THE NAMES by Florence Knapp

What’s in a name? A lot. Names shape identities. Names work on our psyches. In Knapp’s debut novel, Cora and Gordon are parents of a newborn son. Cora must register the birth. She wants to name the baby Julian. The nine-year-old, Maia, wants to name her baby brother Bear. And Gordon, like his father and grandfather before him, wants to name the baby Gordon. But Gordon is abusive, emotionally and physically, so Cora cannot conceive of punishing herself or her son with an abuser’s name. Yes, trigger warnings are needed. In a Sliding Doors-type structure, the reader lives each variation of the son’s life with the three different names. I adored this novel for its brilliant structure, the subtle ways the narrative shifts and grows with each version of the son’s life. Even with the trapped feeling of disgust at the characters in the beginning, I loved everything Knapp succeeded in showing the growth of these characters by the end.   

Favorite line(s): He wasn’t just devastated she was no longer there—the day-to-day tangible presence of her, of the girls—but by the reality that she could leave at all. He’d let himself believe she was his; he, hers. But perhaps that idea had always been too good to be true. Some days he woke and felt as though his head were being pushed backward through the pillow at the shock of it and he’d silently question if a room was a room, if his hand was a hand, if he was lying there at all. And without warning, while he was in that odd place of rebuilding their house around the uncertain remains of their marriage, his mother’s death hit him anew. As though his whole childhood had been a long, dilute glass of her absence, but now he was faced with the neat concentrate of it. The absolute nothingness of what he was left with.

MY FRIENDS by Fredrik Backman

One summer, four friends swam and hung out at a pier every day to escape their lives at home in their seaside town. From that summer, one of the four painted the scene. Years later, the painting and the artist became famous. Louisa is grieving the loss of her friend when she meets the artist and explains to him what the painting (she carries around a postcard of it) has meant to her. Alternating between past and present, My Friends explores the power of grief, friendship, and how life is made sweeter by the magic that second chances bring.

Favorite line(s): Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.

                          You can choose to be alone, but. No one chooses to be left.

                          The basic function of a parent is just to exist. You have to be there, like

                          ballast in a boat, because otherwise your child capsizes. 

NOTHING’S EVER THE SAME by Cyn Vargas

Itzel’s dad has a heart attack at her thirteenth birthday party. So begins the girl’s journey as her parents’ marriage fails, and her quest to understand love and belonging occupies her every thought. Set in Chicago, Nothing’s Ever the Same is about forgiveness and grieving the loss of someone even though they’re alive.  

Favorite line(s): My room had one straight stripe from the moonlight running across it. It separated the room into almost two equal parts. When I got into bed, the light sawed me in half. Parts of me in different worlds.

FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM by Ursula Hegi

This collection of parables is narrated by Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in Germany after World War II. Each parable is a story of a family member or one of the neighbors in their small town. Etched with precise detail, Hegi focuses on the eccentric characters populating Burgdorf. The American soldier who left before his son was born. The town librarian, a dwarf, knows a little about a lot of their neighbors. Hanna’s mother, an artist, swims during thunderstorms and drives too fast. Evoke a particular time and place, along with the characters and events that leave an impression on a young mind. 

Favorite line(s): Though they had wrinkles and gray hair, these women didn’t think of themselves as old; it was an unspoken fact that each of them carried within, a fact that didn’t need to be confirmed because there was always someone who could remember them as girls and recall a half-forgotten detail, someone who—beneath the fine web of lines—still saw the child’s face. They did this for each other, the old women, pulling out the albums of class picnics, of trips to Kaiserwerth and Schloss Burg, pointing to their younger images in fading photographs and whispering to each other: “Remember?” And they continued to do so until they were in their eighties or nineties because, as long as there was someone who had known them as girls, someone who could recollect the quick movements of their limbs, the graceful turn of their smooth necks—they could gaze into their mirrors and see their young reflections.