2 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read December 2024

We Came Here to Forget by Andrea Dunlop  I want to know more. I know that this author has a podcast called Nobody Should Believe Me. She talks about Munchausen by Proxy and how it impacts people other than the patient involved. Her sister is a Munchausen by Proxy mom, and it has torn her family apart.  And this book was about that.  Katie is a champion skier who is on a sabbatical in Buenos Aires, where she meets a group of other ex-pats and hangs out with them.  She doesn’t tell them her real name or what brought her to Buenos Aires, because her real name is tied with the very public court case against her sister.  Her sister was accused and acquitted of killing her own toddler daughter with excessive medical treatments. Her sister was very public about her daughter’s illnesses online and sought attention for those illnesses. Then the daughter died and everyone figured out that the sister had a lot to do with it.  Turns out all the ex-pats she met were also fleeing some traumatic thing that happened in their lives. In the end they all came clean and started to heal. Very good book, and I know a lot of it is based in reality.
 

The Perfect Family by Robyn Harding  This one was super interesting. There’s this family living in a wealthy neighborhood and their house starts getting vandalized. First it’s kid stuff, eggs thrown at the door and stuff like that.  Then it escalates into worse things that are dangerous. And they can’t figure out who is doing it.  The reason why they can’t figure it out is because each member of the family of 4 has a secret they’re keeping from everyone else. So everyone in the family thinks it’s their secret that is causing the problems, and they all have to keep their own secrets so nobody finds out and they’re all trying to stop the danger that faces the family. Very well done, I was riveted the whole time.