8 Study Guides
Women's Fiction & Book Club Reads
Explore women's fiction, contemporary novels, memoirs, and popular book-club reads through thoughtful chapter-by-chapter conversation. These guides help readers look closely at character, relationships, identity, ambition, loss, and the choices that shape a story.
The Women
by Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah's The Women (2024) is a sweeping historical novel that follows Frances "Frankie" McGrath from the sunlit comfort of her California upbringing through the chaos of the Vietnam War and into the long, painful struggle of coming home. At its heart, the novel is a reclamation project: a work of fiction determined to restore women veterans — particularly the Army nurses who served in Vietnam — to their rightful place in the story of American war. Through Frankie's eyes, Hannah asks what it costs a person, and especially a woman, to see the worst of human suffering and then be expected to return to ordinary life as though nothing happened.
View Discussion GuideReminders of Him
by Colleen Hoover
Colleen Hoover's Reminders of Him is a deeply emotional novel about grief, guilt, redemption, and the fierce love between a mother and the daughter she has never truly known. When Kenna Rowan is released from prison after five years, she returns to a small town carrying the unbearable weight of having accidentally caused the death of Scotty Landry, the father of her daughter, Diem. Scotty's parents, Grace and Patrick Landry, have raised Diem in Kenna's absence and are determined to keep her out — a determination that feels, at times, both devastating and completely understandable. Into this standoff steps Ledger Ward, Scotty's best friend and the owner of the local bar, who finds himself caught between loyalty to the family he loves and an undeniable connection to the woman everyone else has written off. Hoover tells this story from alternating perspectives, weaving Kenna's letters to the long-dead Scotty throughout the novel to stunning emotional effect. The result is a book that refuses to let any character be simply a villain or a saint — only human, and aching with it.
View Discussion GuideBook Lovers
by Emily Henry
Book Lovers by Emily Henry is a romance novel that turns the conventions of the genre inside out. Nora Stephens is a sharp, ambitious New York literary agent who has spent her career sending heroines off on small-town adventures where they fall in love and leave their big-city lives behind — only to find herself cast in exactly that role when her sister Libby insists on a month-long trip to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina. There, she keeps colliding with Charlie Lastra, a brooding, exacting editor she has sparred with professionally for years. What begins as a familiar-feeling setup gradually reveals itself to be something far more interesting: a story about two people who have each written themselves into a corner — Nora as the woman who sacrifices everything for others, Charlie as the man who keeps everyone at arm's length — and what happens when those self-authored stories finally crack open.
View Discussion GuideLessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus
Lessons in Chemistry is Bonnie Garmus's debut novel and a runaway global phenomenon — a sharp, funny, and deeply felt story set in early 1960s California that asks what happens when a brilliant woman refuses to be diminished by the world around her. At its center is Elizabeth Zott, a research chemist who dreams of contributing something meaningful to science but is repeatedly blocked by the institutional sexism of Hastings Research Institute. When an accidental pregnancy, a devastating loss, and financial desperation conspire against her, Elizabeth finds herself hosting a daytime cooking show called Supper at Six — and, to everyone's surprise, including her own, she transforms it into something radical: a platform for women to see themselves as capable, intelligent, and worthy of more than the roles society has assigned them. Alongside Elizabeth is a richly drawn cast that includes the Nobel Prize–nominated Calvin Evans, their precocious daughter Madeline (nicknamed Six-Thirty after the family dog), the producer Walter Pine, and the neighborhood polymath Harriet Sloane. Together they make the novel not just a feminist manifesto but a warm, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking story about love, grief, belonging, and the courage it takes to be exactly who you are.
View Discussion GuideDaisy Jones & The Six
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid is a novel told entirely in the form of an oral history — a retrospective interview transcript in which the surviving members of a fictional 1970s rock band recount, in their own words, how they rose to fame, how they made one of the greatest albums of their era, and how, on July 12, 1979, it all fell apart on stage in Chicago. The band's story is inseparable from the story of two people: Billy Dunne, the charismatic and self-destructive frontman of The Six, and Daisy Jones, the wild, gifted, and fiercely independent singer-songwriter who becomes the band's co-lead and, inevitably, the gravitational force that reshapes everything around her. Through competing memories, contradictions, and silences, Reid builds a portrait of creativity, desire, addiction, loyalty, and what it costs to love something — a person, a sound, a life — more than you can bear.
