THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE by Rachel Beanland

Historical fiction can be educational, as is this novel about the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811.  I had never heard of this disaster, which Patrick Henry’s daughter, Sally, survived.  She, along with three other characters, headline the chapters and present their various perspectives on the events of that tragic night.  She was a patron the night of the fire, and in this telling, she jumped from a third floor window and survived.  Gilbert is a slave who caught a dozen white women who plunged into his arms from a second story window.  Cecily is Gilbert’s niece who sees the event and the city’s inability to identify the dead as an opportunity to flee to freedom.  Jack is a young stagehand whose actions contributed to the accident that caused the fire.  The book reads like a thriller as we follow Cecily’s escape plans and Jack’s efforts to quiet his conscience when his fellow theatre workers concoct a story of a slave revolt as a cover-up for their own mistakes in causing the fire.  However, the characters are fairly one-dimensional, especially the villains, including the blacksmith who owns Gilbert, and Cecily’s owner’s son, a brute who frequently rapes her.  However, the slave owners are not the only cruel characters.  Sally experiences a rude awakening when she discovers that many of the men in the theatre survived the fire by basically trampling the women.  So much for chivalry.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

APPLES NEVER FALL by Liane Moriarty

Joy Delaney has gone missing, but her four adult children and her husband take their sweet time about reporting her disappearance to the authorities.  She left them all a cryptic text message, but then the housekeeper finds Joy’s phone under the bed in the Delaney house.  Joy’ husband, Stan, with whom she ran a successful tennis academy, seems the most likely suspect, especially since he is enigmatically unconcerned.  Even more curious is the former presence of Savannah, an injured waif who showed up on the Delaneys’ doorstep several months ago and proceeded to insert herself into the household.  The fact that two seemingly intelligent adults would allow a complete stranger to move in and take over the cooking and housekeeping is incomprehensible, but then many aspects of this book are absurd.  What’s not absurd is the number of family secrets that trickle out one by one, adding intrigue to the mystery of Joy’s whereabouts, as well as dispelling the myth of the Delaneys’ perfect marriage.  Three of the four children have their own share of secrets, including, in some cases, the fact that their marriages/relationships have recently gone bust.  The plot sizzles at times, but this book falls more squarely into the cozy mystery category than the thriller genre.  The writing style is too simplistic, and the characters are too even keel to rev up our heartrates and inspire us to become truly worried about Joy.  Everyone, including the reader, seems to feel that Joy will turn up sooner or later.  Also, the author is not the least bit subtle about sharing odd tidbits that turn out to be incremental to the plot, such as the ugly rug, the dog that eats paper, the cat that steals laundry, and, of course, the hotshot tennis prospect that got away.

AFTERLIFE by Julia Alvarez

Antonia is still mourning the death of her beloved husband, Sam, after almost a year and finds herself at loose ends, until suddenly she has too much on her plate.  Her oldest sister, Izzy, has vanished en route to Antonia’s 66^th birthday party, and the girlfriend of her neighbor’s undocumented employee, Mario, needs a place to stay.  Unbeknownst to Antonia and Mario until her arrival, Estela, the undocumented teenaged girlfriend, is pregnant with another man’s child, and now Mario wants nothing to do with her.  Antonia finds herself torn between two crises while trying to stay true to her mantra of taking care of herself first.  Her reluctance to help Estela brings with it a heavy dose of guilt, since she knows that Sam would have helped Estela in every way possible.  Plus, Antonia is a Dominican immigrant herself.  As for the Izzy crisis, Antonia has three sisters working on that situation, all convinced that Izzy is mentally unstable, and Antonia questions whether her participation is even necessary.  She boomerangs between the Izzy problem and the Estela problem, both geographically and emotionally, and this tug-of-war between the two emergencies is the driving force in the novel.  The author vividly and eloquently paints Antonia as a truly relatable character who deftly juggles both crises while battling uncertainty about how much commitment she wants to make to either one.  Her sisters are tugging on her to help resolve the Izzy situation, and Sam, or at least the memory of Sam, is tugging on her to help Estela.  I have to admit that I felt that Estela was more in need of assistance than the sisters, but family pressures are difficult to deny, particularly when one family member has become a threat to herself.

THE PLOT by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jake Bonner is a writer whose first novel was reasonably successful but whose subsequent efforts have been mediocre at best.  After a student named Evan Parker, who happens to be a decent writer, recounts to Jake the dynamite plot of a novel he plans to write, Jake expects to see that novel in print within a few years.  However, for some reason it has never come to fruition, and Jake discovers that Evan died shortly after completing Jake’s workshop.  Jake struggles to rationalize why he ultimately expands his student’s plot into a novel of his own:  it’s a story that is too good to go to waste.  The ensuing recognition of Jake’s novel comes with not only a fair amount of guilt but also a new girlfriend and some creepy missives from someone who apparently knows that his book’s storyline is not original.  One could argue that it’s always a bad idea to do something that will cause you to be constantly looking over your shoulder to see if someone is coming after you.  Jake’s dilemma, as he dodges questions about how he got the idea for his novel’s plot and pretends to be unfazed by the ever more threatening notes from someone calling themselves TalentedTom—clearly a reference to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley about a man who covets the life of another man and ultimately takes it over.  Jake may be enjoying the accolades that rightfully should have belonged to Evan Parker, but there is more to the Ripley theme than just stealing the plot of another man’s novel.  Chapters of Jake’s blockbuster novel are interspersed throughout this book, so that we really have two novels here that converge.  The story of Jake’s inner turmoil and quest to uncover the identity of his nemesis is undeniably a page-turner—even more so than the stolen plot of his best-selling thriller.