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Club Calvi's Top 3 FicPicks for March explore the fallout from family secrets, revenge and redemption, and life after a national tragedy. Now you can select which FicPick the club will read next.
"Lafe Effect" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney is about families changed forever when married neighbors have an affair, and their children feel the fallout for decades.
"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden explores the aftermath of trauma for three women after the man who abused them when they were children is murdered.
"All the World Can Hold" by Jung Yun is about passengers on a cruise just after 9/11, their regrets and hopes for second chances.
You can read excerpts and vote on the books below. Voting closes Sunday, March 5 at 6 p.m.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"Lake Effect" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
From the publisher: It's 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara's world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.
Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney lives in New York City.
"Lake Effect" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (ThriftBooks) $23
"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden
From the publisher: Birdie Chang didn't know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She's a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend's eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who's now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution and plan for revenge.
But Birdie isn't the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There's also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book's spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin's loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.
Calvin's death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers.
T Kira Madden lives in Hudson Valley, New York.
"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden (ThriftBooks) $23
"All the World Can Hold" by Jung Yun
From the publisher: It's Sunday, September 16, 2001. Franny and her husband have traded in their elegant Park Avenue co-op for a suite on board the Sonata, a once-glittering cruise ship with a complicated history now long past its prime. Though they're not "cruise people," Franny is determined to host the trip as planned because it's her mother's seventieth birthday, or chilsun, a major rite of passage celebrated by Korean families. But as her husband keeps pointing out, Franny and her mother aren't close, and it is surreal—even wrong—to be on a cruise as the death toll from the attacks on 9/11 continues to rise.
Also on board is Doug, an aging actor and former star of Starlight Voyages, the hit Love Boat–style television series famously filmed on the Sonata. With few professional prospects, a now sober Doug has reluctantly joined his former castmates on a reunion cruise for fans of the show, but he dreads the dark specter of his past misdeeds. Meanwhile, Lucy, the only Black female graduate student in her department at MIT, has uncharacteristically accepted an invitation to join her roommate on the cruise during the height of recruitment season. Lucy's impulsive decision reflects her growing ambivalence about the tech companies that are trying to hire her, including a new one with a strange-sounding name, Google.
Jung Yun lives in Baltimore.
"All the World Can Hold" by Jung Yun (ThriftBooks) $23
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Excerpt: "Lake Effect" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Clara moved to New York City weeks after Bridie left for college. The sister of a friend needed a roommate in her small apartment on far West Ninety-Fourth Street. Fiona's place was tiny but efficiently organized and had a certain charm even though Clara could only fit a twin bed in the room off the kitchen that at one time, before this previously grander home had been cut up into smaller apartments, had housed the family maid and, apparently, generations of mice based on the abundance of steel wool stuffed into every crevice in and around the floorboards and radiators. In addition to the kitchen and Clara's closet-sized bedroom, there was a decent living room that faced Riverside Drive and got plenty of light through three nicely spaced windows. Fiona's bedroom was big enough for a queen-sized bed and the custom shelves she'd had built to house her photography equipment, but she paid a much larger portion of the rent, so Clara felt like she'd lucked into a deal.
The only job offered to her when she arrived in town was at an Irish pub on Second Avenue in Midtown. She worked weekends, including the dreaded bottomless-mimosa Sunday brunch, which was its own circle of hell because when she wasn't ferrying endless plates of eggs Benedict and French toast and traditional Irish breakfast, she had to sprint around the room double-fisted, a carafe of orange juice in one hand and a bottle of cheap champagne in the other. By the end of brunch, everyone was too drunk to pay the check properly, much less tip. One weekend she walked into the bathroom as one of two regulars had dropped their pants to show the other how her pubic hair had been shaved into the shape of a shamrock for Saint Patrick's Day. "Wow," Clara said, stunned as the woman cheerfully displayed her pubis to the entire room. "A surprise for the boyfriend," the woman cackled.
And then, after lucking into her apartment, Clara lucked into a career.
"Can you cook?" Fiona said one morning. "My sister said you can cook."
"I can cook," Clara said, not very enthusiastically. Since landing in New York, she had not missed cooking one bit, did not miss feeding a household, but anything had to be better than roaming the floor of Molly Malloy's covered in orange pulp and J. Roget Brut.
"Do you want to help on this shoot today? My food stylist's assistant called in sick. You just need to do whatever Joy tells you to do and know your way around food. Pay's not terrible."
"I can do that," Clara said.
