Found! The Best Book to Take on Vacation
Joanna Goddard Alex Ronan jannelle sanchez Grace Farris
Emma Cline's The Guest is the perfect summer read.
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Cup of Jo
What Books Have You Enjoyed Lately?

What are you reading these days?

I always love psychological thrillers but they can’t be too scary since I sleep alone at night and am a wuss. Luckily, Emma Cline’s second novel The Guest, which came out this month, is the perfect non-murder-y but wildly propulsive thriller. I couldn’t put it down, and the whole week I was reading it, everything around me felt creepy (you know how that can happen?) but in a fun way.

Here’s the premise: 22-year-old Alex lives in NYC with a job as an escort and roommates who want her out. She meets a rich older guy at a restaurant, and he invites her to the Hamptons for the month of August. But when he breaks things off, she has to figure out how to stay out east for another week, even though she has no friends, no money and no place to stay. How? She’s a champion grifter, slipping in and out of parties and houses and beach clubs. But how long will she last? The whole book is a tense tone poem with baked-in danger and sexuality and money and class and power and the ability to make yourself visible or invisible as needed. Says Vogue: “Spellbinding.” Says WaPo: “Smoldering.” Says the NYTimes: “Sharp as a scalpel.”

Bottom line, I inhaled it and think you will, too. (It would also make an excellent beach read!)

What about you? What are you reading these days? I’d LOVE to hear. I also really liked Connie Wang’s memoir Oh My Mother! and Samantha Irby’s hilarious essays Quietly Hostile; and I’m currently two chapters into the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Trust by Hernan Diaz. (I feel like I can finally read again now that my kids are older! #renaissance)

P.S. More books we love, including a very scary book and a darkly funny novel I can’t stop thinking about.

(Photo by Sonja Lekovic/Stocksy.)

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