One Night at the Lake by Bethany Chase

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A tragedy on a hot summer night at a lake house forever alters the lives of two best friends—and the man they both love. But the truth isn’t as simple as it appears in this intricate novel of love, friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness in the tradition of Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s Bittersweet.

Leah Tessaro has been waiting for this moment for a long time: Her boyfriend, Ollie, is taking her to his family’s home on Seneca Lake for a week of lazy summer bliss, boating, and barbeque. The couple has been together for four years, and Leah is convinced that Ollie is finally going to pop the question. And Leah can’t wait to share the joyous news with her best friend, June Kang, who is joining them on their getaway, and whose presence will make everything feel more real. 

Seven years later, the moment June has been dreading has finally arrived: Her fiancé, Ollie, is taking her to his family’s lake house. But this is not an ordinary visit to an ordinary place; it is a house haunted by June’s long-buried memories of her lost friend, Leah—and the connection that appears to remain between Leah and the man for whom June’s love is as deep as her sense of foreboding.

Alternating between the two women’s vibrant voices, One Night at the Lake is a gripping novel that explores a complex tangle of friendship, loyalty, and betrayal, all driving toward one question: What exactly happened to Leah on that hot summer night?

Source: advance e-galley provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review


I've been a fan of Bethany Chase's since her first book, The One That Got Away so I eagerly scoop up anything she releases. Chase continues to explore themes of complicated relationships and friendships, his time adding a mystery.

Chase has split the story into two timelines. The first with Leah that happened seven years ago and the second with her best friend, June which happens seven years later. In the past, Leah and Ollie have been dating for years and they're the couple that most people envy. Sickeningly cute, he's so perfect, she' so vibrant ... yada yada yada. Things seem so perfect that Leah is convinced he will propose during their upcoming trip to his family's place on Seneca Lake. She also invites June to accompany them for the week since she's broken up with her latest boyfriend and best friends don't leave their BFFs alone. Seven years later, June is now engaged to Ollie and dreads the return to Seneca Lake for another family get together. At this point not much is known as to why and how it's June and Ollie and not Leah and Ollie but we know that Leah hasn't been in the picture since the last visit. What happened is slowly revealed as the week at the lake in both the past and present slowly wears on. In both timelines everything starts out fine. It's a typical holiday with lots of fun and and lakeside shenanigans. Then the pressure sets in and little by little this perfect picture of happiness and contentment starts to become fractured. 

Firstly, I purposefully didn't read the blurb too closely so I was not expecting the time jump and couple switch. I literally gasped when I realized June was now with Ollie. I did have a hard time at first reconciling that they were a couple in the future. It felt disloyal and disingenuous to Leah. But I think that's what I was supposed to feel without knowing all the specifics and come on, I wanted the gossip. Secondly, this mystery is my kind of catnip. I loved the suspense and how details gradually emerged via Leah and June's recollections and observations. The timeline flip flop was genius! It gave me the sense that I was there in the thick of things. There's something alluring about being a reader who knows that something foreboding is close at hand when reading it in real time (Leah's POV). June's timeline is all about reconciling the past with the present, and her guilt over moving on with her life which includes Ollie. There's so much baggage in that relationship that's been ignored; this trip will undoubtedly force them to finally unpack all of that. The contrast between the two trips to the lake couldn't be more apparent - the first starts out joyous and second one is just pure dread. (By the way, Leah's timeline does have a few possible triggers which I will list below. They could be spoilery so consider yourself warned.)

I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting but I was definitely surprised by how everything played out. Chase crafted a story that steadily escalated in tension, especially during June's POV as she began to fit in the missing pieces of their last time at the lake with Leah. I had not anticipated the ending as I let my imagination run wild with all sorts of possibilities but it was still shocking. One Night at the Lake is something different from Chase and I say if you're in for some mystery, good storytelling and a close examination of friendships, you'll be pleased with this one.

~ Bel


Trigger Warning

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suspicion of cheating, unwanted touching, unwanted sexual advances

Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen (Six Tudor Queens #3) by Alison Weir

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Acclaimed author and historian Alison Weir continues her epic Six Tudor Queens series with this third captivating novel, which brings to life Jane Seymour, King Henry VIII’s most cherished bride and mother of his only male heir.

Ever since she was a child, Jane has longed for a cloistered life as a nun. But her large noble family has other plans, and, as an adult, Jane is invited to the King’s court to serve as lady-in-waiting for Queen Katherine of Aragon. The devout Katherine shows kindness to all her ladies, almost like a second mother, which makes rumors of Henry’s lustful pursuit of Anne Boleyn—who is also lady-in-waiting to the queen—all the more shocking. For Jane, the betrayal triggers memories of a painful incident that shaped her beliefs about marriage.

But once Henry disavows Katherine and secures his new queen—altering the religious landscape of England—he turns his eye to another: Jane herself. Urged to return the King’s affection and earn favor for her family, Jane is drawn into a dangerous political game that pits her conscience against her desires. Can Jane be the one to give the King his long-sought-after son or will she meet a fate similar to the women who came before her?

Bringing new insight to this compelling story, Weir marries meticulous research with gripping historical fiction to re-create the dramas and intrigues of the most renown court in English history. At its center is a loving and compassionate woman who captures the heart of a king, and whose life will hang in the balance for it.

Source: advance copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review


One of my best friends and I have talked about how we don't understand why tv shows or movies would purposefully revamp actual historic events when they were dramatic enough in real life to begin with. I get it, not everything translates to the screen so artistic license is taken. So what does this conversation have to do with Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen? Everything because reading this shows that there was no bigger soap opera in Europe than the court of Henry VIII. 

We are dropped into one of the most tumultuous times during Henry's reign. Still freshly divorced from Katherine of Aragon, his first wife and now turning sour on his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Henry's need to produce a legitimate male heir to ensure a peaceful succession to the throne is in overdrive. The political machine is hard at work trying to figure out how to make this happen. But first they need to do damage control caused by the divorce from the much beloved first or "true" queen, then they have to get Henry away from Anne which then paves the way for him to take a new wife, and that would be Jane Seymour.

As a knight's daughter, Jane's family isn't as rich or influential as the Boleyns but they have a presence. Being the lady-in-waiting to Katherine and then later to Anne puts her in Henry's orbit. Jane isn't as ambitious the way Anne was believed to be. In her book, Weir offers us an alternative: that as a child she had wanted to live a quiet life as a nun but later realized that that wasn't a life suited for her. Jane presents a more demure nature that befits a queen and more importantly, is acceptable to the royal court and to a country after Henry's divorce. After the scandal that has followed Anne, Henry is convinced that Jane is the answer. She starts believing it, too.

Here's the deal: reading about The Tudors - specifically Henry and his wives - stirs up all kinds of emotions. I go from sympathy to annoyance to outrage and then back to sympathy. and I preat that cycle. Keeping in mind the time period (that Henry needed to establish his legitimacy domestically and internationally) and what a woman's role was then, I have to remember that the women were essentially pawns in a greater game played by the ego-driven and politically ambitious men and families surrounding them. These women were encouraged to use their feminine ways to woo the king by any means necessary, but the dangerous flipside to that was that their femininity was also used against them when they proved to be a political liability and no longer useful (see: Anne Boleyn). Reading Jane Seymour made that more apparent because she isn't necessarily in the thick of things but merely an observer for most of the time she's at court. She witnesses Katherine's humiliation, Henry's estrangement from his two daughters, Anne's (and her family's) rise through the ranks and then seemingly overnight, the machine behind Anne's downfall. It was illuminating for me to see these events through her eyes and I have to say that I learned something and gained a better perspective on this factious time. As always after I've read one of Alison Weir's books, I come away with a better perspective for these events and some of the players involved. As I said before, this is pure soap opera that you can't even make up! I have a special affection for Jane now. I'd like to think that at her heart she was a genuine person who yearned to bring about peace and stability to the monarchy and to Henry's personal life. In some ways she did but at the end of the day, she was another in a line of women served up to the king.

~ Bel

Talking As Fast As I Can by Lauren Graham

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In this collection of personal essays, the beloved star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood reveals stories about life, love, and working as a woman in Hollywood—along with behind-the-scenes dispatches from the set of the new Gilmore Girls, where she plays the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore once again.

In Talking as Fast as I Can, Lauren Graham hits pause for a moment and looks back on her life, sharing laugh-out-loud stories about growing up, starting out as an actress, and, years later, sitting in her trailer on the Parenthood set and asking herself, “Did you, um, make it?” She opens up about the challenges of being single in Hollywood (“Strangers were worried about me; that’s how long I was single!”), the time she was asked to audition her butt for a role, and her experience being a judge on Project Runway (“It’s like I had a fashion-induced blackout”).

