Wolitzer, Meg. The Female Persuasion.

NY: Riverhead Books, 2018.

This is Wolitzer’s tenth novel, and the second one I’ve read following The Interestings, which was excellent. Part of that book’s structure and theme was watching a group of kids growing into themselves over a period time, and that’s sort of what happens here, too, but the overarching theme this time is feminism and what it really means and how it affects people, both to women and men. There are several protagonists, really, but the main one is Greer Kadetsky from a small town in Massachusetts, whom we first meet as a college freshman in 2006, when she’s talked into going with her new dorm friend, Zee, to hear a talk by the famous Faith Frank, one of those pioneering feminists from two generations earlier, like Gloria Steinem.

Egan, Jennifer. The Candy House.

NY: Scribner, 2022.

This is less a standard novel and more a collection of extended vignettes about the members of the multi-generational Hollander family and their relations and other connections — a few of whom we previously met in Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. In fact, it’s being marketed as a sequel to the earlier book, but I think that’s overstating things. (And you certainly don’t have to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one.) It all starts, though, with Bix Bouton, a young black nerd who lives in a somewhat alternative world to ours, and who now, twenty years later, has become a multi-billionaire tech entrepreneur and an icon to most of 21st-century society. (“The term ‘social media’ wouldn’t be coined to describe Mandala’s business for almost a decade, but Bix had conceived of it long before he brought it to pass.”)

Rowell, Rainbow. Scattered Showers.

NY: St. Martin, 2022.

This is a collection of nine short stories, some new, some previously published. And while they all have a romantic theme, they’re not rom-coms but rather stories of falling in love or or discovering that you can fall in love — and perhaps not just fore the first time. The characters are all high school or college age, so the book is obviously intended for young adults, but the author never writes down to her audience. Also, Rowell is very good at character-building, which I already knew, but she does it here in surprisingly few words in each story. And that’s one of the most important parts of writing short stories, and also one of the hardest.

Wang, Weike. Chemistry.

NY: Knopf, 2017.

This debut novel won a Whiting Award and the PEN award for best first novel. It’s not especially long, barely two hundred pages, and there’s not a lot of action in the usual sense, but there’s a great deal of thought. The narrator (who, like all but one of the other characters, is never named) is a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at a university in Boston, but after nearly five years (by which time she is expected to have completed her dissertation, like everyone else) things aren’t going so well at the lab. She’s stuck and hasn’t been able to produce useful results in her research.

Osman, Richard. The Bullet That Missed.

NY: Viking, 2022.

This is the third novel about the adventures of the Thursday Murder Club, and each has been better than the last. In fact, this one is about to be made into a film — and by Steven Spielberg, no less. If you don’t already know, the Murder Club meets in the Jigsaw Room at Cooper’s Chase, an upscale retirement community in Kent, and its four elderly members — Ron, an old-style labor leader and dedicated troublemaker, Joyce, an ex-nurse and much sharper than her outward persona would lead you to believe, Ibrahim, a somewhat OCD psychiatrist who is very good at plumbing people’s depths, and Elizabeth, ex-MI-6 and not someone it would be wise to cross — attempt to solve cold cases for the fun of it and have perverted DCI Chris Hudson and his PC Donna De Freitas to their cause.

Thompson, Kate. The Little Wartime Library.

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2022

I was a big-city public librarian for thirty-five years, and I retired at the turn of the century, so my career was almost entirely in the days of books and readers, not computers and “information technology.” Which means I will approach any historical novel about libraries with both automatic interest and a little bit of caution. And you might not think that fiction books would be important during World War II, but they played a major role in providing the civilian population of London with at least a temporary escape from the nightly bombings.

Sturges, Lilah & Meaghan Carter. Girl Haven.

Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2021.

This lively fantasy/adventure graphic novel is a lot more than the title might suggest. It starts with Ash, a middle school student unsure of his sexual orientation (or what he’s even supposed to do about all that). His mother disappeared three years before, and his father’s not much help, so he’s kind of lonely, and he falls in with the members of the school’s “queer support” club (all three of them).

Fior, Muanuele, Hypericon.

Np: Europe Comics, 2023.

So, there are two story lines here. The first retells the story of Howard Carter’s discovery and excavation of the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in 1922, in Carter’s own published recollections. It’s a straightforward recitation of the facts, with schematics of the tomb. The second, set at the turn of the 21st century, concerns twenty-year-old Teresa Guerrero, an Italian university student come to Berlin on a grant to work as scientific assistant at the state university’s installation of a Tutankhamen exhibit. And on her fist day in the city, she meets Ruben, an artist her age, also Italian, who has been in Berlin for two years, living off the checks his father sends every month and not accomplishing very much. But Berlin at the time was a huge playground for people their age, and he intends to remain there as long as possible.