In "Creature," shortly after she and her mother move out of her father's house for the third time, Carol gets a summer babysitting job. She spends two weeks in one of her mother's customers Mrs. Pike's mansion on Widows' Point. For the first week, Carol feels comfortable and happy. The house is palatial and the Pike family is pleasant enough. Then, when the children's uncle, Hugh, comes to visit, everything changes. Carol feels attracted to him, and writes about him to her friend Gina. Hugh sneaks into her room one day and finds the letter. Not long later, he corners her in the bathroom and assaults her. Carol realizes that love and sex are not what she once believed them to be. Masterful… You can’t put it down, and you’ll feel larger and more connected once you finish it. Plus, it’s funny as hell.”— Dead Darlings Creative” I thought was a four star story, featuring a 14-year-old girl who was (as was King) a nanny for a summer, reading Jane Eyre, living (like The Madwoman in the Attic) in the attic, who overcomes a bad sexual experience to gain some (surprisingly!) solid sense of herself. She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she’d give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.” In North Sea, Oda has saved up for two years to be able to take her sullen 12-year-old daughter on a short holiday after her husband, Hanne’s father died unexpectedly. She hopes they will talk.

In "Five Tuesdays in Winter," middle-aged single father, Mitchell, develops a crush on his sole bookstore employee, Kate. Kate is a thirty-something woman, who has just moved to Portland, Maine from the West Coast. Because she is intelligent, attractive, and has a boyfriend, Mitchell's crush feels hopeless. When Kate starts tutoring his young daughter, Paula, Mitchell wonders if something might happen between them. Not long after Kate breaks up with her boyfriend, she comes to Mitchell and Paula's for another tutoring session. She and Mitchell talk and kiss. Mitchell feels that love is possible. These stories share multiple stages of life, love and grief, and the power of stories to touch us in such a memorably moving way. So many beautiful, stirring passages with such lovely imagery. Discuss setting in “South,” in which young mother Marie-Claude drives her two children from DC to South Carolina. Why do you think “South” takes place in a car? Do car rides allow for different kinds of conversations? Revelations? King, who won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Fiction for Euphoria (2014), can make you fall in love with a character fast, especially the smart, vulnerable, often painfully self-conscious adolescent protagonists featured in several of the 10 stories collected here, half previously published, half new. In "Creature," the fetching opener, 14-year-old Carol is hired to be a live-in mother's helper by a rich woman whose children and grandchildren are coming for a two-week visit, a woman so entitled she breezily renames her Cara because she likes it better. Under the influence of Jane Eyre, Carol is swept away by the charms of the woman's newly married son, who's arrived without his wife. "You cannot know these blistering feelings," she writes to her friend, "you have not yet met your Rochester." As in Father of the Rain (2010), alcoholism and mental illness shadow many characters' lives. Carol has a father in rehab, while the unnamed boy narrator of "When in the Dordogne" has parents who have left for France following the father's nervous breakdown and failed suicide attempt. His babysitters are a pair of college boys with whom he has so much more fun than usual that he dreams that his parents will get in a car crash and never return. The protagonists of other stories show King's range, among them a gay man who receives a surprise visit from his homophobic college roommate, a Frenchwoman living in the U.S. whose husband has abruptly moved on, a German woman taking her bratty daughter on holiday to an unpromising inn on the North Sea, a 91-year-old visiting his young granddaughter in the hospital. The final story, "The Man at the Door," about frustrations of the writing process, also tells of its joys: "This morning, however, without warning, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc....Words flooded her and her hand ached to keep up with them and above it all her mind was singing here it is here it is and she was smiling."

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection of short pieces that cover a wide range of life stages, including love and loss, as well as the potency of stories to reach us in such a memorable way.

Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.” Fierce, funny, tender stories that demonstrate both range and emotional heft… All of them are stunners.”— Boston Globe One of my favorite stories, A young boy, before entering high school, spend the summer of 1986 with Ed and Grant. Two college boys who be with him when his parent wasn't home. Though “Creature” takes place over the course of only two weeks, it reads as a coming-of-age story. How do we see fourteen-year-old Carol—who seems by turns precocious and heartbreakingly innocent—move out of her childhood, finally and irrevocably, in this story? What does she gain, and lose, during her time as a babysitter for the Pikes? How does writing play into her journey and maturation? What is the role of place in these stories? How do King’s evocatively rendered settings—the coastal Saxon town where Oda and Hanne vacation in “North Sea,” the Vermont apartment Lucy moves into with her brother in “Timeline,” the coastal New England town where Carol lives and babysits in “Creature”—influence each one’s tone and mood?The opening salvo, Creature, is short story-telling perfection. In once sentence, a sweet coming of age story shifts into a nightmare. It remains my favorite story in the collection, in content and style.

THE AUTHOR: Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. After grad school she took a job as a high school English teacher in Valencia, Spain and began writing her first novel. Eight years, ten more moves all over the US, and many bookstore, restaurant and teaching jobs later, that novel was published. Lily King writes about love better than anybody.”— Jenna Bush Hager, Best Books to Read in NovemberMany thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King in exchange for an honest review. A story of a girl who moves to live with his brother to left her wrong choice behind, And her friendship with their neighbor, a single mom. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.