Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share their mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer? Email bellis@denverpost.com.

“When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary,” by Alice Hoffman (Scholastic Press, 2024)

Hoffman creates the inquisitive, yearning and irrepressible child that Anne Frank might have been in this young adult fiction. And she deftly weaves Anne’s backstory into the larger framework of 1930’s European history, while foreshadowing with a light touch what was to come. A refreshing perspective on pre-World War II Europe. — 3 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver

“Tell Me Everything,” by Elizabeth Strout (Random House, 2024)

Elizabeth Strout excels at revealing inner lives. If you’ve not read her previous books, you’ll still find richness in the connections between Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess and others in fictional Crosby, Maine. This novel is intimate, simply and beautifully written, occasionally wry, humorous, and always very real. I am charmed by how we readers are brought into the scenes. (The audiobook narration by Kimberly Farr is superb.) — 4 stars (out of 4); Neva Gronert, Parker

“The Housekeeper and the Professor” by Yoko Ogawa (Picador translation, 2009)

Families nowadays are a challenge to define. This one is comprised of a mom and a boy (that’s natural enough) coupled with a damaged professor of mathematics, whose brain holds only 80 minutes of memory. Because he can’t remember things, he pins little notes to his suit to recall names, dates, facts and his own history. Somehow, despite this unplausible theory, they get along just fine. The housekeeper has an inquiring mind and loves learning about mathematical theories. The professor loves delving into his favorite baseball team, up to 1975 when a car accident robbed him of most of his memory. It also damaged his sister-in-law, with whom, we suspect, he had a romantic attachment. Through the years during which they build a close relationship, the housekeeper helps the professor regain some semblance of a contented life, and he becomes a joyful substitute father to her son. Luckily, the reader doesn’t need to grasp mathematical theory in order to learn what really counts in life. — 3 stars (out of 4); Bonnie McCune, Denver (bonniemccune.com)

“The Empusium,” by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead Books, 2024)

Despite this novel’s setting in an Alpine sanatorium in pre-World War I Europe and the endless philosophic discussions among the patients on themes of life/death, sickness/health, democracy/autocracy, this is not your parents’ “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. As the discussions start to veer obsessively onto “the nature of women,” the men (yes, all the patients we come to know are men) vie to outdo one another in their condescending misogyny, emboldened by a locally brewed, hallucinogenic liqueur. Whispered rumors of unexplained disappearances, hints of evil forces hiding in the nearby forest and clear warnings of potential danger all create a suspenseful sense of foreboding. The eponymous “empusa” refers to a female shape-shifter from Greek mythology, who lurked in the shadows and preyed upon men. The ending leaves the reader to interpret whether or not developments in the sanitorium and its community were a result of the lurking empusa. (Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature.) — 3 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver