3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: October 2025

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang  This one was a light read, but man the sex scenes were super hot. Helen’s sister Michelle committed suicide when they were in high school by jumping in front of another student’s car. Of course the parents blame this boy for her daughter’s death. Years later Helen is a successful author and her series is getting made into a TV show. Her relationship with her parents is super strained, of course, as none of them have ever gotten over Michelle’s death. When she goes to the writer’s room in the show she learns that the boy who was driving the car is one of the writers that she has to work with. It’s super awkward at first, neither of them want to talk about the connection they have. But then they start to hang out, and then they start to fall for each other. 

Did You Hear About Kitty Karr by Crystal Smith Paul I loved this one. It was about a black family that is in Hollywood. The mom is an actress, the daughter is also a famous actress. The daughters were left a massive estate by a white actress named Kitty Carr who had died and while she was a close friend of the family nobody really knows why she left this estate to these daughters. The story then splits and tells us about Kitty Carr, who we learn is a light skinned black woman passing as white—to the point where not even her husband knew. I am so fascinated by the concept of passing as white and what it meant at the time and how risky it was to be black passing as white in 1950s and this story dives into how it worked and what it all meant. Absolutely fascinating.

An Honest Lie by Tarryn Fisher This one has it all, an exclusive group of friends in a wealthy neighborhood, a cult, a girls’ trip gone wrong. So, the main character is Rainy. She just moved to Washington state to be with her boyfriend. She joins this group of women because he’s concerned that she needs to be social. But she knows she definitely doesn’t fit in with these women. They invite her on a girls’ trip to Vegas and she doesn’t want to go, but she relents and goes. She has a history in Vegas: when she was a child she and her mom got sucked into a cult and she managed to get out but her mom was murdered by the cult leader. Of course nobody believes that the mom was murdered by the cult. The cult was just outside of Vegas. Then at the end of the trip one of the women starts acting very strangely. She disappears and her texts are super weird. So Rainy has to know figure out where she is and what’s going on. And what’s going on definitely isn’t good.