HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

Sold as a sequel to her previous novel, Writers & Lovers, King's latest, Heart the Lover, finds the narrator, Casey, in college and in a relationship with two different men, and then, decades later, as a married mother of two and an accomplished writer. The new novel stands alone without the need to read the former. Casey, called Jordan (a reference to Jordan from The Great Gatsby) by the two men, classmates in her 17th-century lit class, are in love with her. Casey dates Sam, the frigid religious one, while pining for Yash, the funny one, thus forming the love triangle King is an expert at unraveling with just the right amount of tension. Will she, won’t she, fuel the plot for the first half of the novel? Then it leaps twenty-one years into the future, and we find out what has become of the three lovers. Casey is now married with a child who needs surgery, while her friend is dying and needs to see her one last time. We learn what really happened to Casey and Yash all those years ago. And with the revelation comes the tears. Love is never simple in King’s hands. But real in all the ways so hard to express. 

Favorite line(s): I was on a panel a few years ago with a philosopher who’d written a book on time. She said there were two prevailing theories, eternalism and presentism. Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all. Nothing before and nothing after. No exceptions. As we were walking off stage, I asked her which she believed, and she told me she could make a strong case for either, but recently she was leaning toward presentism. I didn’t understand why she would lean toward presentism, why she would choose only the present moment—no past, no future—when she could have everything all at once for eternity. But standing here in line, with all these good people working to help others get better, it feels okay to me to have this moment and nothing else. It feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here right now. I feel happy. I have told him.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Ryan’s Buckeye takes a cross-section of small-town Ohio and follows the characters for most of their lives. Cal and Becky Jenkins and Margaret and Felix Salt live in the fictional town of Bonhomie. Cal’s leg deformity keeps him from serving in World War II. He works at the hardware store owned by his father-in-law. Becky tells people’s fortunes. Felix survives an explosion aboard his Navy ship, where most of his shipmates perish. As a baby, Margaret was left in a basket on an orphanage doorstep. Margaret and Cal become lovers. Each couple has a son. Then the Vietnam War takes both. Only one comes home. I loved these characters, their quirks, and their dark secrets. Ryan loves them too. Painted so realistically and lovingly rendered on the page, Buckeye rolls out in braided, storied perfection.

Favorite line(s): “Listen,” she said, returning to Becky, “I never told you this, but I’ve always thought you place too many limitations on yourself.”

“Limitations?”

“You’re more than you think you are,” Mrs. Dodson said. “More than anyone thinks you are. Your true senses already know this.”

“What are my true senses?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be true. Just realize, you are more.”

More than—herself? She didn’t want to waste this opportunity, wanted to get it right before she woke up. “More than Becky Jenkins?” she said.

“Much more.”

“More than somebody’s daughter, or mother? Or wife?”

“Yes.”

“More than a human being in a body.”

“Don’t go off the rails, dear. But look what you did for me. You made it so that I could communicate with the two people I missed the most. You see yourself as a telephone operator connecting calls, but you bridge worlds, don’t you get it? What an incredible thing that is.”

“What about now?” she asked. “Are you in communication with them regularly? Your husband and son—the two Henrys?”

“Ha ha,” Mrs. Dodson said gently. “Junior, yes. Senior, we’re all caught up.”

“You know what?” Becky said, sitting back in her chair. “Maybe I’m dreaming you in order to say these things to myself. Can I ask you one more thing?”

The older woman’s eyes narrowed and she nodded.

“What was it like?”

It took Mrs. Dodson a moment to answer. “I won’t lie to you,” she said with a shrug that was mostly performed with her thin brow, “dying was unpleasant. But death? It’s wonderful.”

THE ENGAGEMENTS by J. Courtney Sullivan (audio)

“A diamond is forever,” and for Mary Frances Gerety, the copywriter who came up with the advertising slogan for De Beers (this part of the novel is a true story), the phrase is a metaphor for a diamond engagement ring’s journey through four different fictional couples. Beginning with the ring’s creation in the early 1900s and following its trajectory through the last couple of owners it had in 2012, we trace its path—lost, stolen, found again, and eventually redesigned into two rings. In alternating chapters and nonlinear storylines, the novel meanders through the lives of each couple, their relationship failures, the lasting love, and the ultimate joys and sorrows the ring bears witness to. And in the end, we learn the connective thread of the characters all within the novel's immense scope.

ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A dual timeline of Joan Goodwin’s journey as she becomes NASA’s first female astronaut in the Space Shuttle program in the early 1980s, and then as she commands the CAPCOM position at Mission Control for another launch that proves disastrous for the fellow astronauts she trained with. Goodwin’s mother figure to her sister and niece weaves intricately into the lives of the other astronauts in the tight-knit Houston community, especially her relationship with her love interest, fellow astronaut Vanessa Ford. Reid writes strong female protagonists no matter the era. And Atmosphere, with the patriarchal environment of the Space Program of the 1970s and 80s, showed that ambition and sacrifice for women sometimes wasn’t enough. It required more than most could give.  

Favorite line(s): Look what we humans had done.

We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly.

It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt.

Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.

Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”

“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.

Joan nodded.

“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is  . . . meaningless.”

Joan looked at him.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?

When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.

Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive.

Intelligent life was her meaning.

People were her meaning.