NetGalley Extras

  

 Every once in a while, I'll take advantage of tools provided by NetGalley for books that have been or are available for review on the platform, or to help reviewers keep track of not only their reading but their lives. 

It would be hard to write a whole review on a book club guide or a reading journal, but I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight how NetGalley makes reviewing there fun.

1.     Book club kit for Christina Lauren’s Tangled Up in You.   I didn’t get approved to read this book, despite being a devoted Christina Lauren Fan, but I did get the book club kit, which frankly made me want to read it even more.  With everything from discussion questions to recipes, it makes the whole leading a book club thing easy.

2.     Net Galley Reading Journal. I love the idea, but this was too labor intensive and …analog?.. to be of much use for me.  I think most reviewers take the time it would require to enjoy this journal as it should be enjoyed, to read and review.  If I were starting over and looking for a way to be organized, this would be much more helpful.

3 NetGalley’s Book Advocate TookKit.  Another great assistant to keep organized and answer questions like “how to improve your review percentage” …the inspiration for this post!

The Near and Dstant World by Bianca Stone

 

How an author can take mere words and turn them into such a collection to touch the inner consciousness of anyone who picks up their work always surprises and astounds me. Make that author a poet, condensing it all into a few stanzas and collecting them into a book, and you have The Near and Distant World by Bianca Stone. Though she says A metaphor no longer holds like it used to in Old Bio in Snow, I have to disagree. She’s found metaphors that hold.

The Near and Distant World was released January 13, 2026. Thanks to NetGalley, and the publisher, Zando/Tin House, for the review copy.

Buzz Books Spring Summer 2026

I always look forward to reading Publisher’s lunch Buzz Book publications because it gives me a sneak peek at what I want to read in the coming year.  I experienced my first Buzz Books panel live at Book Expo in New York way back in 2005 and have considered some of the books highlighted in Buzz Books to be must reads.

 

Buzz Books 2026 continues the tradition. I’m excited by the fiction and debut offerings particularly.  For example, Maria Semple’s excerpt of Go Gentle, (Putnam) promises a story as fascinating as Bernadette, and I’m eager to see what happens to the bereaved daughter and her inheritance of Molly in Jan Saenz’s debut, 200 Monas. 

I’ll be sure to let you know what I think! Thanks to NetGalley and Publisher’s Marketplace for the advance copy!

The End of Romance by Lily Meyer

Silvie Broder decides, based on her life experiences, to write her dissertation in philosophy on the theory that any public or public inspired performance of relationships or sexuality--any romance—at once kept women from flourishing and corroded true love. Men were fine as sex partners or friends, but not both together.

She then spends the novel quoting and studying philosophers, while telling us her theories and living the opposite. It seemed to me that what the author was trying to say had more to do with the distribution of power in relationships, but her character can’t seem to handle any of it.

I didn’t ever like Silvie, but she has some fun boyfriends!

 

There are some unique ideas and interesting writing in the book, but it seemed to me not quite there. Not only didn’t Silvie (or her reader) quite buy her own philosophy, she made the mistake of all philosophy professors, in my experience, and make the whole higher level of thinking idea boring. The end of the End of Romance couldn’t come fast enough.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Viking/ Penguin Random House, for the opportunity to read this advanced copy. It will be released February 3, 2026.

 

 

 

Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews

 

Maeve and Therese are sisters who’ve drifted apart. Maeve is a college professor, happy to remain in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia and Therese is an actress, who isn’t exactly homeless, but drifts from job to job and man to man as she pleases.  When their mother dies, the girls inherit the estate, which includes a recently mortgaged house, a coffee can, filled with cash, and a portrait of Lady Geraldine Rossington, an English aristocrat by an old master. The painting holds great value if it can be authenticated.

As neither of the sisters are employed at present, they decide to honor their mother’s wish to trace their roots in Ireland, in hopes of authenticating the portrait.

It’s a great adventure for Maeve and Therese, and the reader.  Charming villages, beautiful scenery, irascible characters and of course, handsome Irishmen make the quest delightful and the mystery hard to put down. Road Trip will be released June 2, 2026, by St Martin’s press. Thanks to them and NetGalley for the review copy.

The Midwest Lawyer (audio) by Peter Kirkland

First in a new series featuring attorney Maggie Gallagher, a former Chicago prosecutor who has returned to her “safer” mid-west hometown of Kerry (fictional) Ohio, in order to spend more time with her family.  As a lawyer who has grown up and practiced in the Mid-west, I had to suspend a lot of disbelief for the telling of this story, including the law and the setting. While Kirkland’s story was well written, I found it to be a bit generic in setting and unreasonably simplistic in its understanding and portrayal of the law and small-town life.

Maggie happens to see emergency vehicles at a childhood friends’ home while out on a run and stops by.  There has been a shooting.  Ultimately, her friend is charged with a crime connected to it, and ballistics tests show the gun involved is one used in an unrelated, and unsolved, murder a year and a half earlier. 

Of course, her friend is charged with murder and the case speeds to trial. The rest of the book is basically narrative of the trial, and for me, it was about as accurate as any crime drama.

I listened to this book on audio and found the narrator a bit much.  She made Maggie sound like she was always the victim, and my experience with women lawyers, especially in the criminal field, is that there may be attempts to victimize them, but those attempts do not define a mindset.

Other than a couple of backyard barbecues, I found nothing that marked this book as a Midwest representative.  I think it could have stood a little more research.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Relay Publishing for the review copy. The Midwest Lawyer was published on November 21, 2025.