Is There Still Sex in the City? by Candace Bushnell

A special thank you to NetGalley, Edelweiss, and Grove Atlantic/Grove Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Sex and the City was a cultural phenomenon—Carrie Bradshaw redefined the single girl. Fast forward twenty years and Candace Bushnell is back with a commentary on sex, dating, and friendship after the age of fifty.

In this book, Bushnell's topical chapters are a comment on trying to find love when you are middle aged, and how to navigate after divorce with the modern tools that are readily available to singles today. She also updates one of her more popular stories from Sex and the City, "The Bicycle Boys," about the dudes who are always trying to bring their bicycles up to a woman's apartment. There are other amusing anecdotes—getting Tindered, or the "Unintended Cub Situation" where a competent, put-together older woman temporarily loses all sensibility when she becomes the love interest of a much younger man.

Is There Still Sex in the City? is a satirical look at how middle-aged women are perceived, the unrealistic expectations put upon women by way of not aging and doing/having it all, as well as all the different stages and types of love—marriage, having children, not having children, divorce, and widowhood. This book is exactly what we need more of. What does it really mean to have it all? Who judges these things? Why are women constantly being compared to another woman's best instead of their own personal best? Some days it is a huge feat just to even get out of bed in the morning. The levels of expectations that women, both young and old, experience, and the pressures of society to be thin, beautiful, youthful, and successful are both crippling and unrealistic. These same pressures are not put on men, especially with appearance (see the section about the "Mona Lisa" treatment).

Bushnell is a fantastic writer. She's engaging, captivating, and razor sharp and this wry social commentary collection is no exception.

CANDACE BUSHNELL is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, The Carrie Diaries, One Fifth Avenue, Trading Up, Four Blondes, Summer and the City, and Killing Monica.

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

A special thank you to Edelweiss, NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and Atlantic Monthly Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one

Or did she?

I'm not going to lie, I kept putting this one down.  The opening chapter narrated by Lizzie was well-written with a nice hook, and then the second chapter narrated by her sister Emma threw me off.  However, I limped through it, and then a few more chapters here and there, and then I couldn't put it down.  This book was well-written and captivating, especially for a debut, and I would definitely recommend it.

In See What I Have Done, Schmidt takes on the daunting genre of historical fiction with her account of one of the most famous murder cases of all time—Lizzie Borden's father and step-mother are found bludgeoned to death at the Borden residence.  Told from multiple perspectives, the reader goes inside the mind of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the Irish maid Bridget, and a mysterious stranger, Benjamin, who has ties to the family.  This multiperspectivity works brilliantly and while I enjoyed Lizzie's chapters the most, the other perspectives were needed to balance out the story.  

Schmidt juxtaposes the visual imagery of sickness—blood, vomit, rotting food—against the relationships of the family. This is more than fiction, it is a foray into the human psyche and a study of the most intimate kind of relationships.