Her Good Side by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Summary from Edelweiss:

**A New York Times Best Romance Book of the Year** A swoony, heart-melting YA romance from beloved author Rebekah Weatherspoon about two awkward teens who decide to practice dating in order to be good at the real thing. Perfect for fans of Nicola Yoon and Jenny Han.

Sixteen-year-old Bethany Greene, though confident and self-assured, is what they call a late-bloomer. She’s never had a boyfriend, date, or first kiss. She’s determined to change that but after her crush turns her down cold for Homecoming—declaring her too inexperienced—and all her back-up ideas fall through, she cautiously agrees to go with her best friend’s boyfriend Jacob. A platonic date is better than no date, right? Until her friend breaks up with said boyfriend.

Dumped twice in just two months, Jacob Yeun wonders if he’s the problem. After years hiding behind his camera and a shocking summer glow up, he wasn’t quite ready for all the attention or to be someone’s boyfriend. There are no guides for his particular circumstances, or for taking your ex’s best friend to the dance.

Why not make the best of an awkward situation? Bethany and Jacob decide to fake date for practice, building their confidence in matters of the heart.  

And it works—guys are finally noticing Bethany. But things get complicated as their kissing sessions—for research of course!—start to feel real. This arrangement was supposed to help them in dating other people, but what if their perfect match is right in front of them?

So, I LOVE Rebekah Weatherspoon’s adult romances – super sexy, kinky, and funny. And I was super-excited to have made my one visit to The Ripped Bodice (since I don’t live in California) when Rebekah just happened to be picking up a shift. (I got my copy of Rafe signed, eeeee!) So I was really interested in Rebekah’s debut YA romance. And it sounded so cute.

Fear not! It does not disappoint! Her Good Side is an adorable but extremely relatable fake-dating romance between Bethany, a self-described late-bloomer who wants a little romance, and Jacob, the photography whiz who gets a rep as the hot guy who gets dumped. After Jacob gets dropped by Bethany’s friend for being “boring” (aka quiet and not overtly horny) and Bethany gets turned down for a date because that guy doesn’t want to be her first date (uh, sorta gross my dude), Jacob and Bethany concoct a plan. They will fake date to raise each other’s romantic profile in the school’s gossip network. Does this involve cute Halloween costumes? Yep. Does this involve joint babysitting of rebellious younger sisters? Yep. Does this involve yummy cooking exploits? Yep. And does this involved kissing for “Science”? Double-yep. And then those pesky feelings had to go and get involved.

Oh, these sweet, awkward babies. Look, I know horny teenagers are a thing, but as someone who was also very much “I don’t get the hype” and didn’t date until college because, like, idk I was more into talking and less into doing #iykyk, I heart Bethany and Jacob forever for this. Being a teenager is so weird. You could not pay me enough to go back. But also…would I have liked some “practice time” dating a cute person who wasn’t going to shame me or anything for not being experienced or super-horny or anything? Oh, for sure!

On top of the A-plot, Bethany is working through the process of figuring out who she is and who she wants to be. She’s got two moms and two sisters were/are incredible basketball players and Bethany herself is really good at it…but she doesn’t love it. And since the expectation is that she will also go off to play elite college ball and then pro, she’s so worried that it’s going to change how her family thinks about her if she quits. Her true passion is cooking (yall, her sandwiches sound amazing). The way Weatherspoon explores the process of figuring out yourself through Bethany is so good. Also a great group of diverse friends in this book which is always super fun in a YA. Definite recommend.

CW for some implied fat-shaming/food-policing because Bethany (who is plus-sized) is told she needs to fuel her body better (paraphrasing) for elite basketball.

Dear FTC: I swiped the paper galley from the bookstore.

American Royalty by Tracey Livesay

Summary from Goodreads: In this dangerously sexy rom-com that evokes the real-life romance between Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle, a prince who wants to live out of the spotlight falls for a daring American rapper who turns his life, and the palace, upside down.

Sexy, driven rapper Danielle “Duchess” Nelson is on the verge of signing a deal that’ll make her one of the richest women in hip hop. More importantly, it’ll grant her control over her life, something she’s craved for years. But an incident with a rising pop star has gone viral, unfairly putting her deal in jeopardy. Concerned about her image, she’s instructed to work on generating some positive publicity… or else.

