The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

This was in my stack of unread Book of the Month picks from this post, and Kayla commented and highly recommended it. I was already about halfway through when I picked it back up this month, and it was a satisfying page-turner that kept me guessing until the last chapters.

It’s a little campy (it’s literally set at an all-girl sleep-away camp) but in the best way.

During Emma Davis’ first summer at Camp Nightingale, her three bunkmates leave their cabin in the middle of the night and never return. Years later, Emma’s a rising star in the New York art scene, painting the ghosts of her past into massive canvases beneath menacing forest scenes. When Camp Nightingale’s wealthy founder, Franny, contacts Emma and invites her to return to the camp as a counselor for its first summer session since the girls’ disappearance fifteen years earlier, Emma jumps at the opportunity to confront her past and search for clues about the mystery that still haunts her conscious and fills her nightmares all these years later.

When history repeats itself in the same cabin, things get really weird.

Parts of the story make you question Emma’s sanity and credibility, which is one of my favorite thriller tropes. I was super surprised by the ending! I just saw on Goodreads this afternoon that Amazon Studios picked it up for a miniseries.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

“How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, and end up destitute?” After losing their jobs, Willa Knox and her husband, Iano, relocate and move into an inherited house that’s falling apart at the seams, along with a disabled parent and a strong-willed adult daughter. Before long, their Ivy-educated son’s life turns upside down, and he moves in, too.

In the same house, more than a century before, a teacher, Thatcher Greenwood, finds his teaching methods under siege. In a deeply-religious community that brands itself as a utopia (even though it’s anything but) scientific investigation and Charles Darwin’s new theory of natural selection are considered heresy. As Thatcher battles the structural inadequacies of the home he shares with his young wife and society-obsessed mother-in-law, a lack of funds to repair it, and the powerful men in town who want him to shut up about science, he meets a woman next door who becomes an unexpected ally in his fight to educate his students.

Both characters learn that shelter can come in unexpected places, and that being ‘unsheltered’ may not be as scary as it seems.

I really enjoyed this book, but I think I would’ve enjoyed it more as two separate books: one for each timeline. Although the stories intersected, they didn’t intertwine as seamlessly as I’d hoped. However, the struggles of Willa’s family in today’s economy read like a cautionary tale that made me rethink everything about our priorities, spending and security; it left me a little haunted when I finished, but also a little hopeful.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will To Survive by Stephanie Land

This was my January Book of the Month pick, and I’m only halfway through, but so far, I’m loving every page. Land’s raw and honest memoir takes readers deep into the world of poverty in America: it shatters the stereotypes of welfare and the perception of the working poor as ‘lazy’ or uneducated; sheds light on the indignity of poverty and the struggle of single-motherhood; and highlights the myriad of ways that our society is set up to keep the poor mired in their circumstances.

At 19, with big plans to move and go to college, Land finds herself pregnant by a volatile and unreliable boyfriend, in a tourist town with meager employment opportunities. Born to working-class parents who face their own financial struggles (and some serious emotional instability) Land has no safety net. She moves moves into a homeless shelter, then a halfway house, then a rent-subsidized apartment; at one point, she relies on seven different government assistance programs to scrape by while she takes on as many minimum-wage odd jobs she can find, including working as a maid for the upperclass. She describes the experience as becoming “a nameless ghost.”

‘While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren’t being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.’ (via Goodreads)

With the gap between the working and middle class widening every day, Land’s story is a grim reminder of how one unexpected event, like an unplanned pregnancy, illness or tragedy, can derail a life. And Land is a white woman, so her personal story says nothing of the challenges of minorities, immigrants and other groups that face systemic oppression every day in our country.

It’s a sobering read, but a necessary one: Land’s story brings awareness to the people who often don’t get a voice; the more we educate ourselves about the plight of others, the more compassionate we become a society; and when we acknowledge our own privilege, we can use it to advocate for others who don’t have the same fortune and opportunities.