It All Comes Down to This

January 1, 2022

In Honey and Spice, following Babalola's buzzy debut story collection, Love in Color, young Black British woman Kiki Banjo--host of a popular student radio show and known for preaching bad-relationship avoidance--gets tangled in a fake liaison with the very guy she's been citing as big trouble. From Bays, co-creator of the Emmy Award-winning series How I Met Your Mother, 2015 New York-set The Mutual Friend features Alice Quick, mourning her mother, barely managing as a nanny, and trying to make herself sign up for the MCATs even as her tech millionaire brother experiences a religious awakening. In Blush author Brenner's latest, three sisters from a Gilt-edged family in the jewelry business are torn apart following a publicity stunt gone wrong, with one sister dying in a subsequent accident and her daughter struggling to regain traction within the family. In Coleman's Good Morning, Love, aspiring songwriter/musician Carlisa "Carli" Henton's efforts to keep her business and personal lives separate crumble when she meets rising hip-hop star Tau Anderson (50,000-copy first printing). From Egyptian-Irish BBC broadcaster El-Wardany, These Impossible Things features friends Malak, Kees, and Jenna, on the verge of adulthood as they struggle to be good Muslim women yet wanting to follow their dreams (50,000-copy first printing). In Fowler's It All Comes Down To This, three sisters--freelance journalist Beck, struggling with her marriage and a desire to write fiction; Claire, an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, recently divorced; and Sophie, leading a glamorous life she can't afford--face their mother's impending death and the fate of their beloved summer cottage on Mount Desert Island, ME. In Ho's Lucie Yi Is Not a Romantic, a follow-up to the LJ-starred Last Tang Standing, a hardworking career woman gives up on finding the right guy after her fianc� calls off their marriage and signs up for an elective co-parenting website so that she can have a baby--with unexpected consequences. In USA Today best-selling Moore's latest, Maine is not exactly Vacationland for Louisa when she visits her parents one summer with her three children, as she's dealing with an unfinished book, an absentee husband, and a father suffering from Alzheimer's, plus a young stranger in town trying to get her own life in order (100,000-copy first printing). In popular Patrick's The Messy Life of Book People, Liv Green forms a tentative friendship with the mega-best-selling author for whom she works as a housecleaner but is surprised when the author dies suddenly and in her will asks that Liv complete her final book (75,000 paperback and 10,000-copy paperback first printing). In Saint X author Schaitkin's Elsewhere, an interesting departure, Vera grows up in a small town where for generations women keep vanishing mysteriously (200,000-copy first printing). Vercher follows the Edgar-nominated, best-booked Three-Fifths with After the Lights Go Out, about a biracial MMA fighter aging out of his career and facing his father's end-stage Alzheimer's when he scores a last-minute comeback fight. Already a multi-award winner, Wolfe debuts with Last Summer on State Street, about Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens and two close-as-hugging friends--a happy threesome that expands to an uneasy foursome even as the Chicago Housing Authority prepares to tear down the high-rise in the projects where Fe Fe's family lives (50,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2022
Love, lies, and long-buried secrets surface as a favored family summer home in Maine is put up for sale. The title is something of a giveaway in Fowler's latest, a story of problems endured over many years, sometimes at significant personal cost, but, once aired and shared, reaching self-evident solutions. Sisters Beck, Claire, and Sophie Geller, with their contrasting careers and lifestyles, must come together after the loss of their mother, Marti, whose will requires them to sell the beloved summer cottage they have inherited, a remote house on Mount Desert Island. Sophie, who works in Manhattan's art world but whose life has suddenly upended, needs the money the sale would bring. Claire, a doctor whose marriage has failed, could use the cash, too, but welcomes the distraction from unrequited love that the house brings. Beck, a journalist married to book editor Paul, wants to keep the house as a place in which to write the novel she's longed to complete. Doing so would also liberate her from her kind but sexless marriage. Paul, meanwhile, has a secret--he yearns for Claire, and Claire (unbeknownst to Paul) yearns back. Marti kept secrets, too, and Beck has lied to Paul, both for financial and sexual reasons. She's recently spent an amazing night with C.J. Reynolds, a figure from her past who has his own problematic backstory. Backstories indeed fill many pages in this exposition-heavy, distinctly soapy story, which devotes most of its attention to elaborating the problems set up to be unraveled. Fowler presents the family members in great detail; less so in the case of the perfunctory C.J., though he too will reach a happy resolution. So, this is what it all comes down to--a tying up of much-dangled loose ends. Romantic and other dilemmas reach flagged-up conclusions in a novel whose destination is gratification.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 25, 2022
Fowler (The Good Neighborhood) returns with a smooth Austenesque tale of midlife reckoning. Matriarch Marti Geller, faced with terminal cancer, worries about her daughters. “That is what wills are for,” Fowler writes, “to pull the strings you weren’t able to... in life.” The oldest, Beck, a freelance writer, is stuck in a sexless marriage. Claire, a cardiologist, is recently divorced and pining for a man she shouldn’t be. Sophie, an art curator, is Instagram famous, but drowning in debt. Upon Marti’s death, the girls are left with instructions to gather one last time at the family summer home off the coast of Maine before selling it and splitting the proceeds. In chapters from alternating points of view, Fowler skillfully captures each woman’s contemporary narrative and backstory without losing the thread of time and place even as the book hopscotches through flashbacks and locales ranging from Mount Desert Island to Duluth and Dubai. At times she relies on too convenient coincidences to move the plot and the random insertions of an omniscient narrator to explain things, but the well-developed character studies keep the reader chugging along until the satisfying conclusion. Neither too complex nor too light, this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz.

May 15, 2022
Seasoned novelist Fowler (A Good Neighborhood, 2020) offers up a tightly coiled family saga. After the Geller sisters' mother passes away, they are left with the family vacation home as their inheritance. Claire, Sophie, and Beck make their way to Mount Desert Island, Maine, to sever their connection to "the camp," and take their share of the proceeds. The home, a 1960s bungalow overlooking the water, becomes the center of the story as the sisters tie up loose ends and sell the property. Fowler writes in chapters that alternate characters' viewpoints, releasing with each one, in a slow drip, the long-held secrets the sisters have been keeping from each other. When charming southerner C.J. enters the picture--bringing his own buried past and a connection to the Geller family--he desperately wants to buy their family home to create a fresh start of his own. Fowler expertly peels back the layers of each character in this page-turner, making for a highly entertaining summer read.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 2, 2022

Fowler, the author of well-received family and historical dramas like A Good Neighborhood and A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts, veers light in this sparkling, summery contemporary story, A dying woman with a secret past, Marti Geller leaves behind three successful adult daughters: freelance journalist Beck, who longs to write a novel; pediatric cardiologist Claire, who pines for the wrong man; and Sophie, whose Instagram-ready life looks better online than in reality. Marti dispenses maternal advice to "take more taxis," and her revelatory bombshell of a will requires Beck, Claire, and Sophie to sell the family's summer house in Mount Desert, Maine, and split the proceeds. This forces Marti's rivalrous daughters into a closeness that each had previously only shared with their mother. Together, the sisters must eventually reveal and confront their own scandalous secrets. VERDICT All you could want in a beach read: three sisters with secrets; a summer house in Maine to be sold off (or not); a sexy stranger from out of town who's looking to buy; and no problem that can't be satisfyingly resolved before the story ends.--Laurie Cavanaugh

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.