The Best Grown-Up Reads of September 2020
by the Brightly Editors
As another school year — albeit an unprecedented one — gears up to full speed, we hope you can take time for your own reading bliss. Whether it’s a love story, family novel, or parenting advice you seek, this list has a book to bring you peace (several hundred pages worth!).
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The Bottom Line for Baby
Available from:Perhaps the hardest part of making parenting decisions is all the competing information out there, from old wives’ tales to the latest studies. With The Bottom Line for Baby, parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson approaches each question from three categories: Competing Opinions, What the Science Says, and the Bottom Line, and — when the answer isn’t definitive — encourages parents to make choices according to their values and their baby’s unique needs.
(On Sale: 09/01/20)Related: 6 Recommendations to Help First-Time Parents Thrive
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A Rogue of One’s Own
Available from:In Book Two of the A League of Extraordinary Women series, which follows Oxford’s inaugural class of women and their rebellions and romances, Lucie is locked in a battle of wits with her old nemesis, Victorian playboy Tristan Ballentine. Lucie and her fellow suffragists have big plans for their publishing house, but Tristan is blocking the way. His price? A night in Lucie’s bed. Her response? Two can play that game.
(On Sale: 09/01/20)Also available from: -
Transcendent Kingdom
The daughter of an immigrant Ghanaian family, Gifty is pursuing her Ph.D. at Stanford, where she studies depression and addiction in mice. For Gifty, her research is more than academic: she wants to make sense of her mother’s suicidal depression and her brother’s heroin overdose after an injury led to opioid addiction. An acolyte of science, Gifty also finds herself drawn to the evangelical faith of her youth, which promises answers of its own.
(On Sale: 09/01/20)Preorder from: -
Peace
Available from:For too long, writes Midnight Mom Devotional author Becky Thompson, Christian women have been taught that fear and worry is an outcome of their lack of faith. But as someone with anxiety, like 40 million adults in the U.S., Thompson knows her fear is a physical rather than spiritual issue. In Peace, she balances Biblical scripture with the realities of modern parenthood, helping isolated mothers feel less alone.
(On Sale: 09/08/20)Also available from: -
The Book of Two Ways
Available from:After a near-death event, Dawn Edelstein is faced with two options: go back to her perfectly comfortable life in Boston with her husband, daughter, and work as a death doula, or return to Egypt and her abandoned research on the afterlife — and maybe her relationship with Wyatt Armstrong, who she hasn’t seen in 15 years. Dawn’s two possible lives unfurl side by side in the latest from master storyteller Jodi Picoult.
(On Sale: 09/22/20)Also available from: -
Well Played
Available from:After years of putting off her own life to care for her ailing mother, Stacey is determined to find The One. So when she receives a romantic email from her casual fling from the Renaissance Faire, she carries on the correspondence for nine months, until the Faire rolls back in town — and she discovers the man she’s been falling in love with wasn’t her fling at all. In fact, she hardly knows the guy, and now she loathes him.
(On Sale: 09/22/20)Also available from: -
Just Like You
Love is unpredictable — sometimes shockingly so. Lucy is 41, mother to two school-aged boys, and in the process of a divorce when she meets 22-year-old Joseph at the butcher counter and they quickly fall in love. Can two people from different cultures, classes, and generations really make it work?
(On Sale: 09/29/20)Preorder from: -
The Midnight Library
Available from:In the Midnight Library, Nora Seed gets an opportunity many of us might covet: each book she opens is her life story, or rather, the story of the life she would have lived had she made one choice differently. As Nora reads through her altered pasts — different careers, different relationships — she must ask herself what constitutes a life well-lived.
(On Sale: 09/29/20)Also available from:
