If you’ve ever found yourself holding gratitude and disappointment at the same time, maybe this is for you. open.substack.com/pub/elicitin... #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #PersonalEssay #Parenting #Motherhood

The summer that didn’t exist

If your kids, like mine, go back to school when it’s still hotter than the devil’s undercarriage, then happy first day of school! As my youngest said when she popped her head up after a wave knocked h...

open.substack.com

This book is for you if you: love bad-ass women, revenge plot, love stories, dual timeline, WWII fiction, stories that flip trad gender norms, fictional accounts of real people #booksky elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/code-name-... subscribe for recs to your inbox (can’t trust the algorithms!)

Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon

This book might be for you if you love books about bad-ass women, a revenge plot, and/or love stories; enjoy Kate Quinn, Kristin Harmel, Kelly Rimmer, or Georgia Hunter; enjoy dual timeline; are inter...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

💪🏼 vigilante justice ⚖️ moral complexity ❤️‍🩹 cathartic end 🤣 hard topics balanced with warmth and humor 🧠 ND MC ❤️ mental health rep 🌎 pro-immigrant 👧🏽 precocious preschooler 🤝 friendship & found family 💔 grief 🧭 set in the American South #questpit #Q #A #WF #U #T #AnQuerying

Sarah Berke@sarahjberke.bsky.social · last mo.

How do broken people become family? Neurodivergent, intimacy averse private investigator + compulsively kind paramedic + undocumented mother + precocious three-year-old 🫀 centering moral duty, friendship, and emotional reckoning #questpit #Q #A #WF #U #T

How do broken people become family? Neurodivergent, intimacy averse private investigator + compulsively kind paramedic + undocumented mother + precocious three-year-old 🫀 centering moral duty, friendship, and emotional reckoning #questpit #Q #A #WF #U #T

How do broken people become family? Neurodivergent, intimacy averse private investigator + compulsively kind paramedic + undocumented mother + precocious three-year-old 🫀 centering moral duty, friendship, and emotional reckoning #questpit #Q #A #WF #U #T

What do you do when you don’t love parts of yourself? On a tough time in my marriage, going to couples therapy, self-reflection, and having the courage to shape yourself into someone you truly like. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/when-you-d... #PersonalEssay #CreativeNonfiction #WritingCommunity

When you don’t love your insides

We’re all works in progress. On marriage, therapy, self-reflection, and the courage to shape yourself into someone you truly like.

elicitingesperance.substack.com

I’m Sarah! Reader, writer, recommender of books. I’d love it if you’d follow me, but the algorithms can be fickle so I’m launching a book recs list. Real-time to your inbox. I’d love you to subscribe! elicitingesperance.substack.com/subscribe #BookSky #BookRecommendations #AmReading #Substack 💙📚

“While it’s hard to get good, you know what’s even harder? Not living on purpose…Living with yourself when you have deferred your own desires for everyone else’s goals.” open.spotify.com/episode/71Zc... #create #writingcommunity #liveonpurpose

144. Now is how

The Career Novelist™ Podcast With Camille Pagán · Episode

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I picked this up expecting something fun and relatively uncomplicated—I was ready for swoony and sweet, maybe (hopefully!) a little spicy. What I didn’t expect was how every emotional beat is earned. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/love-and-o... #BookReview #RomanceReads #ChristinaLauren #Booksky

Love & Other Words by Christina Lauren

I picked this one up expecting something fun and relatively uncomplicated. A second-chance romance, high school sweethearts, a coffeeshop reunion. I was ready for swoony and sweet, maybe (hopefully!) ...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

A queer mountain lion observes the human condition with a closeness that hits harder because they don't understand what they're seeing. Strange, heartbreaking, thought provoking.  elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/open-throat #BookReview #LiteraryFiction #OpenThroat #HenryHoke #Booksky #Fiction

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

Open Throat by Henry Hoke is about a mountain lion narrating their own displacement through LA. The lion observes the human condition—cell phones, climate change, unhoused neighbors—with a closeness ...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

A moving story about ambition, sacrifice, motherhood, and the people who help us become who we're meant to be. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/spectacula... #SpectacularThings #BookSky #BookReview #FamilySaga #Sisterhood #LiteraryFiction #ReadingCommunity #WomenInLiterature #BookRecommendation

Spectacular Things by Beck Dorey-Stein

Spectacular Things is a moving, character-driven story about ambition, sacrifice, motherhood, and the people who help us become who we're meant to be. As a mom of daughters, Mia and Cricket's relation...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

You can check out my full review here (and please do!!!) but I found this novel deeply affecting, a gorgeous commentary on motherhood—it’s meanings, how we fail mothers, and how mothers can save each other. open.substack.com/pub/elicitin... #BookSky #BookReview #LiteraryFiction #ReadingCommunity

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

This story follows three teenagers who are mothers, or soon will be. The three POV characters—Simone, Adela, and Emory—are part of a tight knit found family started and led by Simone and known as the ...

open.substack.com

The choices we make—the empathy we show kids, the ways we encourage them to use their voice and think critically, the messages we give them—are forming the foundation for how they interact with the world now. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/wonder #Booksky #WonderBook #ChooseKind

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

Auggie Pullman is just a regular kid the summer before fifth grade…except he’s always been homeschooled because of a combination of rare genetic disorders that’s left his face severely deformed. But h...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

It’s hard to explain this book in a way that will do it justice. It’s a deeply intimate experiencing of something most of us have been through: young, fervent, all consuming love. #Booksky #LilyKing #HeartTheLover #LiteraryFiction #FiveStarRead elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/heart-the-...

