The January 2024 Celebrity Book Club Spoilers to Enjoy Now

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

January 2024 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

Evie Porter knows the rules for survival: the first lie wins. Her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, will first send her a name and then a location. She gets one piece of information at a time and is never sure what the end game is. She knows that she owes Mr. Smithe everything.

This time, her mark is Ryan Summer. But she is starting to feel like there might be something real with him. But, she cannot make any more mistakes. She is already on thin ice because of how she screwed up her last job. Soon, she is following twisted pathway and is not sure who to trust. Can she even trust herself?

Why I Love It: This is unlike any thriller I have read. It is not a murder mystery thriller, but rather a fast-paced, secret-identity thriller where you will feel like you are one step behind the entire book. I listened to this on a road trip with my husband he loved it as much as I did. #gifted

The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

January 2024 Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

This is a book like Where the Crawdads Sing in the sense that it’s focused on the inhabitants of the swamp lands of a rural community. But “Herself” is an herbalist who has cured local women for generations.

Her daughters though, are each as different from her as from each other. But her granddaughter, Donkey, is more like “Herself” – with her deep understanding of swamp life and the healing power of herbs. But Donkey, like her mother and Aunts before her, also wants a life outside the swamp. And more specifically, she wants a father.

Why We Like it: This family saga kept us intrigued with the constant unveiling of secrets, and the swamp was a character of its own. Yet the writing, while beautiful, seemed to drag in places and some of the events were too imaginative to be believed.

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan

January 2024 Good Morning America Book Club Pick

A spellbinding, sweeping novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth….

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

October 2023 Oprah Book Club Pick

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
 
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages. MORE