A brilliant professor and reclusive royal, Prince Jameson prefers life out of the spotlight, only leaving his ivory tower to attend weddings or funerals. But with the Queen’s children involved in one scandal after another, and Parliament questioning the viability of the monarchy, the Queen is desperate. In a quest for good press, she puts Jameson in charge of a tribute concert in her late husband’s honor. Out of his depth, and resentful of being called to service, he takes the advice of a student. After all, what’s more appropriate for a royal concert than a performer named “Duchess”?

Too late, Jameson discovers the American rapper is popular, sexy, raunchy and not what the Queen wanted, although he’s having an entirely different reaction. Dani knows this is the good exposure she needs to cement her deal and it doesn’t hurt that the royal running things is fine as hell. Thrown together, they give in to the explosive attraction flaring between them. But as the glare of the limelight intensifies and outside forces try to interfere, will the Prince and Duchess be a fairy tale romance for the ages or a disaster of palatial proportions?

Tracey Livesay writes Back Breakers in the Sack. UNF.

LOVED IT. Many stars, lots of chili peppers.

I keep trying to rec this to customers who liked or are interested in the Marry Me movie, but alas, this comes out in June! *womp womp* I was so sold on this two famous people who don’t really like the privacy intrusions/shit you get for being famous who are also from completely different worlds but who also fit together really well.

CW for his family being an absolute garbage fire except for his mom and she’s got some tough family history plus a shitty up-and-coming pop star internet bullying her/stalking her coattails. Also, racism bc British royalty.

I do want to talk about this cover bc she looks AWESOME and he looks nothing like I thought he did in the book. *shrug*

American Royalty is out today!!

Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma (If Shakespeare was an Auntie #1)

Summary from Goodreads: Dating Dr. Dil features a love-phobic TV doctor who must convince a love-obsessed homebody they are destined to be together. 

Kareena Mann dreams of having a love story like her parents, but she prefers restoring her classic car to swiping right on dating apps. When her father announces he’s selling her mother’s home, Kareena makes a deal with him: he’ll gift her the house if she can get engaged in four months. Her search for her soulmate becomes impossible when her argument with Dr. Prem Verma, host of The Dr. Dil Show, goes viral. Now the only man in her life is the one she doesn’t want.

Dr. Prem Verma is dedicated to building a local community health center, but he needs to get donors with deep pockets. The Dr. Dil Show was doing just that, until his argument with Kareena went viral, and he’s left short changed. That’s when Kareena’s meddling aunties presented him with a solution: convince Kareena he’s her soulmate and they’ll fund his clinic.  

Even though they have conflicting views on love-matches and arranged-matches, the more time Prem spends with Kareena, the more he begins to believe she’s the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. But for Prem and Kareena to find their happily ever after, they must admit that hate has turned into fate.

In the years since her mother died, Kareena Mann has been very slowly restoring both her mother’s beloved car and the house she grew up in. However, on Kareena’s birthday her father announces that he’s selling the house and moving to a retirement community. Now that her younger sister Bindu is getting married, there’s really no reason to keep the house. This was NOT the plan they agreed on. Kareena manages to talk her father into making a deal: if she gets engaged in four months – when her sister’s wedding celebration gets rolling – he will give her the house. (This whole morning conversation felt very Sixteen Candles when the movie opens and everyone has forgotten Samantha’s birthday.) So Kareena meets up with a friend later to have a few drinks and fume about the situation. And she sees a super-hot guy. And they start flirting, which turns to making out in an office…and then the guy PEACES OUT when his phone rings leaving Kareena stuck with her sweater vest caught on her earring and over her face. The next morning, when she’s good and hung over, she has to accompany her social media influencer (and math professor, I mean, get it Bindu, even if you are seriously the brattiest younger sister) to the taping of a local desi talk show, The Dr. Dil Show. As the show gets rolling and the topic of love comes up – during which the host who is a cardiologist says that love is bad for your heart and he doesn’t believe in it – Kareena realizes that this “host” Dr. Prem Verma is the same jerkwad who left her stranded the night before. So Kareena reads him the riot act about being a dog and they proceed to have one hell of a verbal smackdown. This wouldn’t be so bad – the show records to tape – except that Bindu has been streaming the recording live to her YouTube because Social Media Influencer.

Everyone loses control of the narrative. Prem loses financial backing for his dream project, a South Asian-centered community health center. Kareena looks like a shrew and has a snowball’s chance in hell of finding an actual nice guy to fall in love and marry her in four months now (for real – many chapters open with her messages with various shitty dudes on Shaadi.com and other dating sites). But Aunties to the Rescue: Kareena’s four aunties decide that Prem would be Kareena’s ideal match. If he can win Kareena – who is firmly in the “will marry for love or nothing” camp vs Prem’s “love causes cardiac damage” camp – the aunties will help get his funding back.

