Double Feature Spotlight and Giveaway!

It's our first giveaway of 2026 and we're featuring a couple of books that released toward the end of last year. We're excited to share them with you today as they both sound really interesting and are receiving great reviews. Thanks to the authors, we have TWO sets of print copies to give away!

Missed You the First Time by Julia Carpenter

At 25, Dani Galler just gave up everything—an apartment she loved, a job she liked, and a long-distance boyfriend she wasted years planning to marry. Starting over means figuring out her next career move, finding a new place to live, and maybe, fingers crossed, falling in love again.

What she’s not looking for is pity—especially from Jake Litman, her doughy, bespectacled childhood friend from Jewish summer camp. Back then, he followed her everywhere, eager for her advice and friendship. Now, a decade later, he’s reappeared, transformed into a Greek god of a man with a penthouse overlooking Lake Michigan and a girlfriend who makes Zendaya look just okay.

Desperate to reclaim the confidence of her camp days, Dani obsesses over tracking down a teen magazine article she’s convinced launched her pubescent glow-up. If she can rediscover that spark she may avoid her worst-case scenario: moving home to live with her parents and work for her suddenly successful brother. 

As Dani and Jake revisit shared memories, and their connection intensifies, Dani starts to wonder if the life she’s chasing isn’t about rediscovering who she was—but embracing who she may become.(Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.)

"I didn’t realize this book was going to be exactly what I was looking for this year. Is it too much to ask for a sequel!?" 
- Pat and Liz Lenihan (Amazon reviewer)

"I highly recommend this lighthearted, sweet and enjoyable romantic book." 
- Kristina (Amazon reviewer)

Julia Carpenter writes romantic comedies about smart, complicated women juggling life, love, and everything in between. Her debut novel, Missed You the First Time, debuted as Amazon’s #1 Kindle release in Jewish Life (Nov 2025). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, YourTango, and PBS’s Next Avenue.

Visit Julia online:

Website * Facebook * Instagram * TikTok

Together On Our Own by Eliana Megerman

Alex Galen is a thirty-one-year-old emergency medicine resident barely keeping it together. After a patient’s unexpected death puts her on probation, her confidence — and her sense of purpose — begin to unravel. Outside the hospital, she’s alone, anxious, and drowning in a sea of Law & Order reruns and social media feeds that make everyone else’s life look more together than hers.

When the hospital rolls out a new AI system designed to streamline care, Alex finds unexpected comfort in its nonjudgmental, always-on presence. She starts sharing things she can’t say to anyone else. She even gives the system a name, Henry, after a quiet, observant fellow resident who, in real life, is the one person she’s been trying not to notice.

But AI Henry isn’t real. And everything she tells him is being recorded.

As Alex and the real Henry begin to question another patient’s suspicious death, Alex is forced to confront what it means to truly connect — and whether she’s been trusting the wrong version of intimacy all along.

Written by a practicing Emergency Room doctor, Together On Our Own evokes the gritty intensity of The Pitt in a quietly suspenseful story about burnout, vulnerability, and the subtle ways technology can both numb us to intimacy and expose our deepest thoughts. (Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.)

"I really loved this, it is a fantastic book! I could barely put it down. It was so well written and the twist and turns were exciting! The main character was relatable and intriguing. What a treat to read!"
- M. Gottlieb (Amazon reviewer)

"I loved reading this book so much in so many ways and I don’t want to spoil any details by talking about all the reasons I loved it. It’s a great story with interesting characters and great character development.  I cannot recommend enough." 
- Amy Allshouse (Amazon reviewer)

Eliana Megerman is an emergency medicine physician and writer whose lifelong love of books and film led her from screenplays to short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines. Born and raised in Kansas City, she lives with her husband and three children. Together On Our Own is her debut novel. Visit Eliana on Instagram.

How to win: Use KingSumo to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using KingSumo on our blog, enter the giveaway here.

Giveaway ends January 11th at midnight EST.

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Book Review: The Water Lies

By Jami Denison

Motherhood has always had some aspects of performance. In the fifties, women were expected to look and act like June Cleaver. In the seventies, they were told to “bring home the bacon/fry it up in a pan/and never let you forget you’re a man.” The nineties were the SAHM versus working mom wars. Today, are you even a mom if you don’t have five social media accounts celebrating your child?

Author Amy Meyerson’s new book, The Water Lies, illustrates mothering in a fishbowl by having her protagonist, Tessa Irons, live in a touristy neighborhood in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where the houses back to popular canals and their windows put their inhabitants on display. Tessa, the mother of a toddler son and heavily pregnant, lives her life in full view of nosy neighbors and her best friend across the canal. But when a dead body shows up in the water—and Tessa recognizes her as a woman who ignored her son’s calls the day before—suddenly no one has seen anything. 

Barb, the dead woman’s mother, flies in to find out the truth about her daughter, with whom she had a shaky relationship after years of estrangement. The police say she drowned in a drunken accident, but Barb knows that Regina had been sober for years. She meets up with Tessa, who is terrified about her son’s connection to a dead woman. Together, they search for the truth, which seems to be hidden along those enticing canals.

Told from both Tessa and Barb’s alternating first-person points-of-view, The Water Lies has been compared to Rear Window due to its claustrophobic setting and Tessa’s suspicions about her neighbors. Tessa’s husband dismisses her concerns as pregnancy related, even while Tessa staunchly defends him and their marriage to the reader. Barb, who has a history of assuming the worst of a person and being accused of meddling, doesn’t want to make the same mistake twice. The character work with these two women, and their developing relationship, is the strongest feature of the novel. 

As the book develops, the danger points closer to home than the neighbors. Tessa’s husband is a celebrated IVF doctor with his own clinic, and his job becomes entangled with the main plot. When Tessa finds out that Barb has been stalking him, she starts to doubt the older woman, who is convinced that Tessa is in danger. But will Tessa believe her before it’s too late?

The Water Lies covers many domestic suspense tropes, the most obvious one being the husband who cannot be trusted. But while the book starts very strong, Meyerson’s terrific set-ups result in flat payoffs. The plot grows convoluted. The murder victim, estranged from her mother and not known to Tessa at all, never completely emerges as a real person—and the second murder victim is even less developed. Meyerson’s fabulous character work for her two protagonists makes some of her reveals unbelievable. The climax introduces a new person previously only alluded to in glimpses, frustrating the reader. 

Even so, the writing is excellent, better than in most domestic suspense novels I’ve read. Readers will root for Tessa and Barb, who are brave, thoughtful women determined to learn the truth about Regina’s death and their own culpabilities. And the ending is perfect. 

The Water Lies begins by showing a mother aware of how the world judges her. It ends with women deciding for themselves what motherhood is. 

Thanks to MB Communications for the book in exchange for an honest review.

More by Amy Meyerson:
The Bookshop of Yesterdays
The Imperfects
The Love Scribe

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