You Should Have Known / Jean Hanff Korelitz

Grace Reinhart is a couples therapist in New York City on the cusp of making the big time with a book that’s getting lots of buzz entitled You Should Have Known. The book is about how couples who face discord later in a marriage really should have seen it coming from the start-- the clues are always there, the fatal personality and relationship flaws obvious from the get-go, but somehow signs are ignored, until later down the line it all goes “kerflooey”.

Grace’s professional standing, her modest but comfortable Upper East Side apartment, son in an exclusive Manhattan private school, husband a doctor with at a prestigious hospital—it all seems so perfect and her bio should look rather nice on the jacket flap of her soon-to-be New York Times bestselling title. But the advice she doles out to her patients and records in her book come back to haunt her—you really should have known, Grace Reinhart.

At times this novel almost reads like Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, but about three quarters of the way through it downshifts and the narrative tension decrescendos rather quickly. I like the characters the author creates, entering Grace’s New York neighborhood, and seeing events unfold in her eyes. If Grace had met up with her husband in the last half of the book, it might have made a better read. But maybe the way it was written was more true to life.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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