In my first month with NetGalley, I read five ARCs and squeezed into three more published novels and a self-help book. Among the novels I read, several themes emerged. AI plays a big role in Stop All the Clocks and Life Derailed. The main characters in Before We Say Goodbye and The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits fight to balance their ambition with their families. The Three Lives of Cate Kay and Run for the Hills both explore drastic searches for identity. Family was a common theme across almost all of these books, most poignantly in Room 706.

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My Top Picks

My favorite books were ARCs and will not be published for several months – but when Restoration Garden (Sara Blaydes) and Room 706 (Ellie Levenson) are published, I highly recommend picking up a copy of each.

All Nine Books Reviewed

This Must Be The Place, Maggie O’Farrell

I picked up this book from the library after first discovering Maggie O’Farrell when I read (and loved) her more recent novels Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. This Must Be the Place tells the story of Daniel, a flawed and struggling man whose marriage is falling apart due to some poor choices from his past and present. His character’s journey is built through chapters from the perspective of different people in his life – his children, wife, and in-laws – as well as his own, in various times and locations. Through these scenes we ultimately understand the consequences of his decisions and how his situation came to be. 

I can’t say that I entirely enjoyed reading it – the various chapters felt disjointed because of all the different settings and characters and it took a while for these threads to pull together. I kept going in the hope of an emotional payoff at the end and I do think it came, but I really had to motivate myself to keep reading in order to get there. 

Buy This Must Be the Place from Bookshop.org

Life Derailed, Beth Merlin & Danielle Modafferi

Life Derailed is the first ARC I read from NetGalley. The novel tells the story of Remi Russell, editor of a struggling woman’s magazine who is grieving the unexpected loss of her husband. When the attractive new Chief Digital Officer of the magazine brings in an AI tool to increase efficiency, Remi must decide if she wants to keep living in the past or embrace the future and open herself to a new chance at love. Along the way she navigates her grief and professional ambition with the support of her two best friends, her chubby dog Fitz, and her meddling mother.

The book reads more like a journey through the other side of grief than a romance novel, but it doesn’t feel heavy. The cute dynamic between Remi and her two best friends offsets the sadness with lighthearted and funny moments. While the romance is there, it builds very slowly and gently. It didn’t blow me away but it was entertaining enough.

Thank you to the publisher Montlake and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Buy Life Derailed from Bookshop.org

The Five Types of Wealth, Sahil Bloom

The author is a content creator and entrepreneur whose content first caught my eye on LinkedIn. His book posits that when we measure our life solely by financial wealth, we are using the wrong marker to keep score. Ultimately there are five types of wealth: time, social, mental, physical, and financial wealth. 

The book does not feel particularly fresh. The author repackages and summarizes common ideas and practical tips about fulfillment in a way that would make it easy for someone new to exploring this corner of self help to digest. It might be an interesting book for a new college grad or someone early in life looking to get on the right path from the start.

I feel that the author comes at these concepts from a place of privilege. A broader lens of people’s lifestyles and socioeconomic situations would add dimension to his argument and perhaps surface some more original ideas.

Buy The Five Types of Wealth from Bookshop.org

Before We Say Goodbye, Boo Walker

Before We Say Goodbye tells the story of the life and love of straight-laced, idealistic Otis and free-spirited hippie Rebecca, who meet as teenagers on a bus to Woodstock and fall hard for each other. Throughout the book Otis reflects on the life and family they build together in Sonoma as he blindly pursues his ambition to become a world-renowned winemaker. I was not familiar with Boo Walker’s Red Mountain series but apparently Otis is a main character in these novels and Before We Say Goodbye is his origin story. 

I read this as an ARC and will publish a longer review at pub date. For now, I can say that was my first Boo Walker book but it won’t be my last!

Thank you to Lake Union publishing and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Before We Say Goodbye will be published on September 16, 2025. Pre-order a copy from Bookshop.org

The Restoration Garden, Sara Blaydes

After a personal tragedy, landscape architect and garden restorer Julia Esdaile takes a job restoring the decrepit gardens of Havenworth Manor, an English country estate, to their 1940s magnificence. The elderly lady of the manor, Margaret Clarke, mysteriously demands that the restored gardens must look exactly as they did when she was a child at Havenworth in the early days of World War II. With Margaret reluctant to revisit her memories of the gardens and no historical garden plans or photos to work from, Julia must do her own sleuthing to unearth the garden’s history, inadvertently encountering a painful family mystery haunting Margaret. 

