By Collection Management Librarian Kathy
I love how much our community uses the library. Sometimes that means waiting for the hottest titles. Don’t fret! I can help you find a similar reading experience to THAT book you are waiting for or that you finally read and loved.
All Fours readalikes
The Misfortune of Marion Palm by Emily Culliton
Why you should try it: Culliton has a similar quirky sensibility as July, and this book also focuses on a woman escaping her life, even if it is for embezzling not a midlife crisis of sorts.
Description: Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house.
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Why you should try it: Sad and funny, sweet and sexy, this tale of a woman subverting her carefully circumscribed life is perfect for readers of All Fours.
Description: Rachel is 24, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a 90-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent on feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith, and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.
The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
Why you should try it: This "potent comedy of manners" (Kirkus Reviews) is set over the course of a day and can be read in a day.
Description: What if your two favorite people hated each other with a passion? The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky best friend, Temi, with whom to laugh about facile men, and a devoted husband who loves her above all else—even his distaste for Temi. On a seemingly normal day, Temi comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife: drinking wine, eating snacks, and laughing caustically about the husband's shortcomings. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made, the wife's two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions, throwing everyone's integrity into question—and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over years, into utter chaos.
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
Why you should try it: Another fleeing woman and another midlife reckoning told in a nuanced, funny, and ingenious way.
Description: On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond's life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 52, she finds herself staring into "the Mids"—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life—and her family—as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.
I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol
Why you should try it: Even though this is a memoir, reading about MacNicol's midlife embrace of living on her own terms in Paris feels like a perfect companion to July's novel.
Description: After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged 46, unmarried with no children, spent 16 months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend's apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity. What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman's pursuit of radical enjoyment.
About Kathy
Kathy is a Collection Management Librarian who loves reading, sharing, and talking about books. Her missions in life are to: create communities of readers, convince folks that her official title should be "Book Pusher," and refute that "disco" is a dirty word.