View Discussion GuideThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid is a sweeping, deeply human novel about a fictional Old Hollywood legend who has spent decades constructing — and carefully concealing — the truth of her life. Now in her seventies and living in reclusive luxury in New York City, Evelyn Hugo summons an unknown young magazine journalist named Monique Grant to write her authorized biography. As Evelyn unspools the story of her seven marriages, her stratospheric rise from a poor Cuban-American girl in Hell's Kitchen to the most glamorous movie star in the world, a far more private and profound love story gradually comes into focus. Reid's novel is, at its heart, a meditation on the costs of ambition, the violence of self-erasure, and what it means to love someone completely in a world that will not let you.
View Discussion GuideVerity
by Colleen Hoover
Verity by Colleen Hoover is a psychological thriller that blurs the line between truth, obsession, and self-deception. When struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh arrives at the home of bestselling author Verity Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in Verity's successful series, she stumbles upon a hidden autobiography — a document so disturbing it upends everything Lowen thought she understood about the Crawford family. What unfolds is a compulsive, morally complex story about grief, desire, manipulation, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify what we want. At its heart, Verity asks a deceptively simple question: when a story is this convenient, can we trust it — and can we trust the person who found it?
View Discussion GuideIt Ends with Us
by Colleen Hoover
It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover is a contemporary romance novel that quietly, then devastatingly, reveals itself to be something far more demanding than its opening promises. Lily Bloom leaves her small hometown of Plethora, Maine, and the shadow of her complicated family life to build something new in Boston — a flower shop, an identity, a future. When she meets the brilliant and magnetic neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid on a rooftop at a party, the story feels like a classic love story in the making. But Hoover uses that momentum to carry readers into far more uncomfortable territory: the slow, confusing, and heartbreaking experience of recognizing abuse inside a relationship that also contains genuine love. Woven throughout is the voice of teenage Lily, preserved in journals she kept about her first love, Atlas Corrigan — a homeless boy she sheltered and adored — whose reappearance in her adult life forces her to confront who she was, who she has become, and what she owes herself.
View Discussion GuideWomen's Fiction & Book Club Reads Studies — Questions Leaders Ask
- How many Women's Fiction & Book Club Reads study guides are there?
- 8 guides right now, listed above, out of 233 in the library. Each one is written for a specific published book: a reading, discussion questions, and a closing prayer for every week of it. Browse the whole library →
- How long does a study take?
- Women's Fiction & Book Club Reads guides run 8 to 14 weeks, one meeting a week, and each week has its own reading, discussion questions, and closing prayer. Groups that meet every other week or take a break for the holidays simply spread the same weeks further apart. Put your meetings on real dates →
- Can we read part of a guide before we pay?
- Yes. Week 1 of every guide is free — no card and no account. Three of its discussion questions sit right on the guide's page for anyone to read, and the rest of Week 1 opens as soon as you tell us where to send it. Browse the guides →
- What does a guide cost?
- Two ways to pay. This Guide Only is $29 once for the book you pick, and never renews. Full Library is $79 a year for every guide in the library — $59 for your first year if you have not bought from us before, through October 31, then it renews at $79 a year unless you cancel. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on the year (with 2 or fewer guides downloaded) and 7 days on a single guide. See both options →
- What if the book we want isn't on this page?
- We write it. Tell us the title and the author, and we email you the link as soon as the guide is ready. Full Library includes 3 on-request books a year and $9 for each one after that; This Guide Only covers the single book you name. Ask for a book →
- Can I print the guide or share it with my group?
- Yes. Download the guide as a PDF to print for the table, or send your group a read-only link. One membership covers everyone who shows up — there is no per-person fee and no seat limit.