These five titles will be your new favorite books, giving you exactly what you want out of an upmarket women’s fiction best-seller: the same story told slightly differently!
The Trapper Keeper’s Daughter
On a cool Kansas night in 2001, a daughter is shocked by her dying father’s revelation: her modest life as a 90s kid in suburbia was a lie to protect her from the entitlement epidemic plaguing millennials. This daughter is a direct descendent of Trapper Keeper creator Bryant Crutchfield and therefore the heiress to the back-to-school fortune. Her father’s last words reveal it’s time for her to reclaim the school-supply throne and use its power for good instead of profit. Armed with a one-of-a-kind Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper that proves her lineage, she sets off to Mead’s headquarters—now owned by parent company ACCO Brands—in Lake Zurich, IL to keep the greedy family business from spiraling like the binding of the Five Star notebooks they sell. From the author that brought you harrowing stories of daughters whose fathers were a dairy farmer in The Cow Keeper’s Daughter, an electrician in The Wire Keeper’s Daughter, and a locomotive engineer in The Train Keeper’s Daughter, comes another book written especially for millennials who miss the 90s for some reason. Mystery abounds in this thriller, and questions like, “What is the daughter’s name?” and “Why is her father’s job the plot?” will linger in the collective mind of generations to come.
The Secret Wife of Bees
Mrs. Chambers is a dutiful homemaker with a damning secret: she’s having an affair with the endangered bees next door… and she’s deathly allergic. Torn between a life of security with her emotionally bankrupt husband, a renowned bee-researcher, and the chance at adventure with the forbidden beehive, Mrs. Chambers is forced to make a choice. But is the honey worth the sting? Finally, a story about a wife with secrets, lies, and secretive lies that takes the oft-overlooked sexy literary symbol of bees and puts it as a love interest. What’s black, yellow, waxy, and buzzing all over? Bee sex. Whatever you’re picturing, it’s almost certainly better.
The Bake and Cry Club
Four friends with competitive mid-length bobs and varying life struggles—Lydia, Georgia, Ellie, and Kat—find an excuse every day to drink and sob about their upper-middle-class lives. Fearing their alcoholism is becoming obvious to neighbors, they decide to pick a hobby and call their codependence a club. A baking club. Lydia has an old Italian grandmother with a secret biscotti recipe, Georgia wants to do anything Lydia does, Ellie liked wearing an apron that time her housekeeper was out sick, and Kat has a shopping compulsion. Together, they bond over store-bought sticky buns, crumbling marriages, and half-baked affairs with salty endings. This is a delicious portrayal of modern friendship between women who find strength in settling through binge-baking.
GIRL!
In this coming-of-age story, we follow a teen into her bedridden years at a retirement home as she fights to lose the label “girl” and win the age-appropriate title of “woman.” She does everything she thinks might qualify her: having eight children, eradicating diseases in remote areas of the world, and enrolling in Medicare. Still, nothing she does elicits anything more than “aw, cute” from her male counterparts. As each birthday passes, ribbons and curls begin growing out of every part of her body until she learns that no matter how severe her cataracts or how many all-caps Facebook posts she writes on her great-grandkids’ pages, she will always be a GIRL!
Girl on a Plane to Paris
The girl is gone in Paris. But where did the girl go in Paris? And, most important, what did the girl see in the reflection of her window seat that made her disappear as soon as the plane landed in Paris? Maybe it was murder. Maybe it was all in her head. But at least we’re in Paris! In this creepy, sexy thriller that authors Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins call “riveting” and “just like ours but with the Eiffel Tower” and “worth powering through the first half to get to the second,” readers will get more of what they want: a girl who blurs the line between credible witness and mental illness on public transportation in The City of Lights, Paris!
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Rumpus original art by Kaili Doud.
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