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;...

Dani Shapiro is probably well-known to most regular TSP readers; her latest book, Devotion, inspired a wonderful blog-friendship between her and our very own Sister Margaret. But thanks to a dear friend (who happens to be a guy – who says you have to be female to be sisterly?) I discovered her earlier novel, Black and White, and made it my first beach read of the summer. Do you need a book to tote along? Read on.

Black and White tells the story of Clara Brodeur and her mother, Ruth Dunne, a famed art photographer. Mother and daughter have been estranged for years after Clara rebelled against being her mother’s primary subject, in a series of provocative, controversial nudes that Ruth insisted on creating well into Clara’s adolescence.

It’s Clara’s older sister, Robin, a successful attorney, who summons Clara back to New York from her home in small-town Maine: Ruth is terminally ill. Tbe sisters’ relationship is nearly as fraught as that of mother and daughter, and Clara’s reentry into her family’s world provokes conflict among all three women. I won’t say more, but if you’re looking for a thought-and-emotion-provoking read about the painful limits of love, family and obligation, Black and White is a beautifully written, utterly engaging choice.

I’m now fully on the Dani Shapiro bandwagon, and need to pick my next of her books. What should I dive into next? And what’s at the top of your tote bag? Need more? We’ve got other summer reading suggestions, too!

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MY KIDS HAVE fewer than four weeks left of school. That means summer, and summer means lots of goodness: balmy weather, barbecue, and best of all, beach reading. True, my beach vacation doesn’t start for a bit, but I’m already starting to pack.

I’m gearing up for a summer of biographies, mostly, as it turns out, of women writers. (Maybe all these lovely writing sisters are having an influence?)

First up (and, I confess, I’ve already started!) is Joan Schenkar’s masterful and inventive life of crime novelist Patricia Highsmith. The Talented Miss Highsmith is a bio unlike any other, appropriate to the prickly, and kind of scary, writer of eerie masterpieces like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Next up is one that’s been sitting on my shelf all year, Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon, a controversial recent bio of Emily Dickinson. Who could resist that title? Not me. Last year, Marion said it was her pick for nonfiction book of the summer…well, I’m a little behind. But I’m catching up!

And for something completely different: Bossypants by my wished-for-sister, Tina Fey. Hey, she could become my best friend, right? It could happen. And even if I can’t have her all to myself, at least I can snort til I want to cry reading her sure to be fabulous and funny memoir.

My final pick (so far, anyway)? A surprise, maybe, as it’s about a motley band of tripped-out brothers, not a sister in the bunch. But I’m dying to read The Harvard Psychedelic Club, Don Lattin’s look at the rise of 60s psychedelic culture in the stuffy halls of Cambridge. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius is about as far away from now as anything I can imagine, so I think the beach is the perfect place for a little time travel.

What are your top picks for your beach bag this summer? You’ve already read Margaret’s lovely memoir, right? You’ve perused our massive list of our sister book picks?  Is the stack already teetering on your nightstand? Or are there new releases you’re counting down to? Tell your sisters.

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BEVERLY CLEARY, AUTHOR of arguably the best exasperating little sister book every written, turns 95 today. Do you remember Ramona? Whether you have children or not, now’s a good time to refresh your memory.

Ramona, fanciful younger sister of Beatrice (better known as Beezus) Quimby, is one of contemporary kid lit’s most enduring, and award-winning characters. In Ramona the Pest, Beezuz and Ramona and 10 more titles, Ramona’s flights of imagination often turn others’ lives topsy-turvy…just like every real-world little sister I’ve ever known.

Cleary has said in interviews that her inspiration came from her own life, and the lives of children she knew. And as the New York Times reported just this week, Cleary in turn inspired at least one other beloved children’s author, Judy Blume. Do you remember reading Ramona? Are your kids reading these books, too?

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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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SOMETIMES, YOU JUST HAVE to read a book. You love (or know!) the author, the subject compels you, something on the dust jacket sucks you in, a review is so provocative you cannot skip it…I have hundreds of different paths to reading, but the one I took to my latest favorite read is roundabout, for sure–and yet, at least for my life here on TSP, it feels totally inevitable.

Gabrielle Burton is a writer, and mother to five filmmaker daughters, one of whom was my classmate in college. Somehow, Facebook asked me to become a fan of my friend Ursula’s mother’s new novel, and not thinking much about it, I did. Excerpts appeared on Facebook intermittently, and I read some of them with interest, but as with too much of the information that crosses my brain, even that which I know I cleave to, if only I had the time to fix upon it, my awareness of the novel dissipated before it caught my focus.

And then I read this dual review on NPR of not just Burton’s new novel, but of the somewhat eccentric memoir that narrates and preceded its creation.

Searching for Tamsen Donner tells the story of a determined feminist, dedicated writer, and mother to five daughters, who, in the 1970s, decided she just had to take her husband and kids on a journey across in America in the footsteps of our country’s most notorious group of pioneers, the Donner party. Burton’s explanation of why she had to make the trip, and what she and the girls found there, had me staying up late, reading in lieu of sleeping or working, shivering in recognition of my own endless painful seesaw between work and family.

Burton’s voice is strong, and funny, universal and iconoclast at once.  If you are a woman who does the awkward dance of loving your family, hard, and craving immersion in your own creative life, this book will resonate in your gut like the beat of a huge drum.

Next up on my nightstand: Burton’s long-gestating novel about Tamsen Donner, and her journey, Impatient With Desire. Not to worry, I’ll be reporting back.

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Five of the six Mitford sisters

CALL ME BIASED, but I don’t think of the Wall Street Journal as the most sisterly-leaning publication. But after this week’s installment of their regular “Five Best” book column, I may have to reconsider my position.

Author Heller (picture from Amazon.com)

The Journal asked snappy British novelist Zoë Heller (who, as it happens, is the sister-in-law of a friend of mine) to name her choices for the five best books on sisterhood. Her picks are diverse (from Little Women to collected letters of the Mitford sisters, the only non-fiction book to make the cut) and make for a great spring-into-summer reading list.

After being deep into memoir these last few months, it may be time for me to tackle a wonderful novel, and what better subject than sisterhood? I think it may finally be time for me to read Marilynne Robinson’s much-lauded Housekeeping.

Once I’ve finished Heller’s picks by others, I may also have to have fun rereading her own blackly comedic works, including What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal and her first book,  Everything You Know. Her latest, The Believers, has just been published in the U.S.

What would YOU pick as your top sister novel?

(Thanks to Karen of A Class Act for the image of the Mitfords!)

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