Kareena wants none of this. Even Prem’s suggestion that they fake date for four months until she gets the house isn’t a plan she can stomach. But Prem keeps showing up, trying to convince Kareena that he might make a great plan B. Despite all their verbal fireworks, he starts to admire and like this woman who wears sweater vests, stores peppermint coffee creamer in the freezer so she can have it year round, does her own DIY and restoration work on her car, and takes none of his bullshit. As verbal fireworks turn to a tentative friendship then to steamy sexytimes (A+, no notes), Kareena starts to think Prem might be capable of love after all. Prem has some secrets, though. And then it all falls apart.

LOVED IT! A great adaptation of a Shakespeare play (Taming of the Shrew) that could go sideways if too much of the original plot is kept sacred – I loved how you could see a little bit of Kate’s final monologue in there at the end but flipped and shared by both Prem and Kareena. (If you haven’t read Taming, or have but aren’t that familiar with it, don’t worry, you’ll be fine.) I loved their competitiveness, the pani puri eating contest, the TSwift love, and their wonderful circle of friends (lol, when his buddies show up for their weekly beer and dinner night and Prem has to keep them in the hall because Kareena is over). [Side note: you may have read in various reviews that Prem calls his dick “Charlie.” However, he calls it Charlie to himself only, he doesn’t tell Kareena his dick has a name nor does he ask her to call it Charlie. We are given a reason in the text for why he thinks this way. So this is fine to me. I mean, considering that I am not a person in possession of a penis I have no direct knowledge of this practice. Maybe some people do name their junk. *shrug* But it seems a number of reviewers are extremely weirded out by this. Don’t listen to the haters.]

The aunties are great, with the added bonus that they’re all named for other desi romance authors. I’m pretty sure one of the other books in the series will be a Much Ado About Nothing adaptation ❤

Dating Dr. Dil came out on Tuesday! (Copies are going fast, thanks to the power of the clock app)

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss.

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo

Summary from Goodreads: A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life

“Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know.”

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD–a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma–but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body–and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

First of all, ALL the content warnings for childhood physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. The author doesn’t hold back in describing her childhood. What My Bones Know is a rough book to read, but an incredible one as well.

When we think of PTSD, we generally think of it as happening after a single traumatic event. Stephanie Foo endured years of abuse from her parents, ending in abandonment as a teenager. She managed to pull herself up and put herself through college and then embark on a dream career, ultimately becoming a producer on This American Life. But she started having panic attacks and responding to friends and loved ones as if they might be a threat. A diagnosis of PTSD didn’t seem to fit her – she was ultimately diagnosed with complex PTSD (C-PTSD), which occurs after years of repeated trauma, and, for which, there aren’t very many resources available. So Foo turned to her profession – journalism – to investigate C-PTSD as well as the roots of her own trauma. Through her research she finds ways to work through her symptoms, to find common ground with others who suffered trauma in the community where she grew up, and in researching her family, she finds that generational trauma plays a huge part in her story.

This is a stunning memoir plus investigation into the psychology and treatment of complex PTSD (C-PTSD), beautifully written and guttingly honest. You can really see how Foo’s experience of working on shows like This American Life really helped her work out how to shape a story and how to keep the reader’s interest, even when the subject matter was hard and almost unthinkable. You just wanted to reach into the book and pull that little girl straight out of the pages – even years later her parents have very little insight into the damage they did to their child.

What My Bones Know is out today!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American by Wajahat Ali

Summary from Goodreads: This is just one of the many warm, lovely, and helpful tips that Wajahat Ali and other children of immigrants receive on a daily basis. Go back where, exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is now an unaffordable place to live? Or Pakistan, the country his parents left behind a half-century ago?

Growing up living the suburban American dream, young Wajahat devoured comic books (devoid of brown superheroes) and fielded well-intentioned advice from uncles and aunties. (“Become a doctor!”) He had turmeric stains under his fingernails, was accident-prone, suffered from OCD, and wore Husky pants, but he was as American as his neighbors, with roots all over the world. Then, while Ali was studying at University of California, Berkeley, 9/11 happened. Muslims replaced communists as America’s enemy #1, and he became an accidental spokesman and ambassador of all ordinary, unthreatening things Muslim-y.

