The most recent book I finished from this list published by the Huffington Post is The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan.
(Image from amazon.com)
The book is about Grace, a young woman stranded on a lifeboat with 30 other people following a shipwreck in the early 1900s that the author makes sure to inform us is not the Titanic.
Grace is a complicated character. Because the book is told in first-person, we perhaps don’t get a clear view of what is taking place. Does anyone else feel like first-person has been overdone in the fiction realm in the past decade? To me, Grace seemed manipulative and spoiled.
This book fell a bit flat for me, but it did shed light on human behavior when the outlook is bleak and it is a survival-of-the-fittest situation. Grace finds herself on trial for murder and while she is not being tried for her husband’s death, we never do discover what happened to him. Be warned: The book leaves a lot of unanswered questions at the end.
Here’s an updated list. The first five books on this list are the ones I had read prior to discovering the list:
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Yes, Please by Amy Poehler
Bossy Pants by Tina Fey
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Drink by Ann Dowsett Johnston
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Her by Christa Parravani
NW by Zadie Smith
Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin
A HOUSE WITH CHARACTER 