MY LATEST SUMMER book find is a winner: a chilling murder mystery with a secret sisterhood of privileged teens at its center. My own path to finding this gem of a thriller was pretty twisted, too.

It all started with a tantalizing article in the New York Times: the writer wrote of her experience of a dream I happen to share, expatriating herself and her family to Bali. (This was actually more my dream when I was young and single: the idea of moving our brood anywhere again is daunting, though not unimaginable.) I read the article, only salivating slightly, then looked at the accompanying photograph, a smiling family of four, the parents grinning in Balinese sarongs, clutching onto cute kids attempting to escape the camera. It could have been any family, including mine. But I looked closer, and read the caption. I knew this family, sort of: I recognized Bacon’s husband as a high school classmate of mine.

My husband will tell you that I can’t cross a street, anywhere in the world, without running into someone I know. This is not true. However, I do have a knack for remembering those whose paths I’ve crossed, and Charlotte Bacon’s husband is one. (For the record, he was, and I presume is, a lovely man and a very talented artist.)

But I learned Charlotte and I have one more connection, however tenuous. In addition to living my Balinese dream, she’s also quite successfully living out another. She’s written four novels (and, it bears mentioning, won the PEN/Faulkner prize for First Fiction for her first publication, a 1997 book of short stories entitled A Private State. Not shabby.) Given that, unusually for me, I have focused on mysteries this summer (witness my ongoing venture into Joan Schenkar’s superb biography of Patricia Highsmith) I opted first for Bacon’s most recent book, The Twisted Thread.

At Armitage Academy, a New England prep school, senior Claire Harkness is found dead in her dorm room. The newborn son she’s just secretly delivered is missing. A young teacher discovers that girls in Claire’s dorm, bound by loyalty to (and perhaps fear of) Claire, not to mention the traditions of a secret society they call the Reign (think the French Revolution’s reign of terror) know more than they’re telling.

I confess that I’m only a third of the way through, but I had to force myself to stop reading last night in order to go to sleep…and this is the book I’m taking to the hammock with me later this afternoon. It’s been compared, rightly, to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Yes, the two books share genre (mystery) and setting, schools for privileged kids, but they also share elegant, subtle prose. Whatever web Bacon ultimately weaves in The Twisted Thread, I know it will be surprising and well-drawn. I’ve already got an earlier novel of hers, The Split Estate, waiting on my always-overloaded nightstand.

Keep me posted: what’s your latest pick for this summer’s must-read?

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1. Sisterly Reads: Black and White Dani Shapiro is probably well-known to most regular TSP readers;...

SISTER SHEILAA’S AT it again, giving us good advice under her beautiful umbrella of stars. According to her, the challenge for Aries this month is to find the middle road through all the ups and downs. Seems to me, that’s a quest for a lifetime, not a month, but with some good counsel, I think I’m on my way. The Buddhists (and friends) have this one covered…

When you need a hit of wisdom and perhaps some advice, why not look to a philosophy that’s been working for people around the world for, oh, more than 2000 years? Whatever your faith, there’s comfort to be found within the Buddhist doctrine of the Middle Way. In a nutshell, the teaching is this: avoid believing in extremes. You won’t find the truth in them. But there are writers who say it, and apply it, much better than I can. A few gems:

1. Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance encourages looking at tough times with acceptance, detachment, and compassion. Brach is a psychologist and a meditation teacher, and brings both of these to bear in this gentle, practical, approachable book.

2. Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart explores Buddhism and psychology, and their relationship, arguing persuasively that support for the wisdom of Buddhist teachings can be found in current scientific research. Kornfeld provides many anecdotes from his years as a Buddhist monk and as a meditation teacher, which make the book as thought provoking as it is useful.

3. Anything by Pema Chodron, an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun. Anything. When Things Fall Apart is a classic for hard times.

