You ever have a month that truly gets away from you? The last few weeks have been a combination of amazing once-in-a-lifetime travel and stressful work responsibilities with very little book reading time in between. In the end I read plenty of guidebooks and magazines while sitting in airports alongside two novels, one audiobook, and one non-fiction.

First up it was The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. I have seen this book in shop windows, best-seller lists, and social media for a year now and I finally picked it up in a bargain bin. Set in a not-so-distance future Philadelphia, this was a really thoughtful work. Chan tackles so many social and philosophical issues without ever crossing the line of show, don’t tell. Rather than some intense ‘here’s why our society fails women, children, mothers etc.’ mini-essays hidden within a novel, Chan guides readers to think about these issues ourselves as we follow the plot and watch the characters change. I also really appreciated the subtle new pieces of technology that are the backbone of the book. Chen’s world is different, but nothing that’s hard to imagine coming our way soon – which makes it scarier. My only warning is this is a very sad book, and the ending doesn’t offer much optimism so don’t pick it up if you’re in need of a breezy beach read.

Next was a paperback I found in an English second-hand bookstore in Paris: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau by Raymond Brunet and translated by Graeme Macrae Burnet. This was a thoughtful, moody mystery set in rural France that I really enjoyed. It starts out introducing us to the town and our main character Manfred. We live in his repetitive, small life for almost too long until a flashback injects a whole new perspective on him. Then we are introduced to our detective, Georges, to solve the murder. Manfred isn’t a brilliant, evil murderer and Georges isn’t a genius detective who catches him with a tiny detail we missed on page 7. They are more average men with average lives, but our writer and translated use their stories to show how murder always changes things. In a literary world full of brilliant fictional detectives and intensive true crime books this was very different. Also noteworthy was the afterword by Burnet at the end of the novel which offered background on the book, the film that it inspired (which made the Brunet cry), and the author himself.

I tried to listen to a 13-hour audiobook in only two days for a last-minute book club meeting so I will preface my review of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to say it was a difficult situation for a book to shine so maybe that’s why I didn’t love it. (Also I only made it halfway through and learned the ending at book club.) Although I probably would have finished it if I had a bit more time, I don’t know that it would have made it a favorite read. While I do love books that focus on long-term relationships (especially friendships), I have to like the characters to spend almost 400 pages with them. Sam and Sadie were brilliant, but they were not very good friends to each other (not by my standards anyway) and their lack of communication made the text almost infinitely frustrating. Based on the time on best-seller lists and recommendations by big names (including Bill Gates!) maybe I’m wrong on this one but I’d say read only if you have both time and patience for the characters.

And finally, I read Paul Kix’s biography of Robert de La Rochefoucauld, The Saboteur. Between his evacuation through a secret mountain route, an appointment in London with De Gaulle, and one escape from a Nazi prison via stolen car I’m surprised an action film hasn’t been made about his life. Kix, thanks to access to La Rochefoucauld’s private diaries and family archive, definitely gives us all of the action, but he also offers details about the moral complexities of living in occupied France. The occupation had a different impact on everyone and lead to millions of choices about resisting (or cooperating) in both big ways and small. One of my favorite things about Kix’s narrative is when he admits what details are lost to history. More than once he says he couldn’t find out exactly how a conversation went or precisely how someone slipped out of a dicey situation and it’s a good reminder to the reader that some things we will never know. It’s a strong work of narrative history and worth a look.

Now that I’m home for the Summer (and finally unpacked) I am ready for plenty of reading! I hope you find time to read in the sun as well.