6 New Books to Read This Month

1. Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)

A single man in possession of good fortune might be in want of a wife, but the world certainly isn't in want of more Jane Austen adaptations — except for this one, from American Wife and Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld. In her clever reimagining of Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bingley is a former contestant on the ​Bachelor​-like reality show Eligible​, who's moved to Cincinnati for a job at the same hospital where his friend Mr. Darcy (now a neurosurgeon) works. They encounter the Bennet girls, particularly Liz and Jane, who've returned home from New York City to care for their ailing father. 

Fans of Pride and Prejudice will already know how everything turns out, of course, but seeing the brilliant ways Sittenfeld adjusts the plot for our modern, screen-obsessed times is more than enough reason to keep reading. Kitty, Mary, and Lydia, for example, are coddled Millennials who've never had to leave the nest, while Lady Catherine de Bourgh becomes Kathy de Bourgh, a formidable second-wave feminist Liz has to interview for a magazine article. Eagle-eyed Austenites will also appreciate details like Darcy's family home address — 1813 Pemberley Lane — and the way Sittenfeld adapts smaller events from the original novel, like Liz's fevered dash across the mud to rescue Jane from the clutches of Caroline Bingley. Here, Liz is an avid runner stuck at home without a car, so she puts on her sneakers and heads out (in midsummer heat, no less). Whether you've read every book in Austen's oeuvre or are strictly a Bridget Jones's Diary type, Eligible is a romantic and highly addictive addition to the genre.

2. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt (Little, Brown)

Rocket science has long been associated with men — think October Sky, based on Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys — but in Rise of the Rocket Girls, Nathalia Holt shines a light on the women behind the scenes. In the 1940s, the research facility that later became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory hired a team of "human computers," many of whom were women, to do all the calculations necessary for making rockets actually fly. "There is hardly a mission that you can find in NASA that these women haven't touched," Holt told NPR. 

3. Lazaretto by Diane McKinney-Whetstone (HarperCollins)

Beginning just before Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, this historical novel is set in and around Philadelphia's Lazaretto Hospital. When a black woman named Meda gives birth to her white employer's child, the employer asks Sylvia, the midwife's teenage apprentice, to tell Meda that the child has died. Meda begins caring for two orphans in her grief over the lost child, while Sylvia becomes head nurse at the Lazaretto. As time passes and their paths cross again, secrets come out and the Lazaretto becomes ground zero for the drama.  

4. Crush: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush edited by Cathy Alter and Dave Singleton (William Morrow)

In this collection of essays, writers including Roxane Gay, Jodi Picoult, and James Franco get real about falling in love (or at least deep lust) with famous people like Mick Jagger and Jared Leto. Cathy Alter, one of the book's editors, spent her youth pining after Donny Osmond and began writing him love letters at the ripe old age of 6. If your childhood bedroom once housed a shrine to Jonathan Taylor Thomas or you're struggling with a more recent bout of Bieber fever, you'll definitely be able to relate.

5. I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her by Joanna Connors (Atlantic Monthly Press)

In 1984, Joanna Connors was raped at knifepoint while on assignment for a Cleveland newspaper. I Will Find You is her account of what happened afterward — PTSD, dissociation, a crippling fear of just about everything — and how she learned to live with it over the next 30 years. After her rapist died in 2000, she began trying to understand him as something other than a criminal, both through interviews with his siblings and an examination of the socioeconomics of Cleveland.

6. Will You Won't You Want Me? by Nora Zelevansky (St. Martin's Griffin)

Everyone, no matter how popular, eventually has to learn that the real world isn't like high school. That's the conflict at the center of Nora Zelevansky's funny new novel, which follows Marjorie "Madgesty" Plum as she tries to get it together 10 years after her teen peak. With the help of an 11-year-old girl, her boss, her roommate, and a blast-from-the-past crush, Marjorie tries to figure out what she wants for herself now that she's no longer leader of the pack.

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