4. I’ve written before, and recently, about my love for Brené Brown, a professor of social work from Houston who has been known to describe herself as a “researcher/storyteller”. Though she’s no Buddhist, she is a big fan of the teachings, and refers to them frequently in her totally brilliant, must-read, anti-perfectionist manifesto, The Gifts of Imperfection. Read it yourself, and then see if you don’t want to give it to every single sister-friend you have.

Be sure to check out your May horoscope from Sheilaa. And in the meantime, tell us: Where do you turn when you need help navigating the slings and arrows, the ups and downs? How do you find the middle of your own road?

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ONE OF THE most flattering moments of my life was the day that (awkward, insecure) 17 year old me was asked by a stranger in a Chicago café if I was Molly Ringwald.

I can still feel the frisson of joy that moment produced, not least because at the time, I was in the company of a boy I adored who I wanted to adore me back. And, let’s face it, being compared to a, at the time, HUGE star cannot hurt your desirability.

Flash forward, oh, a quarter of a century, and I have not forgotten Molly, my would-be teenage resemblance to her (and this was before I started dying my hair, mind you), or my deep affection for the characters she and the late, great John Hughes created together. But Molly (can you blame her?) wants me, and all her fans, to know that there’s been a whole life she’s lived post-Breakfast Club, and it’s given her some good lessons she wants to share.

Share them she does in her lighthearted advice compendium-cum-memoir, Getting the Pretty Back. This is a light, girlfriend-y read, full of tips on food, fashion, parenting and love, with a shocking amount of modesty. Molly is confident in her recommendations, but never imperious; there’s no swinging around of the big stick of celebrity. She seems oddly normal, for a girl who was a star in her teens, decamped to Paris for a ‘normal’ life in her twenties, and is now again in the public eye with a successful television show (ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

While the book is sometimes as fluffy as its cover photograph, it’s also as appealing and seemingly genuine as its author. Though I occasionally wished for a little more depth in the book’s introspection, it made for a perfect end-of-summer read.

Enjoy, and tell us what you’re delving into as the particular delight that is summer reading comes to its end.

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A FEW YEARS back, my family made its own venture into the wilderness, moving from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the expansive green hills of the Hudson Valley. It’s paradise, yet the climate where we live can be wretched and unforgiving, the land hilly and full of stones. We marvel aloud at the tenacity and sheer strength of this area’s early settlers, the people who cleared all the trees, built the stone walls that still stand. We are awed by what they accomplished, and quite certain we, with our reliance on power tools, the internet, and central heating, would not have a prayer of replicating their achievements.

Novelist and memoirist Gabrielle Burton shares her own amazement at the resilience of our forefathers and mothers in her lucid, provocative novel, Impatient With Desire. The book tells the story of Tamsen Donner, wife of George Donner, leader of the infamous Oregon trail pioneers. To illuminate Tamsen’s circumstances and spirit, Burton gives us her version of Tamsen’s journal. (Burton spent over three decades researching Tamsen’s story, and uses her existing letters, some to her beloved sister, as the basis for some of the narrative and language.)

We learn that Tamsen wanted this adventure as much, perhaps more, than her husband. She was a traveller, and a student, and as much a partner to her husband as her times would allow. And when winter trapped the party in the  Sierra Nevadas and forced the Donners into the cannibalism that made them notorious, Tamsen agonized over how her desire for adventure had led her five children into peril. The novel is wonderful on its own, presenting the darkest circumstances without sensationalizing or moralizing, but even better when read alongside Burton’s memoir of her own family’s retracing of the Donner party’s journey, Searching for Tamsen Donner. Burton helps us understand the deep choices every mother makes between self, partner and children, and in the process, brings to life not just Tamsen, but the others who cleared and clawed their way across the country just 160 years ago.

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AM I ALONE in having a too-long list of authors I’ve been meaning to read, it seems forever, yet somehow never get around to? Allegra Goodman, a prolific and much-beloved novelist, is on that list for me, but I’m taking charge. Right now.

