May Wrap-Up: My Favorite Reads of the Month

The Bossy Bookworm
May 30
7 min read

Updated: Aug 8

My very favorite Bossy May reads!

It was tough for me to narrow down my very favorite reads this month; I read so many great titles.

If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think.

And I'd also love to hear: what are some of your recent favorite reads?

01 The Jackal's Mistress by Chris Bohjalian

The deep bond that builds between an injured Union soldier and the Virginia woman who secretly takes him in is touching and complicated, and Bohjalian doesn't make Libby's dangerous choices feel too easy. The author was inspired by a true story.

Libby Steadman lives in Virginia on the edge of the Confederate-Union Civil War conflict. Her husband has been away fighting for the Confederacy since soon after they were married, and Libby is warden to her orphaned, strong-willed niece Jubilee. She's also living alongside a hired hand, Joseph, who became a freedman when Libby's husband's family reconsidered their stance on slavery, and his wife Sally. Together the family members work grueling hours milling grain for the Confederacy.

Then Libby finds a gravely injured Union officer in a neighbor’s abandoned home. Because she hopes that a Union woman would take pity on her husband in the same situation, she secretly cares for Weybridge's injuries, realizing that if Confederate soldiers were aware of his presence in her home, the family would be considered traitors.

The decision to take in Weybridge is morally clear to Libby, but the realities of the potential harm it could bring aren't lost on her. Bohjalian never makes the decision-making too easy, and the ending was not the neatly tied-up bow of a resolution I had begun to anticipate.

The story is based upon a real account of a Southern woman who helped a Union soldier during the Civil War.

I received a prepublication edition of The Jackal's Mistress courtesy of Doubleday Books and NetGalley.

For my full review of this book please see The Jackal's Mistress.

02 The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits by Jennifer Weiner

Jennifer Weiner's newest novel offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the music business, songwriting, and the pressures of fame, layered with complications from clashing sisters, devastating tragedy, and a messy path toward reconciliation.

Cassie and Zoe Greenberg are sisters who have always been opposites. Cassie, a musical prodigy, loved losing herself in and expressing herself through playing and singing, but avoided the limelight. Zoe dreamed of stardom since she was a child and was driven more by fame than the music itself. But Zoe realizes that Cassie is key to any musical future, and she convinces Cassie to join her on stage, beginning their meteoric climb to stardom.

For one year when they're young adults, the sisters reach mindboggling heights of fame as the pop duo The Griffin Sisters--featured in Rolling Stone, performing on Saturday Night Live, and making videos for MTV. Then their run abruptly ended, and for the public, the reasons for their breakup were a mystery.

Twenty years later, Zoe is a housewife and Cassie is a recluse who hasn't spoken to her sister at all. But when Zoe's headstrong daughter Cherry becomes determined to become a star, she digs into the past and forces a confrontation between the estranged sisters at last.

This is a great behind-the-scenes look at the music business, musical creativity and songwriting processes, and body-image pressures on women earning a living by being in the limelight. Griffin Sisters also takes on deep familial conflicts, coping with loss and a devastating blow for future plans, lies and betrayals, and, finally, a messy but hopeful chance for reconciliation.

If you like to read fiction about music, you might also like the titles I included in the Greedy Reading List Six Rockin' Stories about Bands and Music.

Click here for my full review.

03 She's a Lamb! by Meredith Hambrock

She's a Lamb! offers a delusional, self-congratulatory, single-minded, relentless would-be performer and builds tension and outrageously high stakes as the novel traces each of the unsympathetic protagonist's professional missteps and cutthroat choices, pushing toward what feels like an inevitable, disastrous climax to the campy story.

In Meredith Hambrock's darkly funny, satirical novel, Jessamyn St. Germain is a performer as over the top as her name. She's booking occasional commercial jobs, but she firmly believes she's destined to become famous and perform on Broadway, singing and dancing her way to superstardom.

She's hired to mind the bratty child actors for a community theatre production of The Sound of Music, but she's got her heart set on capturing the role of Maria von Trapp, and her systematic destruction of the show unfolds in gruesome detail as her powerful delusions about her talent and her deservedness shape each cutthroat decision she makes to try to propel herself onstage as the lead.

After all, she hasn't sacrificed, obsessed, planned, spent all her money on voice lessons, and humiliated herself with men in powerful positions for a mediocre acting life. Not by a long shot.

