Winter 2026 Hooked on Books

• What Comes Next: A Novel
• Written by Caitlin Forbes
• ISBN # 978-1662528118
• Lake Union Publishing

What if Unthinkable News Arrives in a Note?

What if you knew that you and your sister might have inherited a debilitating disease from your deceased mother who disappeared from your life years earlier? What if she sent this news in a note to be mailed after she died? What if that made you afraid to get back into a loving relationship for fear of the hurt that might be headed your way? What if you were safest when you were training dogs that seemed incorrigible? These are only a few of the conflicts that Caitlin Forbes explores in What Comes Next a book that is well worth your time.

With multi-faceted characters and increasing complications this is a story that will grab you. The narrator asks excellent questions of herself, and you may find yourself asking some of them about your own life. What are you afraid of? Why does commitment scare you? What are the costs of sharing a truth that cannot be changed?

What does Alex, the narrator discover about herself, her sister, and her mother? And who turns out to be “perfectly fine” in the end? What Comes Next will answer these questions and many more.

Caitlin Forbes was born in Rhode Island and grew up in the mountains of western Maine. She received her bachelor’s degree from Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and her master’s degree in English literature from the University of Connecticut. She has a decade’s worth of experience working as a leader in healthcare technology and transformation. Forbes lives in Saco, Maine, with her husband, son, and one-hundred-pound Shiloh shepherd.

This book is perfect for readers who enjoy adult coming-of-age stories that deal with complex, emotional subjects.

This book is on tour with WOW: Women on Writing.

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The Award

• Written by Matthew Pearl
• ISBN #: 978-0063445277
• Harper, December 2, 2025

What Is The Price of Success?

What will an author do to get noticed? Of course your answer depends on several factors? How creative is he? How much does she believe in her talent? How badly does he need the money that an award and fame can bring? How fearful is she that she has no real talent? Matthew Pearl’s The Award explores these questions along with a degree of fear, desperation, and professional jealousy that color the narrator’s thoughts and affect his actions. It offers us the chance to look at how much our minds may be blocking our creative endeavors.

David Trent is an aspiring novelist surrounded by a plethora of other aspiring novelists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s ambitious and so are his aspiring peers. Though their genres and self-confidence varies, their hunger for recognition is strong.

Trent moves into an apartment above Silas Hale, a vindictive monster who is also a celebrated author. Although Hale doesn’t own the apartment, he controls the heat and keeps it so cold that Trent’s fiancée, Bonnie, moves out. Does his cruelty hide fear or arrogance? Or both?  

It doesn’t matter until 28-year-old David Trent wins a prestigious award for his new book. In fact he wins the same award that started Hale on his climb to fame. Silas becomes interested in his neighbor, though he’s still an arrogant boor. Just when things couldn’t be better, the administrator of the Boston Literary Award comes to David with alarming news. His convictions are shaken and he’s forced into desperate choices.

Readers will be shocked at what Trent does and what others do to him. Matthew Pearl starts his book by saying, “Some of this happened.” Did it happen to him? Was he an observer? And just how much is actually true? Readers will be drawn into the hard choices Trent, Hale, Bonnie, and others face as the saga digs deeper and deeper into right and wrong.

Matthew Pearl is the acclaimed author of both fiction and non-fiction. His books include The Taking of Jemima Boone and Save Our Souls as well as other books. He produced Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders.  acclaimed w

The Award is an incisive, engrossing novel about writing peers, publishing, greed, determination, and the dangerous acts people do to win fame and fortune.

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• How To Read a Book
• Written by Monica Wood
• ISBN #: 978-0063243675
• Mariner Books

How to Forgive the Unforgivable

What courses of action do books suggest? Monica Wood’s How To Read a Book advises a retired person to start a group activity using one of her or his many skills acquired while working. Who wouldn’t want to find new relationships? Of course, her book club is in a woman’s prison, so there are some rules, regulations, and drawbacks.

 

Harriet has the members of her book club reading and writing when Violet is released. After a chance encounter, Harriet invites struggling Violet to her house for dinner, where Harriet’s niece offers a job as an animal attendant in a lab to Violet. The niece is leaving and hates the job, but Violet loves the parrots, their talking in the lab, and seeing the way they grow. They are wise but less complicated than the humans in the story. Still, no reader is likely to forget Ollie and his antics.

Author Monica Wood is a skilled plotter who invents characters that will touch your heart. It’s the characters who drive this novel and the plot that pushes it forward with one incident after another escalating the tension. Wood has written several other books, and her work has received several awards including a Pushcart Prize.

How To Read a Book shows readers how to forgive the unforgiveable. Whether the issue involves a public meltdown, a drunk driver killing someone or a secret past, forgiveness leads to growth. So do solid relationships, and Harriet, the book club leader, Violet, a member of the club who gets released from prison, and Frank, the husband of the woman Violet killed, eventually become solid friends who protect one another.