In “What It Was Like, Part One,” Graham sits down for an epic Gilmore Girls marathon and reflects on being cast as the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore. The essay “What It Was Like, Part Two” reveals how it felt to pick up the role again nine years later, and what doing so has meant to her.

Some more things you will learn about Lauren: She once tried to go vegan just to bond with Ellen DeGeneres, she’s aware that meeting guys at awards shows has its pitfalls (“If you’re meeting someone for the first time after three hours of hair, makeup, and styling, you’ve already set the bar too high”), and she’s a card-carrying REI shopper (“My bungee cords now earn points!”).

Including photos and excerpts from the diary Graham kept during the filming of the recent Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, this book is like a cozy night in, catching up with your best friend, laughing and swapping stories, and—of course—talking as fast as you can. 



Graham writes like she talks which makes reading the book fast and engaging. She talks about everything from her childhood to college days and the early years of struggling to find good acting parts before landing her iconic role as Lorelai Gilmore. She fills the pages with funny stories, embarrassing moments and also those teaching moments that stayed with her. Through it all, I got the sense that she maintained her upbeat attitude and was thankful for any opportunity that presented itself.

Most readers will eat up the part of the book where she binges on the entire Gilmore Girls series and reminisces on each season. She jokingly remarks upon the changes in technology, comparisons in wardrobes, hairstyles, storylines. Since my eldest had just recently finished bingeing on the show as well, some of the details Graham recalls were fresh in my mind. She ends the book by sharing excerpts from her diary she kept while filming the revival. I found that to be especially interesting as she writes about their out of sequence filming schedule and how certain aspects of the storyline kind of stumped her. But best of all is the impression that returning to the Gilmore Girls family was essentially returning home after a very long vacation.

I wasn't looking for any sort of lightening-strike-oh-wow moment - I just wanted to read a book by someone I adore. But then she went and offered up this piece of wisdom, really more of a reminder about life in general when faced with disappointment. It's so simple yet powerful and it's my favourite passage from the entire book:

"I still find that, in general, having a plan is, well, a good plan. But when my carefully laid plan laughed at me, rather than clutch at it too tightly I just made a new one, even if it was one that didn't immediately make sense. In blindly trying a different path, I accidentally found one that worked better." 

I'm a Gilmore Girls fan and lately I've gotten into memoirs, so combine these two things and I'm a happy camper. Through her humour and personable charm, Graham shows us just how resilient she has been and how enormously appreciative she is of her experiences. She's someone whom we would love to join us on Bibliojunkies BFF Island. I can only begin to imagine the stories she has tucked away. I'm so glad I picked this up. Talking As Fast As I Can -- all Gilmore Girls/Parenthood fans will find pure enjoyment in this!

~ Bel

Results May Vary by Bethany Chase

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She never saw it coming. Without even a shiver of suspicion to warn her, Caroline Hammond discovers that her husband is having an affair with a man—a revelation that forces her to question their entire history together, from their early days as high school sweethearts through their ten years as a happily married couple. In her now upside-down world, Caroline begins envisioning her life without the relationship that has defined it: the loneliness of being an “I” instead of a “we”; the rekindled yet tenuous closeness with her younger sister; and the unexpected—and potentially disastrous—attraction she can’t get off her mind. Caroline always thought she knew her own love story, but as her husband’s other secrets emerge, she must decide whether that story’s ending will mean forgiving the man she’s loved for half her life, or facing her future without him.

Source: advance e-galley provided by Ballantine Books in exchange for an honest review


Infidelity is not a pleasant matter, period. Even to read about it can make my skin crawl. I've definitely had strong opinions about it in the past, being of the mind that once that trust has been broken then there's nothing left to salvage. 

What Results May Vary has shown me is that it's not as simple as that. In Caroline's case, there's one moment when everything is perfect bliss and then the very next, it's wrecked. Even though she is blindsided and humiliated by her husband's betrayal, she's not entirely convinced that she should give up on her marriage. She spends her energy combing through their history, desperate for signs or clues that she missed. Her approach is analytical, like a CSI investigator, gathering the broken pieces to put together a new picture of her husband who is now a stranger to her. Caroline experiences everything from anger to disappointment to hurt and every other emotion in between. She surprised me with perspectives to ponder on and I must admit that this book was a learning curve for me.

