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| A podcast-style YA mystery, a genre-bending romance, a fast-paced technothriller &
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Read this if: You're on a romance kick (or at least wish you were) Credit: @jasminepics While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory
Jasmine Guillory is back with another tale of lovable characters, relatable conundrums, and a fairytale romance that could warm even the coldest of hearts with her latest book While We Were Dating. After Ben Stephens locks in a huge advertising campaign with a rising Hollywood star named Anna Gardiner, sparks immediately fly between the two of them. It doesn't take long for their harmless flirtation to turn into a little something more, but when Ben and Anna get the opportunity to take their romance in front of the Hollywood spotlight, it comes with a few strings attached.
It's a charming and funny read that you can easily devour in one sitting. What I loved most about the latest installment in Jasmine's rom-com series is that she strayed away from the usual cat-and-mouse games her characters tend to play with each other. This time, Ben and Anna immediately address their attraction, which felt refreshing. Readers are quickly pulled into their lighthearted banter, but it's their open communication and chemistry that keep you truly invested in their love story. I love the little storybook universe Jasmine created with this series and how she manages to connect the old characters with the new! I truly enjoyed this book from beginning to end, and would definitely recommend it. Get your copy now. —Morgan Murrell On the Verge: Imagining Women At Midlife In 14 Movies And Television Shows by Dana Spiotta Credit: Jessica Marx; Knopf When I think of middle-aged women, I think of a number of literary figures, from Chaucer's The Wife of Bath to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Evan S Connell's Mrs. Bridge. More recently, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, with the loss and loneliness that pings through the narrator's consciousness, but also the humor. I think of middle-aged motherhood too: the mother Kiki in Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and the way that book regards the family romance within a specific cultural moment. I think about Doris Lessing's strange book, The Summer Before the Dark. A woman with grown children is bored and has a summer affair. But it ends fast and the book isn't about that as much as about searching for an identity beyond wife and mother. I think of hauntings, like Addie in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, bitterly speaking to her children from beyond the grave, and Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved. So much of the texture of midlife is an internal accounting. But mostly my images of older women, mothers or not, come from movies and tv, vivid depictions of the so-called midlife crisis, female edition. Many show a woman in crisis because she is losing her looks, and thus, her value, like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, or because she has been left by her husband, and she is forced to make a new life, like Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman. When I was imagining my novel Wayward and my midlife protagonist, Sam, I began with her blowing up her life. I didn't want it to be because of an affair, and I didn't want it to be about fading beauty. I didn't even want it to be about how unhappy her marriage is but more of an internal reckoning with her place in the world. She has a comfortable,
1. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977): A magnificent and soulful film in which Gena Rowlands plays Myrtle, an actress who has a dramatic,
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