Here are Bedside Reading’s July 4th Recommended Reads by Jane Ubell-Myer, founder of Bedside Reading.
July 4th is Independence Day! This year, we are celebrating 248 years of Democracy and Independence, and what better way to honor that independence than to choose whatever it is we want to read! You can start doing that right now by selecting one of Bedside Reading’s recommended books below.
Here’s what they’re reading at Southampton Inn…
Elk Love by Lynne Spriggs O’Connor
Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana as part of her doctoral fieldwork in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves there from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her. This is not what Lynne imagined. But her dream of being more connected to nature comes alive when she meets Harrison, a handsome rancher thirteen years her senior. Wary but curious, she leans into the rhythms of Harrison’s hidden valley and opens her heart to a wild language that moves beyond words. In a world where listening is rare, Lynne explores an intimate place where loneliness gives way to wonder, where the natural world speaks of what matters most.
Here’s what they’re reading at Capri Southampton…
All the Summers In Between by Brooke Lea Foster
When wealthy, impulsive summer girl Margot meets hardworking and steady local girl Thea in the summer of 1967, the unlikely pair become fast friends, working alongside one another in a record store and spending every spare moment together. But after an unspeakable incident on one devastating August night, they don’t see one another for ten years…until Margot suddenly reappears in Thea’s life, begging for help and harboring more than one dangerous secret. Thea can’t bring herself to refuse her beloved friend—but she also knows she can’t fully trust her either.
Unfulfilled as a housewife, Thea enjoys the dazzling sense of adventure Margot brings to her life, but will the truth of what happened to them that fateful summer ruin everything? Testing the boundaries of how far she’ll go for a friend, Thea is forced to reckon with her uncertain future while trying to decide if some friends are meant to remain in the past.
Set in the dual timelines of 1967 and 1977, All the Summers In Between is at once a mesmerizing portrait of a complex friendship, a delicious glimpse into a bygone Hamptons, and a powerful coming-of-age for two young women during a transformative era.
Long Time Gone by Charlie Donlea
On the first day of an elite two-year fellowship under the renowned Chief Medical Officer Dr. Livia Cutty, Sloan Hastings receives a research assignment in the emerging field of forensic genealogy. It’s the exciting, rapidly evolving science behind the recent breaks in high-profile cold cases from the Golden State Killer to the Cameron Young murder, and Sloan enthusiastically begins her research by submitting her own DNA to an online genealogy site. Her goal is to better understand the treasure trove of genetic information contained on ancestry websites, but the results she receives are shocking.
Raised by loving, supportive parents, Sloan has always known she was adopted. But her DNA profile suggests her true identity is that of Charlotte Margolis, aka “Baby Charlotte,” who captured the nation’s attention when she and her affluent parents mysteriously vanished in July 1995. Despite a large-scale investigation and months of broad media coverage, there were never any suspects in the family’s disappearance and the case has been cold for decades.
Racing to stay ahead of the media and true crime junkies ravenous to know what really happened to Baby Charlotte, Sloan’s search for answers leads her to Cedar Creek, Nevada, a small town north of Lake Tahoe. There, the Margolis family’s power and influence permeate every corner of the county, and while Sloan’s birth relatives are initially welcoming, they’re also mysterious and tight-lipped. Not everyone seems happy about Sloan’s return, or the questions she’s asking.
The more she learns, the more apparent it becomes that the answers Sloan seeks are buried in a graveyard of Margolis family secrets. And someone will do anything to keep them hidden . . .
Here’s what they’re reading at Baker House 1650…
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.
But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.
Here’s what they’re reading at The 1708 House…
Secrets of Rose Briar Hall by Kelsey James
1908, Long Island: For Millie Turner, the young and beautiful wife of a powerful New York stockbroker, Rose Briar Hall—a gleaming edifice of white marble on the North Shore—is more than a home. Every lavish detail speaks of Charles Turner’s status and wealth, and its stylish interior is testament to Millie’s sophistication. All that’s left is to prove her worthiness to be his bride. What better way than to throw a grand party for New York’s social elite?
After painstaking planning, the night of the event arrives and all is perfection—until Millie wakes to a cold, eerily quiet house, and a gray cloud where her memory should be. Can it be true that she has been in and out of consciousness for weeks, ever since the party took a terrifying turn? Millie recalls nothing. But her friends have shunned her, and it soon becomes clear that if she can’t find out what really happened that night, much more than her reputation will be at risk . . .