I've been taken with Bethany Chase since her dazzling debut from last year, The One That Got Away. I just loved that she wrote about a smart, talented and ambitious heroine. I feel that she continues that theme here though she's giving us a heroine with a broken heart who is rebuilding herself from the debris. I liked the pace at which the story developed as it gave me a proper sense of the time that elapsed between the initial fallout and her eventual renaissance. She also has a core group of friends including her sister, who offer her comfort, support and gives her a little push when she needs it. They add substance to Caroline's narrative so it doesn't seem like she's in a vacuum. I also like the way Caroline marks key moments in her life through visuals. For example, the day that she learns of her husband's unfaithfulness, she describes how earlier in the day when the sun was at a certain point in the sky, her life was perfect and the world was the way she knew it. Hours later when the sun was at a different point in the sky, her world had changed. Marking that shift in such a way is so like something I'd do, how I'd think. It was kind of cool to see that put to words so poetically.

I adore Results May Vary and if you're looking to champion someone, Caroline is a brilliant character to root for. I think there's something in her that's in all of us; that resilience that we don't realize we have until we're forced to confront the worst imaginable. And sometimes remaking ourselves anew is the best thing that can happen to us but we'll only appreciate that after we've made it through that heartbreak.

~ Bel

Curious Minds by Janet Evanovich and Phoef Sutton

****

From Random House:

Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum series, teams up with Emmy-winning writer Phoef Sutton for a brand-new series of thrillers featuring the invincible and incompatible pairing of Knight and Moon.

 

Emerson Knight is introverted, eccentric, and has little to no sense of social etiquette. Good thing he's also brilliant, rich, and (some people might say) handsome, or he'd probably be homeless. Riley Moon has just graduated from Harvard Business and Harvard Law. Her aggressive Texas spitfire attitude has helped her land her dream job as a junior analyst with mega-bank Blane-Grunwald. At least Riley Moon thought it was her dream job, until she is given her first assignment: babysitting Emerson Knight.

 

What starts off as an inquiry about missing bank funds in the Knight account leads to inquiries about a missing man, missing gold, and a life-and-death race across the country. Through the streets of Washington, D.C., and down into the underground vault of the Federal Reserve in New York City, an evil plan is exposed. A plan so sinister that only a megalomaniac could think it up, and only the unlikely duo of the irrepressibly charming Emerson Knight and the tenacious Riley Moon can stop it.

Source:  Advance Copy from the Random House (Ballantine Books).

If you are a regular here, you know I love Janet Evanovich.  Ranger is my number one book boyfriend!  

Nat and I met her a few years ago.  She was just as awesome as I'd imagined her to be. 

Curious Minds reminded me why I love her so.  It's a great mystery with lots of laugh out loud moments and unique, quirky characters.  Emerson is like a new agey Sherlock, while Riley is his reluctant side-kick.  Emmie (as he's known to his badass Aunt) drags Riley into a quest to solve the question of where his banker has disappeared to and in his quest to lay eyes on his gold reserves.  Hilarious shenanigans ensue.  

I love this new series and cannot wait to see what happens next!  

~ Shel

The One and Only by Emily Giffin

**

From Goodreads:

Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas—a small college town that lives and dies by football, a passion she unabashedly shares. Raised alongside her best friend, Lucy, the daughter of Walker’s legendary head coach, Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. Instead she stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department after graduation, where she has remained for more than a decade.

But when an unexpected tragedy strikes the tight-knit Walker community, Shea’s comfortable world is upended, and she begins to wonder if the life she’s chosen is really enough for her. As she finally gives up her safety net to set out on an unexpected path, Shea discovers unsettling truths about the people and things she has always trusted most—and is forced to confront her deepest desires, fears, and secrets.

I admit, I was completely wigged out by this book.  It's the only Emily Giffin I've read and I picked it up because it had the whole Friday Night Lights, Texas football theme going for it, but in the end, I could have done without this book.  Don't get me wrong, the writing was good, thoughtful, evocative - it was the story that made grossed me out.  That sounds mean, I know and I'm sorry, but the whole hooking up with your best friend's dad, whose wife just died and how she completely does whatever he tells her...  It just hit all my wiggy buttons.  I'm sorry Emily Giffin fans, I mean no disrespect, I will definitely try another of her books, I just wish it hadn't been this story that I read first.

~Shel