Monday Mini Reviews: Five Star Read: The Burning Side

I loved The Bright Years, Damoff's debut, when I read it last year.  And if it's possible, I think I love The Burning Side even more. 

This story begins on the night that Alice and Leo escape from their burning house with their young children.  This is also the night that Leo has told Alice he wants a divorce.

From that starting point, the story moves back and forth in time, narrated by Alice, Leo, and Deb (Alice's mother).  

We are able to see how Leo and Alice met, and the beginning of their relationship and marriage. At the same time, Deb also shares the origins of her marriage to Billy.  We see Deb and Billy as Alice's parents, devoted to each other and their family, but through Deb's narration, we get a fuller depiction of things.

In some parts I wanted to page ahead to make sure things turned out alright for everyone. I would inwardly groan at conversations that ended with hurt feelings, or in anger.  These characters felt so real to me - all of their imperfections made them human.

And I love the way Damoff writes about marriage.  We get to see the highs and lows, the small moments that make up everyday life, and the reality that marriages endure some hard times.

This would be a great book club selection. It's for anyone who loves character driven novels, or well written fiction.  And I can't wait to see what Damoff writes next.

Friday Five

 

1. Linen Blend Popover Top

2.  Knotted Muscle Tee

3.  New Balance 327 Denim Shoes

4.  Lottie Love Sleep Set

5.  Izzie Relaxed Pull On Shorts

6.   9" Downtown Bermuda Shorts

7.  French Terry Oversized V-Neck Sweatshirt

8.  The Lodge Pant "Crepette"

9. Gola Hawk Sneakers

10.  Four Seasons- Season Two

That's it for me this week.  What's caught your eye?

Waiting on Wednesday: Valley of the Moms

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature where I share a soon to be released title I can't wait to read.

This week's pick Valley of the Moms by Hannah Selinger

Due out: June 16, 2026

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

Stepford Wives meets Big Little Lies in this twisty thriller that uncovers the untruths, petty grievances, and local school politics underneath a seemingly quaint small town.

Hamilton, Massachusetts is one of those suburban towns that appears untouched by the outside world where stay-at-home moms wear 2ct diamond studs to the playground, where a million-dollar property is “affordable,” and where the Parent Teacher Organization is a hotbed of controversy. Sure, some people struggle to make ends meet, but residents would say discussing such ugly matters is impolite. Hamilton has been like this forever, and everyone likes it that way. Or: almost everyone.

It's not that Anna Plummer doesn't like Hamilton, but she never thought she'd be married with two young kids, comfortable, complacent…and growing more bored by the minute. So, when she realizes her second grader won't be able to attend the "Ziti with Your Sweetie" school dance because she didn’t pay for a “Premium” membership, she snaps. She sends an email to the terrifying president of the PTO—and all hell breaks loose.

One year later, Anna is found dead in the frozen Ipswich River. Left to pick up the pieces, her husband, Denny, is shaken to his core. He's no expert, but he's seen enough Dateline to know that the police think he's the main suspect. If they aren't going to get justice for Anna, he will. Told through the alternating perspectives of Anna and Denny exactly one year apart, and with a shocking concluding twist, Valley of the Moms is a gripping look at the underpinnings of grief, the social structures of wealth, and the secrets people keep—even among friends and loved ones.

Friday Five

The weeks are flying by.  The end of this school year brings unknowns again for the fall.  Despite the fact that I've had four libraries to run this year, and have spent a lot of time driving back and forth to different buildings and been in and out of countless classrooms, I have enjoyed getting to work with elementary students again.  And next year, because the district has cut another two library positions, there will be no librarians in any of our eleven elementary buildings.  The number of colleagues, community members and parents who have all voiced their disappointment in the short-sightedness of the decision, does not change this decision.  I'm grateful to have a job in the library but there is no actual plan for what this might look like.  And this is not what is best for students. 

So, I'm trying my best to enjoy this last month with the students.  And because I have four libaries to inventory there isn't much time to think about how much I will miss these kids.

I'm finding so many great things I'd love to add to my closet.  The willpower comes and goes, so there are packages that keep showing up for me. 

Enjoy this week's finds!

 

1.  The A & F Madeline Whipstitch Crew Sweater

2.  Garden Square Scarf

3.  Ruthie Woven Ballet Flats

4.  The Linen Marine Wide Leg Pant Vintage Ivy

5.  BDG Bridget Cotton Slub Knit Oversized Cardigan

6.  Indigo Tencel Lyocell Zip-Front Jacket

7.  Charlotte Striped Vest

8.  Cora Hand-Made Crochet Cardigan

9.   Princess Charlotte's Eleventh Birthday Picture

10.  Ted Lasso Season 2

That's it for me this week. What's caught your eye?

