Whether in Nebraska or New York, you can find women who defy stereotypes.
Cherry Baby Rainbow Rowell (2026) First, the title. Cherry is a plus-sized woman in her thirties who lives in Omaha. Baby is the name of a character that her husband, Tom, invented in a webcomic that went viral and is being made into a movie in Hollywood. Baby bears a remarkable resemblance to Cherry—hence, marital discord. Cherry and Tom separate, planning to divorce, and Cherry starts dating Russ, an old college crush of hers. Will she start a new life with Russ? Will she reunite with Tom? That’s the basic premise of the novel, but there’s much more. The novelist explores many aspects of body positivity, including through explicit sex scenes. The culture of Nebraska versus the culture of California is in the background, as are Cherry’s disagreements with her fundamentalist Christian family. It’s a roller-coaster ride, engaging and witty. (For my review of Rowell’s 2011 novel, Attachments, click here and scroll down.)
Go Gentle Maria Semple (2026) Adora Hazzard is a fiftyish philosopher who specializes in ancient Greek Stoicism, and like a good Stoic, she tries to control her emotional reaction to the uncontrollable events around her. But she is nonetheless a pretty wild woman, getting herself involved in an unexpected romance and in an international art heist. Readers dash around New York City with the manic Adora in novelist Semple’s trademark fashion (exemplified in the 2016 Today Will Be Different, reviewed here). Semple excels in probing parent-child relationships, women’s midlife angst, and the pretentiousness of the ultra-wealthy. The hilarious one-liners in the dialogue come fast and furious in Go Gentle’s first-person narration, which makes sense when we learn, in a lengthy flashback, that Adora was once a Hollywood comedy writer. The title of this novel is a reference to Dylan Thomas’s poem that advises against passive acquiescence to mortality, and Adora certainly doesn’t acquiesce.