As the house that promised so much happiness begins to feel more like a prison, Millie wonders whether a woman alone, even a wealthy one, can ever be entirely safe. And if she succeeds in finding the truth, will it bring relief, or shake her marriage, and her life, to the core?
Here’s what they’re reading at Journey East Hampton…
Take Back Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil
What if every time you had a self-critical thought, you heard it in a man’s voice? The truth is not far off. Living in a patriarchy, women absorb a lifetime of messages that say your worth is defined by your looks, your accomplishments, and how well you take care of everyone around you. In fact, these messages are so pervasive that, even knowing they exist, they still manage to program themselves into our brains. The result is that women end up feeling anxious, guilty, and vaguely ashamed of themselves no matter how much they do for others or achieve for themselves.
So how do we deprogram our thoughts from patriarchy’s corrosive influence? And once we do, how can we create new, self-empowering beliefs?
Master Certified Life Coach and host of the UnF*ck Your Brain podcast Kara Loewentheil knows how. Despite graduating from Harvard Law School and getting her dream job, Kara spent her twenties and thirties feeling insecure and anxious, until she learned how to change her thoughts—which led her to become a coach. In Take Back Your Brain, she draws on cognitive psychology, feminist theory, and years of experience as a neuroplasticity-focused coach to break down how the patriarchy hijacks women’s brains, and how women can get free. To bridge the gap between your inner voice and your true potential, she says, you must begin with your thoughts. By using the skills in this book to literally rewire your brain, you can create new thought patterns that will directly transform outcomes in your life.
Ultimately, Take Back Your Brain invites you to replace the thoughts that no longer serve you and make room for a kind of confidence you never thought possible. Because when women unleash their true power, they awaken new possibilities for the world.
Here’s what they’re reading at Mill House Inn…
A Daughter of Fair Verona by Christina Dodd
Once upon a time a young couple met and fell in love. You probably know that story, and how it ended (hint: badly). Only here’s the thing: That’s not how it ended at all.
Romeo and Juliet are alive and well and the parents of seven kids. I’m the oldest, with the emphasis on ‘old’—a certified spinster at twenty, and happy to stay that way. It’s not easy to keep your taste for romance with parents like mine. Picture it—constant monologues, passionate declarations, fighting, making up, making out . . . it’s exhausting.
Each time they’ve presented me with a betrothal, I’ve set out to find the groom-to-be a more suitable bride. After all, someone sensible needs to stay home and manage this household. But their latest match, Duke Stephano, isn’t so easy to palm off on anyone else. The debaucher has had three previous wives—all of whom met unfortunate ends. Conscience forbids me from consigning another woman to that fate. As it turns out, I don’t have to . . .
At our betrothal ball—where, quite by accident, I meet a beautiful young man who makes me wonder if perhaps there is something to love at first sight—I stumble upon Duke Stephano with a dagger in his chest. But who killed him? His late wives’ families, his relatives, his mistress, his servants—half of Verona had motive. And when everyone around the Duke begins dying, disappearing, or descending into madness, I know I must uncover the killer . . . before death lies on me like an untimely frost.
Here’s what they’re reading at The Maidstone Hotel…
I Got It From Here by Francesca Miracola
Growing up in an Italian American family in Queens, New York, in the ’70s, Francesca Miracola was trained from an early age to keep up appearances at all costs—but behind closed doors, her parents’ toxic marriage served as a blueprint for dysfunction. So when she met Jason Axcel at a bar as a twentysomething, she ignored all the red flags—and there were plenty of them—and dove right in, normalizing his emotional and physical abuse just like she’d learned to do. She even married and had two children with him. But something in her clicked one night when Jason strolled out the door after a vicious fight that left her degraded on the floor, and she decided she was done.
Except Jason wouldn’t let her go.
Even after they finally divorced and Francesca fell in love with someone else, her ex-husband was keen enough to recognize that she was the same broken girl he’d met a decade earlier, and he exploited that fact at every turn. He called the cops to her home with bogus claims; he bombarded her with provoking emails and texts; he stalked her every move; and, worst of all, he used their little boys as pawns in his campaign. Then he went for the jugular and sued her for custody. But Francesca was stronger than he’d given her credit for.