A bit of bad luck for the sick assistant—a case of mono that wouldn't quit—was spectacularly good luck for Clara because by the time the former assistant was ready to return, Joy only wanted to work with Clara. Clara had a knack for food styling, and she liked it. She enjoyed preparing food purely for how it might look on a plate with no regard for consumption. She liked viewing a whiteboard rendering of a roast chicken and figuring out how to make it look like a thing someone would want to eat even though her efforts—an undercooked bird painted with a browning mixture of bitters and Kitchen Bouquet, a little food coloring and dishwashing liquid—would render the thing inedible. She liked the slant, the trickery, and it appealed to her perfectionism. After a couple of years learning all she could from Joy, she decided to do a certificate course at a small culinary joint in lower Manhattan. "You don't need to go to culinary school to be a food stylist," Joy told her, "but your knife skills could use some work, and if you're in this for the long haul you want to get better at recipe development. It wouldn't be a terrible idea to work in a restaurant kitchen for a bit."
Clara loved the culinary program so much she considered doing a full-fledged degree at CIA up the river, but it was prohibitively expensive, and she refused to take any of her mother's money because it was Finn's money. Clara was still furious that Bridie had allowed Finn to pay her full tuition at Cornell. She tried not to think too often about the day she'd visited Bridie on campus, only weeks after Nina and Sam had dropped her off. Clara had wanted to take Bridie to college herself, but the parents won that round. Sam and Nina were not exactly friendly, but they had reached a certain accommodation in coparenting that Clara resented. Her high school graduation weekend had been an awkward nightmare, starting with the senior talent show the night before commencement, when Clara had chosen, against Mr. Goodman's advice, to accompany herself on the guitar she was just learning how to play while singing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" Only a few chords in, Clara lost her place and had to restart, and she could hear how shaky her normally steady voice sounded. She soldiered on through the audience's scattered coughs and uneasy silence and the sudden exit of Dune, who stood and stormed out through the swinging lobby doors as she reached the chorus.
By the following year, when Fern and Bridie graduated, the families were willing to sit in adjacent rows in the Eastman Theatre, calmly and, Clara thought, smugly. At least Dune hadn't appeared for this graduation. He was staying in South Bend for the summer.
"Probably trying to avoid me," Clara said to Bridie. "I don't think so," Bridie said and then quickly corrected herself. "I mean, maybe!"
On the day Clara pulled up to Bridie's dorm, she couldn't help but imagine herself on campus, walking around in cutoff shorts and some boy's oversized Oxford cloth shirt, waving from the second-floor window of an ivy-covered dormitory, welcoming friends back after the summer. When Bridie showed her the old reading room off the library with its three-storied open walkways of books stretching up to the ceiling, the ornate grillwork on the railings and plush leather chairs and old-fashioned lamps that gave the entire space a warm glow, Clara felt physically ill. She could see herself sitting in one of the chairs by the front doors, reading and looking out the window and feeling like the platonic ideal of a college student. She'd regretted deferring Cornell immediately but hadn't known how to reverse course, and she still— unfairly, she guessed— blamed Sam for not dragging her off to Ithaca.
Copyright © 2026 from Lake Effect by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. Excerpt by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Excerpt: "Whidbey" by T Kira Madden
Note: This excerpt references instances of abuse, including child sex abuse, though it is not rendered in any graphic detail.