How does all that come about? Harriet, who used to be an English teacher, would say, “Read the book. Read it with empathy for the characters. Allow yourself to relate to those characters. See if you can find advice in there for yourself.” As the reviewer I say, “If you choose this book, you’ll be rewarded with new ideas. Reading it will be time well-spent.”

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• The Cartography of First Love
• Angela Grey
• ISBN #: 978-1961841444
• Shady Oak Press August 25, 2025

Unexpected First Love

Do you ever fantasize about your first love, whether it was 50 years ago or hasn’t happened yet? Do you have a secret habit that’s destroying you or seriously interrupting your life? If so, you’ll identify with the teens who are fighting personal battles after being institutionalized in Angela Grey’s The Cartography of First Love.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a high school student. Now imagine that you suffer from  an eating disorder or OCD and the condition has gotten so bad that your parents took you out of your home and school and placed you in a psychiatric ward where they hope you will get better? How do you cope with the added layer of loneliness that comes with a new environment, schedule, and set of expectations?

The story is told in two voices, so readers get a double set of issues and coping strategies. Nico’s anxiety and depression have become unmanageable. Zibby has an eating disorder. The stresses imposed by the sense that they’re always being watched and everything they say and do is recorded are strong.

They personify a plant, naming it Atlas and caring for it as if it were a child. A puzzle they’re working on together takes their minds away from their problems, but their physical proximity at the same table introduces new feelings and tensions.

Always there’s the metaphor of a road map leading the two of them back to health. The author keeps it present as a reminder. It’s never overbearing and subtly gives readers hope that they will find their paths and their way out.

Author Angela Gray is an indigenous novelist as well as a poet and a painter. Storytelling can heal and she treats it like a type of medicine. She’s the author of over 20 books, and many of them deal with mental illness.

As a reader who used to teach high school students, I found myself identifying with the yearning and angst of both Zibby and Nico. I wanted them to rediscover freedom and find purpose in their lives. I even rooted for Atlas, even though it was a plant. That speaks to Ms. Gray’s storytelling skills and understanding of adolescents. Whether you’re a student, a parent, or a teacher, you’ll find an important message in this book.

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• Did You Have the Life You Wanted? 
• Written by Andrea Simon
• ISBN #: 979-8897409785
• Sibylline Press

Fiction As Intimate As Memoir

When I saw the title, I knew I wanted to read Andrea Simon’s book, Did You Have the Life You Wanted?  How would people answer? What would work in their lives and how would their experiences compare to mine?

On the back I read that it was fiction, but it seemed more like the biography of a woman, maybe partly real and partly fictitious, who grew up in the same years I did. We had a lot in common: she was bright, articulate, and independent. Unlike me, though, she hung out in Greenwich Village near the Stonewall Inn where history was made, gave up her college career until later life, and got involved in copywriting as a young woman while I went into teaching in high school and college.

Anita Rappaport lived independently in New York’s Greenwich Village when school strikes with racial overtones, the Stonewall Inn battle and the Attica uprisings occurred along with the second feminist movement that created more equality in both employment and marriage. It was both an exciting and a turbulent time to be alive.

Anita grappled with gang violence when she went out on field work for the Department of Social Services. After surviving that trauma she tried other employment, became a copywriter in an office filled with sexism, sought professional help, married a doctor, and ultimately returned to school to get her MFA in Creative Writing. Her hard work brought her success, but the loss of a brother and a good friend brought deep thought about the ways she’d spent her life. As she ages, Anita asks herself and her friends the question: “Did you have the life you wanted?” Of course, she received both surprising and heartbreaking responses.

Depending on a reader’s own life experiences, Anita could seem anywhere from average or typical to exceptional. As a reader I absorbed her story so fully that I felt like I was reading a well-plotted memoir of an adventurous woman whose character grew deeper as the years progressed. The story is fiction though, not memoir. It’s well worth your time if you like stories of an ambitious and hard-working woman finding her way through the emotional evolution of a life lived between the late sixties and the present. And it’s an inspiring story as you watch her age.

Andrea Simon is a writer and photographer based in New York City. She has worked as an editor, writer, and manager on diverse projects, and was the co-owner of an editorial/production company that specialized in health-related educational materials. Having published numerous stories and essays, she has received prestigious literary honors, including the winner of the Ernest Hemingway First Novel Contest, two Dortort Creative Writing Awards, the Stark Short Fiction Prize, the Short Story Society Award, and the Authors in the Park Short Story Writing Contest and more.

This review was originally posted at Story Circle.

Editor’s Note: Two more reviews will be posted soon, one on January 8 and the other on January 13th. We’re honoring blog tour requests. Please come back to see them.