The Friend Zone

 The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez (2019) 367 pages

Kristen is running a successful niche pet supply company called Doglet Nation through the Internet. She's also waiting for her boyfriend to finish his deployment in the military and move in with her. Unfortunately, uterine fibroids are making her life hell, so she's got a hysterectomy scheduled for shortly after her best friend Sloan's wedding in a few weeks. When she meets the groom's best man, Josh, they have an instant attraction for each other. But when she learns that Josh wants a houseful of children which she can't provide for him, she forces herself to consider Josh as just a friend, even though it's clear that he's much more compatible to her than her boyfriend is.

There were several points in this novel when I just wanted to reach into the book and shake her, to have her really open up to Josh. But I can get that she didn't want him to give up his dream for children on her account, and then later blame her. The chapters are divided into Kristen and Josh's points of view, and the character development is solid. Can love win out, or is it best to be practical? 

Looker

Looker by Laura Sims, 182 pages

A woman lives alone in an apartment in a cozy, family-filled neighborhood. Just down the street lives a famous actress and her family. The actress's seemingly perfect life captivates the woman, whose life is unraveling. As the woman's world devolves, her obsession with the actress grows, with the tension ratcheting up with each turn of the page. In her debut novel, Sims has created a gripping view of an unnamed woman's evolution from someone who deserves our sympathy to someone whose instability rapidly becomes off-putting at best (and often downright scary). It's tight, it's tense, and — perhaps most disturbingly — believably realistic. I can't wait to see what Sims does next.

The Man in the Wooden Hat / Jane Gardam 233 pp.

This is the second in the Old Filth (failed in London, try Hong Kong) trilogy, giving the reader the story of Elizabeth, Filth's wife.  Like Filth, she is a child of the Empire's Far East, and is also marked by youthful suffering: in her case, she and her parents were interned and nearly starved in a Japanese camp during World War II.  Betty and Filth have a strong marriage if a somewhat incomplete one; we learn here about Betty's long connection to Veneering, Filth's archenemy at the Hong Kong Bar, and to Veneering's beloved son Harry.  A bit slower to get rolling than Old Filth, but ultimately just as satisfying.  I am halfway through the third volume and will be sorry to finish.

The Girl from the Garden / Parnaz Foroutan 271pp.

I am generally wary of novels with fruit on the cover.  They tend to be heartwarming family sagas, for which I reached my quota in about 1994.  But this story was something darker and stranger than its cover or title would anticipate, centering on an early 20th-century Jewish-Iranian family, and told through the recollections of one family daughter living in contemporary Los Angeles.   Asher marries Rakhel, but they fail to have a child, while Asher's brother Ibrahim and his wife happily await their first.  Asher's and Ibrahim's choices following the grief of the couple's infertility set up a twisted, dark revenge scenario, oddly believable and braided with strands from Old Testament greatest hits: the wisdom of Solomon, Abraham's sacrifice, Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah.  Foroutan is skilled and compelling, but this is one bleak landscape.  The moral of the story: hug a gynecologist today! (A pat on the back to a psychiatrist and a suffragette would not go amiss, either.)