Elin, Mariella and Grace, who are now in their 50s, met when they were students together at the University of Wisconsin. As they got older and had daughters who were roughly the same age, they invited Jamie --- the one-time nanny of Elin’s daughter, Brigid --- into their friend group.

Now those daughters are all grown, and the friends long for opportunities to bring the old gang back together again. Hence the Mother-Daughter Book Club is born. As Elin notes, “Like most book clubs, we spend about 5 percent of our time talking about actual books; the other 95 percent is taken up by talk of jobs, family, and gossip. The stuff of life. But books are our inspiration.”

"If readers aren’t in THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOOK CLUB for the literature recommendations, they’ll likely be drawn in by the women’s personal and collective journeys of self-discovery over the course of these few transformative days."

THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOOK CLUB by Susan Patterson and James Patterson is a follow-up to their 2023 novel, THINGS I WISH I TOLD MY MOTHER, which they wrote with Susan DiLallo. It opens with the group’s first official in-person meeting, at picturesque Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. What starts out as a pleasant, relaxing long weekend, with plans brewing to make their reunion a regular event, soon goes off the rails when a confessional “Night of Secrets” culminates in a tragedy. As a result, the group scatters, only to be reunited three years later --- some of them under duress --- on the shores of Lake Como in Italy, where opera singer Mariella and her husband have a home.

Mariella serves up more than a little comic relief along with the amazing spreads of Italian food her husband prepares. Her anxieties about ensuring that the group take full advantage of every moment they have together create both tension and humor. Speaking of tension, Jamie’s twin daughters, the once-inseparable Meg and Kathleen, are barely speaking to one another. Meanwhile, Jamie and Brigid have cooked up some kind of plan, only to be unveiled at this year’s Night of Secrets, on their final night in Italy. But these women are not the only ones harboring secrets. Their few short days together are more than enough time for spats, confessions and perhaps even a love affair with a handsome boat captain --- plus maybe discussions of a book or two.

The four “mothers” in the book club, along with their five daughters, take turns narrating chapters. At times, the sheer number of first-person narrators can make it challenging to keep characters and relationships straight. This might account for the authors’ decision to include not only the speaker’s name but also her family associations --- for example, “Elin (mother of Brigid)” --- at the start of each chapter. As the quote at the start of this review probably makes clear, there’s relatively little book talk in these pages --- certainly many novel titles are name-checked, though few are discussed in any depth --- but perhaps the characters’ enthusiasm is enough to entice readers to learn more on their own and plump up their TBR lists.

If readers aren’t in THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOOK CLUB for the literature recommendations, they’ll likely be drawn in by the women’s personal and collective journeys of self-discovery over the course of these few transformative days. It’s a testament to the lifeblood of long friendships, the kind that can weather time and distance.