I'd been trying not to think about the next hearing in Florida, end of summer. Every year I flew down to renew the order of protection against Calvin, which would soon be expiring again. Trace would be there, as always. My mother would be there, as always. As always, we would stay in the taupe hotel, eat the watery room service, and I would wear the used, pin-striped clothes borrowed from my mom's co-worker Abby, clothes that read responsible, ladylike, trustworthy, ecstatically bland. Early in the morning, we'd drive to the courthouse. The sun would blaze the limestone steps. And once inside, I would repeat the facts, because one has to both submit them and recite them aloud to a room full of strangers: I was nine years old when Calvin Boyer molested me and recorded it on a camcorder, nine years old when my parents pressed charges, ten years old when those charges were dismissed; Boyer, now a habitual felony sex offender, continued to abuse young girls, and some girls, girls like Linzie, were offered action, consequences, reverence; Boyer is mentally unwell; he is in and out of jail, prison, and community control; he once lived under the Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge, and he now resides at Gateway to Grace, a civil commitment treatment program for pedophiles; Boyer has continued to initiate contact, has professed his love, has threatened to find me anywhere, has always, and will always, find me—these facts printed on my flimsy sheet of paper, my body, as always, on the left side of the cold, carpeted room with all the other women (sometimes, a single man) and the stupid video looping on the bulky television that hasn't been updated since the invention of television about spousal abuse, domestic violence, the gifts of intuition, while actors on the TV dramatically play us—the disempowered victims—cowering and screaming, hands over our ears, ducked in a corner of a staged dark living room, always behind a couch, makeup too blue and streaking, and one by one, we approach the judge, a judge who is bored, a judge who sits unmoving and unmoved, thinking about his leftover meat sauce and four p.m. vodka waiting at home, and we wait for our verdict, for any recognition that might faintly change our lives, the only sound our stomachs, all of our stomachs gurgling, squelching with ache and with hunger like a thousand rusted, closing doors, while, on the right side of the room, our abusers sit stunned, drop-jawed, feigning remorse, feigning surprise, desultory stares of I don't know where she got this! Get a load of this one! waiting for the moment it's all over, the papers stamped and handed back, so often No, so often No reasonable person would feel threatened or This threat is not explicit, work it out already! or the alternative: a dull date of time allotted, our names no longer names but serial numbers, the countdown until the next renewal, before the mass of us exit the same courtroom and walk the same halls, which are never divided between perpetrator and victim, they wait until we leave, wait until we're back outside, the sun still striking beautifully those courthouse steps, all twenty-three steps, where the person who wants to kill us might, at last, be free to.
Calvin hadn't shown up last time. The two times before he had, dressed in the same oversized royal blue suit, his face clean-shaven and older, his whole body clutching for his mother, Mary-Beth, a jerky-tanned tiny blonde with puffy veins up her arms, who walked him down the hall, kissed him between the eyes, and said, I believe in you, baby.
Excerpted from Whidbey by T Kira Madden. Copyright © 2026 by T Kira Madden. Reprinted with permission from Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt: "All The World Can Hold" by Jung Yun
Sunday, September 16
DEPART FROM NEW YORK PASSENGER SHIP
TERMINAL, NEW YORK
BLACK FALCON CRUISE TERMINAL, BOSTON
The man from Guest Services is named Jimmy. Jimmy from Indonesia, two seemingly incompatible facts engraved on his brushed satin name tag. Franny is convinced that "Jimmy" isn't his real name. She assumes he shortened it—or the cruise line told him to shorten it—from something long and unpronounceable to something effortless and "American."
Jimmy is all smiles and small talk as he shows them around the suite, opening doors to reveal the bathroom, the closet, the mini fridge, the personal safe, and voilà—he actually says "voilà" as he pulls back a curtain and gestures grandly with his arm—the private balcony.
Their view of the port is unremarkable. The port, in general, is unremarkable. Under the late afternoon clouds, the water appears murky, too dark to hold a reflection of the soot- and algae-stained warehouses on the pier. Franny leans toward the sliding glass door for a better look at a nearby ship, a mega-liner twice the size of their own. She's about to call her husband over when she notices him kneeling in front of the television set on the bureau. He's aiming the remote at it, pressing random combinations of buttons too hard.
"This thing's not broken, is it?" Every channel Tom turns to is black, loud with static, and filled with diagonal snow. "There's no way I can go a whole week without the news."
Jimmy, who had just started telling them about their daily fruit basket delivery, seems slightly wounded by the interruption. "I'm sorry, sir. We're having a problem with the satellite right now." He walks over to their luggage, which the porters brought in before they boarded and arranged on folding metal racks. He gives one of the suitcases a gentle nudge, squaring the edges off against the wall. "It should be fixed very shortly. And every morning, you'll receive a complimentary copy of the Herald Tribune."
"No New York Times or Wall Street Journal?" Tom asks.
"I'm sorry, sir. No."
"Not even the Post?"
"It's the International Herald Tribune," Jimmy says, emphasizing the word "international."
Tom glares at Franny as if she's responsible for the ship's selection of newspapers. Then he sinks into the sofa, crossing his arms over his chest. His stiff khaki shorts ride up indecently, well past midthigh, but he either doesn't notice or care. Three years they've been married, and Franny can count on one hand the number of times she's seen him in shorts. He said his legs were too white to wear them—a strange, circular argument that never made sense until now. It's the last week of summer, and compared to Jimmy, whose evenly tanned skin is the color of gingerbread, Tom looks unseasonably pale.