I often have a tough time reading about protagonists who are making poor choices, but the book's dark satire is skillful, and the situation is increasingly over-the-top. Jessamyn is so far gone, even I could give in to the fascination of reading about the growing life-and-death whirlwind of destruction she's causing. Readers will likely have a clear sense that our main character is prepared to burn it all down on her ill-advised, sledgehammer-unsubtle journey to achieve stardom, and I found it irresistible to wonder how dark things would get in her relentless quest.

Meredith Hambrock's debut novel was Other People's Secrets.

Please click here for my full review of She's a Lamb!

04 Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

In Kevin Wilson's latest gem, his quirky characters are irresistible and his heartwarming story is messy, strange, and lovely as a chosen-family element overshadows past tragedies and disappointments.

Mad and her mother have run their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee, ever since Mad's father disappeared twenty years ago. Mad is a loner, and that's okay. But when a stranger who calls himself Rube shows up in a rented PT Cruiser and a story about how Mad is his half sister--explaining that their father has more kids spread across the country as well--Rube and Mad head out on an awkward, nerve-racking mission to find their siblings--and then try to track down their father.

The tone of Run for the Hills feels reassuring in that everything seems headed toward resolutions. Wilson allows for confrontation, and he doesn't spare our characters a messy, somewhat unsatisfying reckoning involving their dad. He is, after all, an imperfect person whose fear of failure caused him to abandon each chance at a wonderfully imperfect life. The most tragic aspect isn't that his children were left, but that he missed out on time with these quirky, caring, wonderful oddballs who find that he is, ultimately, a relatively minor note in their newly formed, forever sibling family.

Kevin Wilson is also the author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Nothing to See Here, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine, The Family Fang, Perfect Little World, and Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories.

For my full review, please check out this link.

05 Definitely Better Now by Ava Robinson

In Ava Robinson's debut novel, she offers an appealingly imperfect main character making missteps and forging a path forward while adjusting to romantic, family, and work complications after a year of sobriety.

Emma is friendly but reserved with her coworkers. She's focused on extending her one year of sobriety--a fact that she doesn't share easily with others, except at her frequent recovery support meetings.

When she's assigned to assist on the committee for the office's extravagant upcoming holiday party, she's thrown together with a cheesy, persistent executive who unfortunately spotted her joke of a dating profile before she pulled it down--and Ben, the intriguing IT manager she can't stop thinking about.

I fell in love with Emma and her imperfect, determined path forward, her sometimes-regretful reckonings with her past, and her fight to be vulnerable for a potential relationship she begins to believe in. Her missteps felt relatable, and I was hooked by her difficult decision-making and her bravery.

This is a great example of a light-fiction-feeling romance that deals with weighty, meaningful themes. It's a combination I love.

This is Ava Robinson's first novel.

Abby Jimenez and Carley Fortune are two more authors who offer deep, heartfelt situations, messy complications, and real-life consequences within a romantic structure.

For my full review please check out Definitely Better Now.

06 I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Harpman's slim novel poses a mysterious situation without promising concrete explanations. Our main protagonist knows little about her situation or location, yet persists in her quest for answers and builds a rich inner life filled with wonder.

forty women (one is a young girl, our main protagonist) live year after year as prisoners in an underground cage. Male guards come and go, feeding the women minimal rations and never speaking.

The women have no recollection of how they came to be in this place, and no information is forthcoming about why they are trapped there. They are not allowed to touch each other but may speak, and to bond and pass the time, they share stories of their past lives, bicker over infinitesimal variations in how they may prepare their food or sew their own clothing, and simply kill time until their almost certain death inside the cell.

Then a blasting alarm sounds, the nearest guard drops his keys and flees, and the women scramble for an escape they never anticipated. But what awaits them on the other side of the bunker doors?

The novel's tone doesn't assure a satisfying set of answers as to why the women were chosen for this imprisonment, insight into what its purpose might be, or details as to its location.

Yet I was intrigued by the post-apocalyptic, puzzling situation and by the main protagonist's persistence and rich inner life, which exists in stark contrast to the physical barrenness that seems to surround her.

For my full review, please see I Who Have Never Known Men.

For more postapocalyptic and dystopian stories I've Bossily reviewed, please check out the titles here.