Yellowface: A Novel

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 18 seconds

I began reading Yellowface, a novel by R.F. Kuang, today. The storyline has been captivating as I scroll through the pages on my Kindle App. The book explores important themes such as cultural diversity, racism, the negative impact of cultural appropriation, and the alienation caused by social media. I find the protagonist, June Hayward, relatable and enjoyable to read about while experiencing Yellowface on my Kindle App.

June and Athena were both talented writers, but Athena’s success overshadowed June’s. After Athena’s sudden death, June rashly steals her completed manuscript, a groundbreaking novel about the Chinese laborers who contributed to World War I. June edits the book and takes credit for it, even going so far as to change her name and ethnicity for marketing purposes. She believes the story deserves to be told, regardless of who tells it.

As June’s book becomes a bestseller, she is haunted by the guilt of stealing Athena’s work. Her secret becomes harder to keep as evidence of her theft surfaces. June must confront her actions and decide how far she will go to protect her newfound success.


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Invisible Hour: A Novel

Read: August 2023

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The Invisible Hour: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

Today I started reading The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman. It’s a story about love, heartbreak, self-discovery, and the magic of books. The Invisible Hour is the story of one woman’s dream. For a little while, it came true. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Mia Jacob finds hope in the power of words on a brilliant June day. She reads The Scarlet Letter, a novel written almost two hundred years earlier, which mirrors her life. Mia and her mother, Ivy, live inside an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts called the Community, where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words perfectly capture the pain and loss that Mia carries inside her.

As Mia journeys through heartbreak and time, she breaks free from the rules of her Community. Along the way, she discovers the power of reading to transport and connect people, the fluidity of time, and the strength of love to overcome any obstacle.

As a young girl, Mia fell in love with a book. Now as a woman, she falls for a writer as she travels back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote “The Scarlet Letter”? What if Mia never found the book on the day she planned to end her life?


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Flight: A Novel

Read: January 2023

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Flight: A Novel

by Lynn Steger Strong

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a novel about family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, forming a decisive next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. The book has been on my to-read list for a few months. A New Yorker Best Books of 2022, it seemed like a good start on my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge. Flight is the first book I read in 2023. Last year I read seventy-four books, and each helped me with my grief journey.

I recommend this novel as it is a page-turner highlighting the difficulty families experience after a loss. As a culture, we are experiencing declining social connections, including within families. Flight is an excellent effort to define the crisis.

Although several possible resolutions to the conflict became clear by the middle of the novel, Ms. Strong told the story so that until the end, it was unclear how or if it would be resolved. In addition, enough unresolved issues remained so that.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Prophet Song: A Novel

Read: January 2024

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Prophet Song: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

In 2024, I started my reading journey with the Booker Prize 2023 winner – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. The book presents a chilling and astonishing outlook of a nation sliding into authoritarianism while also painting a profoundly humane portrait of a mother’s struggle to keep her family together. I have not set a goal of the number of books to read in 2024, but this is an excellent first-day pageturner.

It all begins on a dark, rainy evening in Dublin when Eilish Stack, a scientist and mother of four, opens her front door to two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police. They are there to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart as the government is gradually turning towards tyranny. As her world crumbles and the people she loves disappear, Eilish faces the dystopian reality of her country. How far is Eilish willing to go to protect her family? And what, or who, is she ready to leave behind?


The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Discontent

Read: October 2025

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Discontent: A Novel

by Beatriz Serrano

Discontent” by Beatriz Serrano is a bold and darkly humorous novel that follows a young woman whose carefully constructed office persona starts to unravel when she is compelled to attend her company’s annual retreat. On the surface, Marisa’s life appears enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the heart of Madrid, has a charming neighbor who often spends time with her, and has quickly ascended the ranks at a successful advertising agency.

And yet she’s drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office, hiding from her coworkers, bingeing on YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or tries to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.

However, Marisa’s dubious success, which is primarily built on lies and work she has stolen from others, is in danger of being exposed when she’s forced to attend her company’s team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers, flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses. She is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.


Beatriz Serrano is a striking new voice in international literature. A writer and journalist who has written for publications such as BuzzFeed, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, El País, SModa, and Vogue. Along with writer Guillermo Alonso, she currently co-directs the podcast “Arsenic Caviar“, which won the Ondas Prize for best conversational podcast. Discontent is her first novel. She lives in Madrid.



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Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

Read: March 2026

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Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

by Helen Garner

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most cherished writers, is featured as a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The New Yorker. This collection presents a finely crafted assortment of short stories showcasing Garner’s “generous, category-defying imagination,” as noted by the New York Times Book Review. Helen Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life.

A woman sends postcards from the beautiful Gold Coast to a former lover. A chorus of voices from her hometown gossips about a friend who has returned after going astray. A young girl discovers a hidden box filled with frightening secrets.

In Stories, you will find a collection of short fiction from a unique literary voice. These tales explore the complexities of love and longing, capturing the pain, darkness, and joy of life, all conveyed with Garner’s characteristic sharpness, honesty, and humor. Each story stands on its own as a perfect piece, but together they showcase the remarkable talent of a master of various literary forms.


Helen Garner is an accomplished writer known for her novels, short stories, screenplays, and non-fiction works. In 2006, she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. A decade later, in 2016, she was honored with the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2019, she received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Among her notable works are Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, and Everywhere I Look. Her diaries, titled Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story, were published together as a single volume in the United States.



Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Supporting these selections not only helps me continue to provide you with personalized recommendations but also ensures you have access to meaningful stories that enrich your life. Your support truly makes a difference in helping me share more books and insights with you!


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The Vanishing Half

Read: September 2021

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The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was a true page-turner, and I did not want to stop reading it even when I got to the last page. I am not a fan of sequels, but if I was ever going to change my mind, this is the book I would want to read a sequel.

Ms. Bennett focuses on two twins who run away from home at age 16. They have grown up in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana. “In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder. One of the women chooses to pass as white while the other does not.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

The question of why people choose to live differently than their origins is one that I often ponder. Growing up in a small town and living in a metropolis raises questions for me as to what my life is now and what was once.

I strongly recommend this book.

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