USA Today called Goodman “a modern day Jane Austen.” Need I say more? Her latest novel, The Cookbook Collector, is next up for my summer reading. From the publisher’s synopsis:

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-thre-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters,The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

Apparently we here on TSP are not alone in thinking that sisterly reads are perfect for summer time: the American Library Association’s great Booklist site suggests “sisters” as a perfect August book club theme. So what are you waiting for? Read along with me; I’m taking The Cookbook Collector on vacation with me (beach, here I come!) and will finish it by August 12–plenty of time for a virtual sisterly read-along!

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WHO COULD RESIST a book with the subtitle “My Life in a Harem”? OK, probably a lot of people. But I’m not one of them.

Jillian Lauren looks like a model, planned to be an actress, is married to a rock star…and along the way, ended up as one of dozens of women spirited out of their “normal” lives to provide companionship, and sex, to the Prince Jefri, the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei. She also happens to be a witty and compelling storyteller, with a great command of humor and a gift for self-examination that feels authentic, and never forced.

In a memoir that is much more sensitive and introspective than sensationalized, Lauren outlines her journey from rebellious kid to teen stripper to New York City escort and ultimately her recruitment to be one of the group of girls and young women kept to “entertain” the Prince and his friends.

Lauren clearly delights in remembering and recreating the odd, dysfunctional sisterhood that developed among the harem-mates, who run the gamut from manipulative and mean to much-too-young. It all sounds like it would be pretty tawdry, and some of it is, but Lauren’s gift as a writer is making the reader understand the thousand steps that led her to Brunei, without looking for pity or relying upon sentimentality or defiance. When she falls for the Prince, I couldn’t help but empathize with a young girl’s need (she was 19!) to win the prize: in this case, the love, or at least the attention, of the real-life prince. But particularly wrenching is her inability to deal with coming home, a situation that is so challenging that ultimately, she goes back to Brunei for a second tour of duty.

Lauren is smart, her prose is sharp and unsparing of detail. If you’re in New York City, you can hear Lauren read from Some Girls tomorrow night at 8 p.m. as part of the In The Flesh Erotic Reading series. (The venue? It’s called Happy Ending. Who could ask for more?) Admission is free; if you go, be sure to tell us all about it.

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MY GOOD FRIEND told me that Mary Karr’s Lit was the best non-fiction she’d read in years, that while she couldn’t bear to put it down, the prose was so divine it made her want to stop after each passage just to savor it. This friend is no easy sell when it comes to writing and reading, so ok: add that book to my reading list, stat.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that we sisters of The Sister Project are all about memoir. Ours, yours, or anyone else’s, as long as she’s got something to say, lessons to share, and a vibrant voice in which to sing it all out. All of this, I’m happy to report, is true of Karr’s latest book, which is by turns hilarious and so painful you want to put your head under the pillow and weep.

Through the course of the book, Karr finds her voice as a poet, marries and divorces, drinks to excess and then manages to dry out, and finds God. And, relevant to TSP, she’s got a fantastic sister story to tell, too. The book moves forward like a freight train, begging you to stay up too late to read just a bit more. But best of all is Karr’s command of her prose, which reads like poetry: smart, economical, inspired verse. I never read Karr’s bestselling 1995 The Liar’s Club, but after loving Lit, that’s the next pick for my nightstand.

How about you, sisters? Do you have a story to share? Tell us.

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I‘VE BEEN A SLACKER of late when it comes to reading, as the piles on my nightstands can attest. But I think the first new book I’ll add to the stacks will have to be Gail Collins’ When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, a history of the transformations of women’s lives from 1960 to the present.

As the first woman selected to edit the New York Times’ editorial page (she left that position in 2007 to work on this book) Collins knows quite a bit about pathbreaking, and her current columns on topics ranging from the economy to celebrity culture to the possible coming end of soap operas are, at least for me, always provocative and enlightening to read. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Have you already read When Everything Changed? Share your reactions with your sisters.