Heart the Lover by Lily King

The narrator of Heart the Lover, nicknamed Jordan throughout, meets two boys and best friends her senior year of college. She joins their world fully and passionately, falling in love with both, but i...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

This book is a reminder of what’s most important, a testament to the power of vulnerability, and a work of art spun beautifully. It’s heartbreaking—achingly so—but also letter by letter paints a portrait of what it really means to live. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/the-corres...

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp writes letters—to her brother, to her daughter, to her best friend, to neighbors, to two men vying for her romantic attention, to literary idols, to enemies, to strangers. For her, a...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is about June Elbus, a fourteen-year-old-girl in the late 80s whose uncle—and best friend, confidante, and first love—dies of AIDS. It rocks June to her core, but his slow death also triggers other fractures in her family. elicitingesperance.substack.com/p/tell-the-w...

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is about June Elbus, a fourteen-year-old-girl in the late 80s whose uncle—and best friend, confidante, and first love—dies of AIDS. It rocks June to her core, but his slow dea...

elicitingesperance.substack.com

The God of the Woods x How to Read a Book Meet the characters…Harriett and Sawyer. bsky.app/profile/sara... #QuestPit #Q #A #T #WF #U #AgentGuide

Sarah Berke@sarahjberke.bsky.social · 4mo ago

YOU HAVE TO HANG ON 💪🏼 vigilante justice ⚖️ moral complexity 👫 cathartic end 🤣 hard topics with warmth and humor 🧠 ND MC ❤️ mental health 🌎 pro-immigrant 👧🏽 precocious preschooler 🤝 found family 💔 grief 🤫 past secrets 👩🏼‍💻prof dev edit #QuestPit #Q #A #T #WF #U #AgentGuide bsky.app/profile/sara...

HEART PRINCIPLE + KENNEDY RYAN Daisy and James both sell fantasies for a living. Sex worker, actor; their jobs aren't that different. They’re supposed to have a business arrangement—the illusion of love in exchange for money—but it turns out a heart costs nothing at all. #QuestPit #Q #A #R #U

A 29-year-old woman begins a prestigious nutrition internship at the hospital where her birth mother died, determined to prove she belongs—until she discovers there’s no record her mother was ever there, unraveling the story she’s built her life around. #Q #Querying #U #upmarket #A #Questpit

He says he made her. She says she loves him. GOOD GIRL is a literary novel told as a chat log between a middle-aged author and a college freshman building a relationship that destroys them both. One of them may not be real. MY DARK VANESSA × ANNIE BOT #questpit #Q #A #LF #U

A barn owner who survives by enduring. A trauma surgeon who survives by controlling. A horse kick, an ER meet-cute, and the slow-burn kind of love that doesn’t fix grief, but gives it somewhere to rest. #questpit #Q #A #R #U #WF #litagentsguide

THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING | Upmarket | 80K #QuestPit Closeted YouTuber Dani G is *this close* to being a real pop star, so she is willing to smile and sing while her life falls apart—until she meets a girl who shows her what the world looks like on the other side of performance. #Q #A #U #LGBTQ

When years of unearthed family secrets erupt into murder, two sisters with a decade long feud must rebuild their fractured relationship in order to cover it up, or risk a life behind bars and losing the one thing they were certain they didn’t need – each other. #questpit #q #u #wf #t

LILY KING X NOAH KAHAN She is using solitude as a coping mechanism & he relies on emotional unavailability and moral injury to survive. PICTURE US, FALLING is not about being saved, but about being seen, & the brutal, beautiful act of loving while breaking. #questpit #Q #A #U #LF #amquerying

Actively querying my debut novel SHE CAME BY IT HONESTLY, a multi-generational story of mothers and daughters and the corrosive power of family secrets. #questpit #Q #U #WF

When a designer drug that lets the rich edit memories sweeps through a coastal state split between luxury and neglect the poor become its testing ground. #questpit #t #u #d

YOU HAVE TO HANG ON 💪🏼 vigilante justice ⚖️ moral complexity 👫 cathartic end 🤣 hard topics with warmth and humor 🧠 ND MC ❤️ mental health 🌎 pro-immigrant 👧🏽 precocious preschooler 🤝 found family 💔 grief 🤫 past secrets 👩🏼‍💻prof dev edit #QuestPit #Q #A #T #WF #U #AgentGuide bsky.app/profile/sara...

Sarah Berke@sarahjberke.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The God of the Woods x How to Read a Book #QuestPit #Q #A #T #WF #U #AgentGuide An intimacy-averse private investigator and a paramedic who saves everyone but himself are the only people willing to help an undocumented mother protect her daughter from the girl’s wealthy American father. (1/3)

🎭DEAR WENDY x MY FAIR BRADY🎭 #QuestPit #Q #YA When Sofia is cast as the romantic lead of her senior musical with her toxic, cheating ex-boyfriend, she enlists the help of skeptical aroace sound tech, June, to help her "fall out of love" with him, move on for good and become the star of her own show

Bone HousesXHouse of Hollow A delicate bloom holds a secret & threatens peace when Luna’s father vanishes into The Orade. She & Treasure search for him, but cruel sectors & a magic-plague force her to face untamed powers & a hard choice: save him, save Treasure, or lose herself. #QuestPit #Q #YA #F

Just for the Summer x Things You Save in a Fire An overburdened, chronically ill daughter fights to keep her party girl mother in assisted living without losing her health and sanity in the process. 75k contemporary women’s fiction with romantic subplot Dual POV #Q #A #WF #QuestPit