Waiting on Wednesday: The Amateur

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature where I highlight a soon to be released title I can't wait to read.  

This week's pick: The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

Due out: August 

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs and predatory men, and suddenly a teenager is on trial in this spellbinding novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant.

1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.

In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?

NonFiction Tuesday: Upcoming: The Vanishing Family

I love adding to my TBR and I love reading nonfiction.  I enjoyed Robert Kolker's previous book, Hidden Valley Road, so his newest book is an auto-buy for me.

 

The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate and the Quest To End Dementia by Robert Kolker 

Due out: September 29, 2026

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia.

In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road (“Deeply compassionate and chilling,” wrote The Washington Post). This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.

The Vanishing Family unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.

Friday Five

 

1.  Giselle Wide Leg Ankle Trouser Pants

2.   Boat Neck Denim Bubble Midi Dress by Anthropologie

3.  Straight Hem Short Sleeve Shirt

4.  Hailey High Rise Bermuda Short In Chocolate

5.  The Denner

6.  Maeve Cotton Sleeveless Muscle Sweatshirt

7.  100% European Linen Patch Pocket Wide Leg Pants

8.  Katie Cotton Rollneck Sweater Vest

9.  Tabitha Shirt

10.  Prince Louis 8th Birthday

That's it for me this week. What's caught your eye?

Thursday: Five Star YA: One Word, Six Letters

I pre-ordered this one after hearing what Colby Sharp had to say about it a while ago and I knew from the beginning that it was a five-star read.  

 

Dayton takes a dare and yells the f-slur at a school assembly not anticipating the fallout that this creats.  He loses friends, disappoints his parents, and finds that one mistake can not only have unforeseen consequences, but also create lasting (negative) effects.  

Farshid is a student in the auditorium when Dayton yells the slur.  Although the slur wasn't directed at him, Farshid has been grappling with his own sexual identity and hearing another student's feelings about it causes him to face what it is like to be queer in a world where not everyone accepts that. 

Both boys must decide what kind of man they want to grow up to be.  

This book is full of important topics for discussion and as soon as I finished it, I quickly shared it with our eighth grade English teachers, who started reading and immediately ordered herself a copy.  

I'm so glad I picked this one up and will be sharing this one with anyone who enjoys reading great YA lit.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Half Life

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature where I highlight a soon to be released novel I can't wait to read.

This week's pick: The Half Life by Rachel Beanland

Due out: July 14, 2026

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

From the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire, a novel set on a remote Italian island, about a navy wife’s reckoning with power, love, and the price of staying silent in the Atomic Age.

When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O’Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen’s got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender.

In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of Navy wives, who are hell bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island—taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones—she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from.

Still, it doesn’t take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the US government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island—not to mention all of Italy—doesn’t go communist in the next election.

When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the US Navy. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets—and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.

Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakening—of one woman forced to choose between loyalty to her husband and country and to the Italian locals who show her the high cost of American exceptionalism.

Tuesday Non Fiction: Reading On Topic

I love watching golf.  I played in high school, but that is a long time ago.  My parents both golfed and my dad often had the television tuned in to the Golf Channel. My husband golfs, and so do most of our extended families.  Reading about golf is one way I still enjoy the sport- and it is far less frustrating than actually playing.  

 

Rory McIlroy's win at the Masters this year was perfect timing for his biography being released. I had it next to my night stand to start reading, and my husband quickly snatched it up.  He has already finished it and given it back to me so I can enjoy it, and then we can discuss it.

A few years ago we both read Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict. This is a chunker of a book, but I feel like I grew up watching Tiger and his athletic prowess is something to behold. However, his personal life does not necessarily make him seem like a nice guy, and with his latest struggles, I've been thinking about this book a bit more.

I can still vividly recall A Good Walk Spoiled sitting next to my dad's side of the bed. Feinstein's sports writing is always something I enjoy reading.  And still on my TBR are The Match: The Day The Game of Golf Changed Forever by Mark Frost and Seven Days in Augusta: Behind the Scenes at the Masters by Mark Cannizzaro.

I know there are plenty of other golf related titles.  I've read a few others and have a fiction golf-related book checked out from the library right now.  

Do you have a sport you enjoy reading about?