Books on Thursday

I read several interesting books this week. 

Imbolo Mbue’s Every Story Is a Love Story is a thoughtful, beautifully written novel about grief, forgiveness, and the complicated ways people find their way toward healing.

 

At the center is Wolo, who is still living with the devastating loss of his pregnant wife and their unborn twins three years after a car accident. His grief has softened with time, but it hasn’t disappeared. Then a letter arrives from Victoria, the woman who was driving the car. Her remorse and her desire to meet force Wolo to confront feelings he has tried to put aside, and to consider whether forgiveness is possible when the person who caused your greatest pain is also suffering from what happened.

What I appreciated most is that Mbue doesn't make forgiveness easy or sentimental. Wolo isn't simply expected to forgive and move on, and Victoria isn't reduced to either a monster or a saint. Both are complicated, wounded people trying to live with an event that cannot be undone. The novel asks some genuinely difficult questions about guilt, responsibility, mercy, and whether forgiving someone is something we do for them or for ourselves.

I also enjoyed the Cameroonian family and community life surrounding Wolo. Mbue gives the story a strong sense of place and fills it with complicated relationships, humor, faith, and the sometimes exasperating involvement of family members who believe they know what's best. Told in two timelines, we see Wolo’s marriage and the life he lost while gradually understanding the enormous weight of his grief. The contrast between the warmth and promise of his life before the accident and the emptiness afterward makes his journey toward healing especially poignant.

This is a quiet, deeply compassionate novel about living with the unlivable and finding a way forward without pretending that the past can be erased. I didn't find every part of the novel equally compelling, but its central questions stayed with me. Every Story Is a Love Story is ultimately a moving meditation on whether, after unimaginable loss, it is possible to make room for hope again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of the book. It will be published on October 6, 2026. I gave this one four stars initially, but I've been thinking about it quite a bit, questioning whether it's realistic or possible at all. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you decide to read it. 

 

I was almost afraid to read this book. I spent nearly every day during his first term and now even more in this imperial second term reading the news, doomscrolling, and worrying about what Donald Trump is doing to fellow human beings, to our country, and to the world. So the idea of voluntarily spending several hundred pages immersed in his presidency wasn't exactly appealing. And yet, Regime Change is an important book.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan don't give us a lot of information that will be completely new to anyone who has been following the news closely. What they do is put it all together in a remarkably well-researched, coherent, and detailed account. Their reporting gives context and connects the dots in a way that daily headlines and breaking-news alerts simply can't. The result is a much clearer picture of how this second administration operates, how much has changed since Trump's first term, and how the people around him have responded to the enormous power he has amassed.

It's also a sobering read. Early in the book, the authors write "Given his cartoonish persona, his deep orange complexion, and his oversized ties and coiffure, there is often a temptation to cover Trump as if he is a clown." The book emphasizes that beneath the theatrical presentation lies an intentional and consequential deployment of executive authority, rather than mere performance or absurdity. There is no reassuring conclusion here, no suggestion that everything will somehow work itself out, and certainly no reason to expect the authors to provide us with hope for the next several years. That's not their job. Their job is to report what they have found, and they do that thoroughly.

My bigger problem may be what this book, and the news in general, does to me. Watching the news every day isn't doing my mental health any favors at the moment. I know I can't continue doomscrolling from morning until night, but I also don't want to look away completely.

Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between: step away from the daily news cycle, take a breath, and occasionally consult the people who have done the painstaking reporting for us. Regime Change is a difficult book to read, but I’m glad Haberman and Swan did the difficult work of putting this moment into a coherent historical record. Now I just need to figure out how to read that history without living inside it 24 hours a day. 

 

 

Barbara Kingsolver has written another extraordinary novel. Partita is a beautiful, deeply moving meditation on music, memory, ambition, love, loss, and the ways a single relationship, or a single decision, can alter the course of a life.

Livia Cable has built a quiet, settled life in the place where she grew up, but a phone call from a man she loved decades ago forces her to look back at the young woman she once was: Livia Bohusz, a gifted piano student whose entire life seemed to be opening before her. As the novel moves between Livia’s present and her past, her memories unfold through the language and structure of music. It’s an ambitious device, but in Kingsolver’s hands it feels completely natural. The past doesn’t simply get remembered; it gets played again.

What I loved most is the way Kingsolver explores the complicated relationship between "art and life". What happens when extraordinary talent collides with class, family expectations, love, and circumstances beyond our control? Is pursuing the thing we love worth the sacrifices it demands? And can we ever completely leave behind the person we were before life took us in another direction?

Kingsolver writes with such intelligence and compassion that even the painful parts of Livia’s story never feel merely tragic. There is an understanding here of how people make choices with the knowledge and emotional resources they have at the time, and then spend years living with those choices.

And the music! Music isn't simply decoration in this novel; it is part of the story's emotional vocabulary. The ARC includes a listening list, which I am very grateful for, because the one thing that might make Partita better would be a link to all of the pieces referenced in the book. I will be searching YouTube for Ravel’s Ondine, Bach’s Partita in C Minor, and the rest of the pieces before I read this stellar novel a second time. I have a feeling the experience will be even richer with the music playing alongside the words.

This is one of those books that makes me want to close the cover and immediately start over, not because I missed the story, but because I want to experience it again, this time knowing where all the notes are leading. Five enthusiastic stars, and I'm already looking forward to the encore.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Harper for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on October 6, 2026.  

 

Now I'd love to know what you are reading!