Check out these book club worthy reads!
QUEEN MAB by Emily McBride
9780374617820| 8/4/26
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s QUEEN MAB is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
HOT GIRL MURDER CLUB by Ashley Winstead
9781250401212| 7/14/26
What’s a girl got to do for fame, a few million record sales, and justice for murder?
Ten years ago, aspiring singer-actress Scout Sage lost the only thing that mattered: her sister, Georgia. Ever since Georgia’s mysterious death at a Hollywood party, Scout’s done her best to honor her memory, clawing her way through the industry and collecting a network of climbers along the way, fellow hot girls in stilettos with cutthroat ambition, a new Hollywood order.
But when a slew of targeted murders makes headlines across L.A., all pointing to Scout as the killer, she turns overnight from a mid-tier pop star into the world’s most famous (alleged) murderer. Now everything she’s worked to build—including the justice she wants for Georgia—will fall apart unless Scout can prove she’s not guilty.
Meanwhile, the young and unusual detective assigned to her case, herself no stranger to tragedy, begins to unearth secrets not even Scout knows, let alone her millions of new fans. Particularly about the ways Georgia’s death connects to an even older pattern of crimes long hushed over in Hollywood—an old reign of terror that, if brought to light, could be the fuel that ignites a reckoning the world over.
CRASH INTO ME by Robinne Lee
9781250412751| 7/7/26
When Cecilia Chen gets into a fender bender, she’s shocked to find she recognizes the swan-necked beauty she’s mildly injured. And it’s this chance encounter with the glamorous Anouk Ferrand that will change Cecilia’s life.
Sexy and emotionally involving, CRASH INTO ME‘s core is a familiar and much-discussed challenge for many women: how to express creativity, how to be frankly sexual and emotionally vibrant in and out of a marriage, how to be a constant friend, a good mother. In Cecilia, Lee creates a conflicted character dealing with a complex set of circumstances: a photographer with a Jamaican background from the East Coast married to a Frenchman whose career has catapulted beyond hers.
Readers will immediately recognize the dynamics of Cecilia’s complicated marriage and her worries about raising her bi-racial children in a place she’s not sure she wants to be, a Westside Los Angeles that’s a platform for privilege and power. What will keep readers feverishly turning the pages is what stuns Cecilia herself: the intensity of her explosive physical and emotional entanglement with Anouk.
Did what happened between them two decades ago begin something Cecilia won’t be able to stop?
THE FOREST BECOMES HER by Julie Carrick Dalton
9781250889751| 7/14/26
In historic, bucolic Concord, Massachusetts, a centuries-old forest has been removed to make way for a new, eco-friendly housing development. The locals are upset by the destruction, but out-of-towners like Hazel Stoddard are flocking to put down roots in their new guilt-free dream homes.
Soon a tragedy leaves Hazel unmoored in her new life, and she begins to feel the pull of the absent forest. Hazel is not alone—her neighbors, real estate agent Stella Flint and teenage environmentalist Polly Bauer, each have their own traumas and their own relationship to the land. The three women are drawn together to save the last remaining oak tree, or they risk losing themselves to lingering shadows that only they can see.
In THE FOREST BECOMES HER, Julie Carrick Dalton brings hope and reverence to this lush celebration of multigenerational female relationships, the ever-evolving female form, humanity’s connection to our changing world, and the mysteries that still exist in nature.
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