"Here in this armoire, sir and madam, you'll find your complimentary bathrobes and slippers." Jimmy opens the door to a large closet. A light turns on inside, revealing two plush robes and several plastic bags hanging from a hook. The bags are labeled and require no explanation, but he explains them anyway, noting that laundry, dry cleaning, and shoeshine services all have a guaranteed turnaround time of eight hours or less.
"Muy rápido," he adds.
The sudden switch to Spanish appears to be too much for Tom, who jumps up from his seat. He flips open his wallet, thumbing through his dwindling supply of small bills. Ever since they left the hotel this morning, he's been tipping people left and right—the housekeeper, the bellman, the concierge who called for their taxi, the man at the port who tossed their luggage into some kind of wheelbarrow and then took off running toward the ship. Tom's expression is the same now as it was then—slightly pinched and put out, in a way that suggests he's more inconvenienced by the need to tip than grateful for the service.
"All right, thank you. I think we can figure out the rest from here."
"Yes, thank you so much," Franny adds, brightening the sound of her voice to make up for the coldness of his. "That was very helpful."
The faint indentations on each side of Jimmy's mouth sharpen into creases when he smiles. He bows deeply from the waist as he accepts the twenty-dollar bill from Tom's outstretched hand, palming it with the skill and speed of a magician. They follow him to the door, where Jimmy stops at the threshold and flashes them another smile before offering two final reminders. The first is about the celebratory champagne toast, which will be served poolside right before departure. And the second is to ring him if they need anything—"absolutely anything"—a line he's probably required to repeat to all the passengers in his section of the deck.
Tom turns the lock and dead bolt as soon as Jimmy leaves. "You actually thought that was helpful?" he asks. "Like we've never seen a coffeemaker or a minibar before?"
"I was trying to be polite." She's tempted to say that it can't be easy repeating the same script with such enthusiasm, especially when people aren't listening. "Plus, he was thorough" is all she can manage.
Franny unwinds the silk scarf from her neck and pulls back her long hair, which is still damp with sweat from the rush to board. According to Jimmy, they were among the last passengers to arrive, which wasn't the accident he assumed it to be. There was no snarl of traffic that kept them, no confusion about the recent change of port. Just another argument that stretched on for longer than it should.
"So this is the Royal Ocean Suite," Tom says, in a tone that suggests there's nothing royal about it.
"Suite" probably isn't the right term to describe the cabin, which has a combined sitting room and bedroom, but Franny is relieved by how bright and airy it is, not cramped at all. Whoever designed the space tried to make the most of the light by adding built-ins and furniture in white lacquered wood, upholstered in muted shades of salmon and seafoam. She's glad that Tom insisted on getting a suite and wonders if she should tell him so. If they're going to survive this trip, she needs to find a way to smooth things over, even though the trip—the timing of it, at least—is what he's so upset about. Despite his many protests in recent days, Franny refused to postpone their plans, which left him no choice but to come.
"Celebratory champagne toast," he says. "Did you catch that?"
"It's his job, Tom. He's supposed to tell us about the events."
"Celebratory."
He shakes his head at her. Once again, it feels like an accusation. She worries that he's about to resume the fight that began at the hotel, which was really just a continuation of the same fight they'd been having all week.
"I'm going to the bar," he announces instead.
"What? Now? You're not going to unpack?"
"I can do that whenever."
At least three or four times a month, sometimes more, Tom has to travel for work. He says that having a routine helps him keep his bearings. Whenever he arrives in a new city, he hangs his clothes in the closet to air out the wrinkles. As soon as he returns home, he empties his suitcase and sorts everything into piles, one for the laundry and one for the cleaners. He's not the type of person to live out of a suitcase, or watch TV when he travels, or sit around in some bar.
"But don't you want to . . . Your tux—"
He gives Franny a withering look that warns her not to say another word about his tux, which she brought even though he told her not to. When he found the garment bag discreetly tucked in between their suitcases and carry-ons that morning, he asked if she'd lost her mind. Did she really think he was in any sort of mood to wear black tie and take her dancing?
Franny scans the cabin, searching for something else to talk about, something that will keep them in each other's presence, if only for a little while longer. They'll never resolve this unless they try. She picks up the brochure on the coffee table and flips through its glossy pages, landing on the maps of all the decks.
"So which bar are you going to?" she asks.
"Whichever one has a working TV."
Every set on the ship probably relies on the same satellite signal, which isn't worth pointing out to him. She understands that he just needs something to do.
"Well, let me come with you," she says. She's surprised when he doesn't turn her down.
Excerpted from ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD by Jung Yun. Published by 37Ink/Simon and Schuster, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Jung Yun. All rights reserved.