she made and the unique culture of boarding schools. It was an eye-opening account of what it was like to be a person of color in that primarily white school community and I learned a lot from it while rooting for Kendra.
Grade: A
Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor
A remake of the Great Gatsby told from the women’s perspectives, this was a fun read. The women were all very different but sympathetic in their own way, and I loved that it gave those characters backstories and context and depth. It dragged a little in the middle, but pulled me back in the last quarter. Grade: B