This book is told in a dual timeline, with Julia’s present day story and Margaret’s sister Irene’s story set in 1940. This is the kind of book that made me ignore most of my personal responsibilities while reading it because I didn’t want to put it down. It will be published in November and I can’t wait to post a complete review then. 

Thank you to Lake Union publishing and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The Restoration Garden will be published on November 1, 2025. Pre-order a copy from Bookshop.org

The Three Lives of Cate Kay, Kate Fagan

Bestselling author Cate Kay has spent her life hiding from a shocking decision and taking on different names for different stages of her life. After achieving massive success with her dystopian fiction trilogy, she decides to publish a memoir and come clean about every detail of her past, with the help of several people from her past. The Three Lives of Cate Kay is said fictional memoir. 

The book tells the story of Cate’s journey through a lot of different characters whose voices all sound the same, so it became hard to differentiate them in my mind. There is some queer romance, miscommunication tropes, and a sweet high school friendship. The resolution happens quickly and off page so I felt a bit dissatisfied after reading it. 

Buy The Three Lives of Cate Kay at Bookshop.org

The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits, Jennifer Weiner

Sisters Zoe and Cassie are complete opposites, united by their love of music. Zoe craves the spotlight and dreams of becoming a world-famous pop star. Cassie is a painfully shy, overweight musical prodigy. The combination of Zoe’s ambition and Cassie’s talent catapults them to pop musical stardom as the Griffin Sisters for just a year, until tragedy forces their band to break up. Now, in 2024, the sisters are estranged, Cassie is living off the grid in Alaska, and Zoe is a suburban New Jersey housewife with a teenage daughter who’s inherited her drive and Cassie’s musical gifts. As Zoe’s daughter Cherry pursues her own musical dreams, the truth behind the sisters’ rift emerges.

The book explores themes of sisterhood, motherhood, family bonds, the courage to pursue your dreams, the price of fame, and forgiveness. Written in seven parts that alternate between Zoe and Cassie in 2003 and 2024 and Zoe’s daughter Cherry in 2024, it’s entertaining enough that I finished it in a weekend. Read my full review.

Buy The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits at Bookshop.org

Stop All the Clocks, Noah Kumin

In the cerebral literary thriller Stop All the Clocks, Mona Veigh is a brilliant technologist and poetry scholar who created an AI program, named Hildegard, that she has trained to recognize and write poetry. After the mysterious death of her colleague Avram Parr, whose company acquired Hildegard, Mona has renounced technology and isolated herself on Roosevelt Island. When Mona starts to suspect there might be more to Parr’s death than meets the eye, she reenters society and embarks on a quest to discover the truth. 

The narrative shifts between a page-turning mystery and abstract philosophical musings on poetry, language, technology, and humanity. It’s a thought provoking and original story, but at times dense and difficult to interpret, so it didn’t always land for me. Stop All the Clocks will be published on June 3 – come back to read my full review then!

Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Buy Stop All the Clocks at Bookshop.org

Room 706, Ellie Levenson

Room 706 was one of my favorite books that I read this month and I’m excited to share more of my thoughts when it gets published in January 2026. The premise is really compelling: married, unfulfilled, middle-aged mother Kate gets trapped in a London hotel room with her lover when terrorists take the hotel hostage. Stuck in the room with nothing to do but think and fear for her life, she is forced to turn within and examine her life, her choices, and her feelings about it. The tension created by the raw emotions that her memories surface, alongside the terror of her situation, is excruciating. You’ll definitely want to pick this one up when it is published. 

Thank you to the publisher Zando and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Room 706 will be published on January 20, 2026. Pre-order your copy at Bookshop.org

Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson

Run for the Hills is a story about family – specifically, about a group of half-siblings driving across the country to track down the father who abandoned each of them and their different mothers. As expected, they build relationships with each other, reflect on how their father and his abandonment impacted their lives, and try to heal from their emotional baggage. 

The book is billed as a zany, adventurous road trip. This is my first Kevin Wilson book, but from reading reviews of Run for the Hills I understand that his other books are zanier than this one. I feel that he played it a bit safe in this book. There could have been so much emotional tension, drama and character transformation, but it felt a bit flat to me. In the hands of a quirky director it would probably make for a fun movie. It’s an entertaining, quick read, but doesn’t offer much emotional payoff.

Buy Run for the Hills from Bookshop.org