This Story Might Save Your Life

Fiction by Tiffany Crum

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Joy and her best friend Benny have a podcast together called “This Story Might Save Your Life,” a show about the crazy ways that people (themselves or others) have survived life-threatening situations. Or, more precisely, that’s what the show is supposed to be about. It’s really just about Joy and Benny: their long-standing friendship, their amusing stories, and their fun personalities. 

The podcast is a big hit. Joy and Benny are also writing memoir together, and there’s a multi million dollar deal in the works as well. Their cute little show is worth big bucks, not just to them, but also to their producers, Joy’s husband and his sister. 

And here’s where the reader says, wait a minute, Joy has a husband who’s not Benny? Is Benny gay or something? Because it’s obvious that they are VERY close. But Benny is recently divorced from his wife, so… not gay…

Anyways you can see that this story is about the relationship between Benny and Joy, but it’s also a mystery, and there’s a slow reveal about the past through the vehicle of the joint memoir. 

This was a really good story with wonderful characters. I loved it. 

The Three Lives of Cate Kay

Fiction by Kate Fagan

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Cate Kay is a pseudonym for the bestselling author who wrote THE trilogy, the books-turned hit-movies that everyone is talking about. But her identity is a big secret; only her lawyer Sidney knows her real name is Cass Ford, and it used to be Anne Marie Callahan. 

In this book, Cate Kay tells her own story with some input from others who know her, and some excerpts from her bestselling novel The Very Last. This was a good novel with believable characters and a few surprises.

Yesteryear

 Fiction by Caro Claire Burke

https://www.audible.com

I had heard a lot about this book, and everyone was saying it was amazing. I was on the waiting list at the library for over six months, but then I gave up and instead purchased it on audible.com. I did not like it as much as I had anticipated. Actually, I didn't like it at all.

I knew the general premise: Natalie is a housewife and social media influencer who claims to be all about traditional values and going back to "yesteryear" as a wife who lives to support her husband and serve her family. But what happens when she actually wakes up in the year 1855 and sees what "yesteryear" was really like? 

The idea was promising, but in my opinion the execution was terrible. It turned out that I hated every character in the book (except the little kids of course). Natalie and the "trad-wives" were unpleasant; the feminist "angry women" were even more so. I kept waiting for the book to get better and it just got worse. I freely admit to skipping through the last 1/3 of the book to try to find out the ending, only to discover that it was also terrible.

I do not recommend this book.