Honestly, I can’t imagine NOT being in a book club. I’ve been in a lot of them over the years, and they’re my favorite way to learn and socialize at the same time. But nearly every one of them read mostly depressing books. That’s what happens when you pick award winners and the books the reigning critics love. (I’m not talking about BookTok—I mean the NYT lit peeps and their ilk.) Many of those books were also written by men and/or too damn long.

So I started my own, with three rules. First, no novels that make you want to jump off a cliff when you finish them. Second, nothing over 400 pages. (We’ve let a few books up to 500 pages slide, but only when a member makes a really good case.) Third, every book has to be written by a woman. (Smashing the patriarchy, one novel at a time.)

We’ve read twenty-five books so far—they’re all listed at the end of this piece—and most of them have been bangers. Only one was regrettable (Verity), and one was so-so (The Lost Apothecary). These five sparked the best discussions. Do some of them have depressing parts? Sure. There’s a plague, a murder trial, and a body in a frozen river. But every one of them ends on a hopeful note.

My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918)
In the 1880s, Jim Burden, an orphan, moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There he meets Ántonia Shimerda, whose family has just arrived from Bohemia, and the two become friends. The book follows them as they grow up and drift apart. Cather doesn’t romanticize prairie life. It’s brutally hard. But her immigrant families work like crazy, look out for one another, and many of them end up doing well. Her descriptions of the land are stunning, and the book made me miss my own childhood. It’s a masterpiece.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (2023)
This was my favorite book of 2023. Martha Ballard was a real midwife in Maine who kept a diary, and Lawhon has turned her into one of the best heroines I’ve read in years. There’s a body in a frozen river, a rape trial in which Martha testifies against a man with a lot of power, and a long, loving marriage to her husband, Ephraim, that I’d happily read a whole book about. Being a woman in eighteenth-century America was rough. Martha handled it better than I would have.

Eleanore of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier (2024)
If you’ve ever wondered what it was like when the Black Death hit, read this. It’s 1347, and Eleanore, a young herbalist, becomes the apprentice of the pope’s physician just as the plague reaches Avignon. The two of them are supposed to find a cure. Meanwhile, the town is looking for someone to blame, and a smart, unmarried woman in love with a Jewish medical apprentice is an obvious choice. The medical detail is fascinating, and Eleanore is a terrific narrator, which is all the more impressive in a first novel.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (2025)
At first, I thought I knew what this was: a love triangle in the English countryside. Beth is married to Frank, a decent farmer, and then Gabriel, the man she loved when she was young, comes back to the village. Then a man Beth loves ends up on trial for murder, and it becomes a very different book, with a courtroom mystery and a second, sadder one about what happened to Beth’s son. It’s quiet and beautifully written. I wasn’t sure about the ending at first, but I’ve come around.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (2025)
I’m not sure I can explain this book in a paragraph, but I’ll try. Owen is a historian whose country reveres a legendary knight named Una. He gets hold of a manuscript of her story, ends up inside it, and finds Una alive, her ending still unwritten. His job is to make her the hero the nation wants. Much of it is told in the second person, the story keeps circling back on itself, and I loved all of it. At heart, it’s a love story, and it made me cry. It’s the best book Harrow has written.

Using our rules, what would you pick for a book club read?

Here’s everything we’ve read. Where I’ve reviewed a book, I’ve included the link.

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