Now a middle-aged dad, Ali has become one of the foremost and funniest public intellectuals in America. In Go Back to Where You Came From, he tackles the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus, peppering personal stories with astute insights into national security, immigration, and pop culture. In this refreshingly bold, hopeful, and uproarious memoir, Ali offers indispensable lessons for cultivating a more compassionate, inclusive, and delicious America.

I’d known kind of OF Wajahat Ali as a political-ish writer for a bit but really didn’t become familiar with him until the push to find a liver donor for his daughter Nusayba went wide on Twitter several years ago.

In Go Back to Where You Came From Wajahat writes with incredible sarcastic – but also earnest – humor about the checklist for the assimilation of the Good Immigrant into White America. About how his parents met and came to America. About surviving several life-threatening illnesses and accidents. Then he segues into the gut-churning era of being brown and Muslim post 9/11, the panic of finding out his parents have been arrested and having to find bail money, keep the business afloat, and find a place to live, and then the all-encompassing worry when his daughter was diagnosed with stage IV cancer (look, if you are stone-cold unmoved after reading that chapter, I don’t know what to say to you; fyi, Nusayba has made a full recovery after her liver transplant, if reading about sick children is not easy for you).

This is another excellent 2022 publication of a memoir in essays. A lot of the memoirs I’ve been reading these last few years are all by people around my age (give or take 5 years or so) so it’s very interesting (and sobering) to see what is basically the same time period and events and pop culture I experienced through someone else’s lens, location, and family.

Go Back to Where You Came From is out January 25.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Rake I’d Like to F… by Sierra Simone, Eva Leigh, Nicola Davidson, Adriana Herrera, and Joanna Shupe

Summary from Goodreads: He’s a legend in the raking . . .

The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind – Sierra Simone: Peregrine Hind, known to all as the bloodiest highwayman ever to bedevil the road, seeks only one thing—revenge against the Dartham family. And so when a robbery sends the second Dartham son and notorious rakehell Alexander Dartham tumbling to Peregrine’s feet, it seems like fate has given Peregrine his vengeance at last. Except then Alexander offers him a desperate bargain: to kidnap him instead, so Peregrine can harvest a generous ransom from Alexander’s family first. Peregrine agrees, but he’s in no way prepared for a captive like Alexander, who insists only on the softest beds and the finest wines…and who enjoys being tied up a little too much…

Two Rakes for Mrs. Sparkwell – Eva Leigh: The last thing Mrs. Vivian Sparkwell wants is to tie her life to another stifling husband. But thanks to the surprise terms of her last marriage contract, if she refuses any reasonable offer to wed again, she loses her widow’s portion. What she needs is a thorough and public ruining to make her would-be suitors cry off. Who better to provide the necessary scandal than notorious rake Rushton Cantley? Yet when Rush proposes that his friend, gaming hell bruiser Jack Morgan, join in on the ruination, Vivian can’t decide if she’s shocked—or aroused. How far is too far when infamy is on the line?

A Rake, His Patron, & Their Muse – Nicola Davidson: London playwright and notorious rake Lennox Townsend is renowned for bold melodrama and bolder pleasures. When he loses interest in both, his shy yet devoted patron Lord Jonathan Grant escorts him to a country boarding house managed by repressed widow, Mrs. Viola Prescott. The trio soon surrender to sizzling—and forbidden—passion, made sweeter as each share their deepest secrets and find acceptance of their true self. Yet cold reality is ever ready to intrude, and they know happiness is fleeting. Or is it?

Monsieur X – Adriana Herrera: Joseph Cantor Marshall never imagined reaching the pinnacle of artistic success would be so… uninspiring. Desperate for a spark of excitement he attends the notorious masked soirée at the most exclusive sex club in Paris. The moment he walks in he’s entranced by the mysterious X, the embodiment of the painter’s darkest fantasies. But X is as slippery as he is tempting, and soon Marshall’s days and nights are consumed by growing desire for his elusive lover. Will falling for X prove to be Marshall’s undoing or his greatest masterpiece?

