On the surface, “Until Summer” follows Kyle on his final summer before he and his core group of very rich and privileged friends, leave their summer island homes behind for college. This is the last summer they can play their games and catch up and live carefree and wild lives together. Some more than others, like Trent who seems to make a sport out of making the local girls fall for him and then breaking their hearts and destroying their lives. There’s very much a “Dirty” Dancing” kind of vibe between the rich visitors that come every year, and the locals that wait upon them. Kyle is more sensitive than his friends, a closeted gay boy who isn’t looking for the same kind of sexual conquests as his friends, until The Boy appears and suddenly all of Kyle’s attention, his purpose for breathing and thinking, becomes Jack. When the author says this is a book about obsessive first love, he wasn’t kidding.

“An American Marriage” is multiple stories wrapped together, and I don’t say that because there are three POV characters. You have the messy relationships of Celestial and Roy, Andre and Celestial, and then the relationships between them and their parents all under a magnifying lens highlighting every flaw. Then you have the story of the gross injustice in our justice system that incarcerates a disproportionate amount of Black and Brown men, and how that incarceration upends not just their lives, but the lives of their families and disrupts a whole community. Sometimes, these two stories came together, and other times they didn’t, which made this book hard for me to put my finger on if I liked it in its entirety, or just certain parts. So, let’s talk about the characters first and the “romance” aspect. Beware, this is a long one!

“The Nine Minute Diner” is a fascinating concept—a novella that focuses on the brief moments before a fatal robbery in a diner from the perspective of the sixteen patrons there at the time. As each person gives their account of events, they explain to the police recorder how the events of their life brought them to that particular diner on that day just before the traumatic events occurred. It’s up to the reader to decide how reliable each narrator is when they both give their account of the crime, and the events of their life up to that moment. While each of the sixteen characters have a distinct personality, not all were necessary as it tended to spread the unifying incident between each character far too thin.

Harrow does a lovely job making the actual house that is Starling House become a living, breathing entity that seems to care for the unwanted things in Eden, like Opal and Arthur. Coiled up within the house is a mystery as to who the Starling’s are, and why they are so steadfast on never ever letting the coal company, run for generations by the Gravely family, have access to their land. But loneliness is an insatiable beast of its own, and when two lonely young adults find themselves in the same orbit, one small act of kindness unleashes the very thing the Wardens of Starling House have been tasked with keeping at bay for generations.

I’m not that familiar with the hoax that this psychological thriller is based on, in fact, I hadn’t even heard of it before this book. All that to say, I don’t really know what is or isn’t pulled from the annals of history, but even a fraction would be a doozy. This book follows Daniel who, in the early 90’s, is experiencing a type of depression that will be very familiar to many people: a quiet type of loneliness and pain where you just want the time to pass and to wake up to something better. For Daniel, a divorced man cheated out of his full pension, that becomes a reality. But when he wakes up from his sojourn of sorts, things only become more complicated. This book, with its medical and psychological thriller elements, felt like it was leading up to a type of moral the entire time, but even now, a day after finishing, I’m not entirely sure I got the message?