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SOMETIMES WHAT YOU really want to read on the beach is a book that’s more entertainment than demanding literature, a story that takes you on a ride through an unexpected world, that surprises with clever plot twists and turns. If that book also happens to be smart, well-written, thought provoking and teaches you a bit of interesting history (painlessly) it’s a home run. This summer, a new thriller, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, manages to hit it out of the park.

Let’s face it, you can’t read Infinite Jest all the time (trust me, I’m learning this the hard way, though I am absolutely loving the book) and when you’re lazing on the beach and zoning out, it’s a poor choice. Luckily, first-time novelist Katherine Howe has come to my rescue with a smart, clever thriller set in two worlds: ivory tower academia circa 1991, and 17th century New England, specifically, the world of the Salem witches.

Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin is desperate to find a groundbreaking topic for her dissertation when her mother asks for help: Connie’s grandmother’s house in nearby Marblehead, Massachusetts, needs to be sold, but must be cleaned up before it goes on the market. When she arrives at the house, which is so overgrown only her dog, Arlo, can find it, Connie is surprised to learn that it’s essentially a time capsule from at least 200 years earlier: no phone, no electricity, a kitchen full of dusty jars of roots and herbs. When Connie discovers a mysterious key, inscribed with the words “Deliverance Dane” tucked into an old bible, she begins to find her way not only to her research subject, but to her family’s past.

Deliverance Dane, the name of a 17th century healer who may, or may not, be a witch, is the subject of the book’s other narrative, which explores the lives of Deliverance and her daughter through the witch trials and beyond. As Connie learns more about Deliverance and her work with her “receipts” (recipes), she begins to sense an unusual sisterhood that spans the centuries. But, of course, there’s danger lurking, and Connie must get to the truth about Deliverance’s powers in order to save herself from harm.

Howe herself has studied colonial American history, and happens to be descended from two of the accused Salem witches, and her passion for her subject shows throughout this totally entertaining book.

Looking for other beach-read suggestions? We’ve got loads. Take a look at our ideas, and keep yours coming. It’s the least you can do for your sisters.

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From the Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History

I CAN’T REMEMBER when I first became aware of the work of Eudora Welty, what story I read first, or when. I was probably in high school, and though I appreciated both Welty’s craft and her Southern settings (having spent part of my childhood in Tennessee) I lost track of her as an adult. Today, her birthday, is a good day to apologize to her for such a flagrant omission, and to remind myself that it’s time to dive back in.

Only last year, thanks to a wonderful website whose recommendations for books, music and tools for living are unerringly fantastic, I read Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, a book that shook me, made me think hard on how I see my world, and what I might do with what I see.

Welty, a sister to two brothers, wrote endlessly about relationships within towns, within families, connections longed for or actually achieved. Welty never married, and though she traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, she always came back to her home in Mississippi, where she finally settled for good to care for her aging mother, and where she died in 2001 at age 92.

It’s fitting that Eudora was also a photographer, for a time. In both photography and in writing, the emphasis in on the capture of a moment–but not any moment. Both writer and photographer, to succeed, must capture just the right moment so that the viewer or the reader may understand more about the subject than is contained in the words or the emulsion.

Welty strenuously resisted efforts by others to make her work about her or her life; she guarded her privacy, and seemed to have mostly behaved like the Southern lady she was, though she was know for a ready and wicked wit, too. How else could she have written the brilliant and wicked story “Why I Live at the P.O.”, a tale of sisterly jealousy so strong that its narrator leaves home to live at the Post Office where she works, all to escape her sister, who she feels is unfairly showered with the world’s blessings?

Eudora Welty, voted “Best All Round Girl” by her high school class, went on to win awards and veneration, without ever losing her sense that life is inevitably made in its tiniest details. Eudora, thank you, and happy birthday.

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