Sold to the Duke – Joanna Shupe: Though she once lived a life of privilege, Lady Eliza is now destitute and desperate to care for her ill sister. She decides to sell the one thing of value she has left: her virginity. At the auction, a shocked Duke of Blackwood recognizes Eliza and refuses to allow her to fall into the clutches of a depraved bidder. But his role of noble rescuer is upended when the proud beauty insists on giving him his money’s worth…

For some reason, I think I liked Duke I’d Like to F… a little better than Rake I’d Like to F… as a whole. It’s all the same authors, all of whose writing I’m familiar with, so it’s not that. Some of the stories felt more rushed in their internal timelines in this volume – “instalust” is always a harder sell for me, and when you make it a throuple/triad or more instead of just two people in the relationship it gets harder for me to buy that everyone is going to have a Happily Ever After after only a few days or weeks. The two novellas I liked best were Adriana Herrera’s and Joanna Shupe’s and both of those had longer elements of time in them and worked really well for me, despite the short nature of a novella format.

It’s all unbelievably sexy of course. Many, many chili peppers. And I can really recommend Adriana Herrera’s contribution, Monsieur X (riffing on the John Singer Sargent “Madame X” painting) which has an unbelievably lush quality to the writing and the evocation of artistic inspiration.

(Apparently, there’s going to be a Villain volume next year…yes please)

Dear FTC: I had a digital galley of this book from the publicist, but got pudding brain and didn’t read it, but I had a copy pre-ordered on my Nook anyway so I read that.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow, #1)

Summary from Goodreads: The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.

When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​

To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

WHAT. OKOKOKOK, so. In Iron Widow:

There are Chrysalises (giant, Transformer-ish mecha) powered by a male-female pilot team, which is supposed to have a balanced qi, but more often than not, the male pilot drains the female pilot’s qi, killing her.

Zetian’s sister is picked for the pilot program and dies in this way. Zetian vows revenge and volunteers for the program, ostensibly to murder that pilot, but then somehow her qi takes control in their psychic link and she drains him. She’s an Iron Widow.

So now it turns out she’s a matched pair with Li Shimin, who is not only the best pilot but also a condemned murderer. The two of them eventually hatch a plot to break the system that is deliberately made to murder women. Also, they get some help from Zetian’s childhood friend/rich boy Gao Yizhi who becomes the brains and money behind their attempt to bring down the patriarchy…and part of their romantic triad. (As Ziran has said on Tiktok, a real “love triangle” meets on all sides, not just one because then that’s just a boring old less than/greater than sign.)

And then shit gets real wild on the last page. Gimme book 2, because Zetian is NOT done fucking up the patriarchy.

So, like 5 stars for the book but also 1 million bananas because holy cats is there so much in here. Come for the Pacific Rim-meets-Crouching Tiger vibes, stay for the feminism, anger, and polyamory (this is still a YA, not much steam on the page, but the committed triad is a real thing and all the main characters are bisexual).

Many CW for violence against women, rape (off page), misogyny, racism, coercion, physical abuse (foot binding is a REAL THING in this book), substance abuse, violence and gore in general.

Dear FTC: I started reading a digital galley from the publisher via Netgalley, but then I bought a hardcover copy and plowed through it. (I started this before Iron Widow came out in September – it doesn’t actually take that long to read, I just had pudding brain and startitis in 2021 and couldn’t focus on anything. But when I did focus? BOOM)

This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris

Summary from Goodreads: A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed—about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son. 

One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’s round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless and unresponsive. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine—others, he struggles to answer simple questions. What is she missing?

When Taylor brings Tophs to a long-awaited appointment with a geneticist, she hopes that this time, she’ll leave with answers. The test reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? And how can she choose the best path forward—for herself and for her beautiful, unsolvable boy? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won insights.

This Boy We Made is a beautifully written and executed memoir about motherhood, especially Black motherhood, anxiety, family, faith, and parenting a child with a perplexing medical and neurodivergent condition. One day Harris’s toddler, Tophs, wakes up unresponsive and listless, as if he’s had a seizure or blood sugar issue, and she rushes him to the emergency room. Tophs recovers from the episode, but it happens again, just as suddenly, and other symptoms begin to emerge. Harris chronicles the many hours consulting with medical professionals, education professionals, worrying about how to make sure Tophs is getting the best care she can find but also making sure her older daughter isn’t lost in the shuffle, that her marriage and partnership with her husband isn’t placed on the backburner, that she can draw strength from her faith. Just a heads-up that there are no clear answers in Tophs’s case, no “label” yet that can guide his medical or therapeutic team, so this isn’t that kind of book where his medical condition is solved and everything is just fine. This is a book where Harris is still in the middle of everything, still trying to work it all through, but where she shares the struggles and triumphs her family has faced with us.

This Boy We Made is out today, January 4!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.