The Perfect Nanny  Leila Slimani 

Winner of the Goncourt, France's biggest literary prize, The Perfect Nanny was bound to be pretty good. But it actually exceeded my expectations - I couldn't put it down.
It's described as 'the French Gone Girl,' which I think is misleading -- it's not a thriller; it's an engrossing examination of the psychology behind the relationships between the people who take care of other peoples' lives and the families they're taking care of. 
I don't want to give the story away, but the character development is extraordinary, the prose is spare, and the tension increases exponentially as the story progresses.
Read this one. You won't be sorry.

Bad Kansas   Becky Mandelbaum

This is the best short story collection I've read in a very long time. Eleven stories that examine relationships and place and our places within relationships - you get the idea. Mandelbaum's writing is beautifully-wraught but not distracting from the stories. I finished this book and wanted to go back and read it over again. So I did. It was just as good the second time around - maybe better. 

If you like your characters human and flawed, sometimes stuck in places they'd rather not be, and trying their hardest to figure out what they want, who they want to be, and how to get there, this collection is for you. Maybe twice.

Everything Here is Beautiful   Mira T. Lee

I'm not exactly sure what to say about this book -- it hits every note perfectly? It does. 
A story of family and of the ways in which mental illness touches everyone, there is no victim here, there are no bad guys. Instead, we're pulled into a story in which love is complicated by fear, by responsibility, by frustration and exhaustion. Both familiar and compelling.
Lee's writing is extraordinary; her storytelling is, too. We know from the start that it's all going to go bad, somehow, but as we follow these people, our definition of bad resets. We feel each event unfold, feel its reverberations for every character before they regroup and move forward again.
Whatever forward might mean for them.

Little Fires Everywhere   Celeste Ng

This book was a double win – when I began it, my expectations weren’t very high, to be honest. It was highly-touted, which always makes me cautious, and its description – about a highly-organized family, in a highly-organized suburb, thrown into disarray by newcomers, appearing out of nowhere – felt a little bit like a story I’d read a thousand times.

But.

Now that we’ve gotten my misgivings out of the way, you should know that I LOVED this book. LOVED it. Read it quickly, only putting it down when I absolutely had to because some child or dog needed me, or I had to go to work. The story is compelling (clearly), and the characters – all of them – are complicated and worth following. Read this one, too. You won’t be sorry.

Upcoming Reviews:

• Griffin and Sabine (I know – it’s not new, but it is Valentine’s Day, which seems like reason enough.)

• Mothers of Sparta

• White Houses

• How Hard Can it Be?

• Fruit of the Drunken Tree

• Back Talk (stories)

• Bukowski in a Sundress