Category: Books

For February, my book club read On the Island. I heard about it through the Twin Cities Live Book Club. We were a little skeptical to read it at first (given the description), but everyone loved it. It was a fast read and it was really hard to put down! Here’s a description.

Anna Emerson is a thirty-year-old English teacher desperately in need of adventure. Worn down by the cold Chicago winters and a relationship that’s going nowhere, she jumps at the chance to spend the summer on a tropical island tutoring sixteen-year-old T.J.

T.J. Callahan has no desire to go anywhere. His cancer is in remission and he wants to get back to his normal life. But his parents are insisting he spend the summer in the Maldives catching up on all the school he missed last year.

Anna and T.J. board a private plane headed to the Callahan’s summer home, and as they fly over the Maldives’ twelve hundred islands, the unthinkable happens. Their plane crashes in shark-infested waters. They make it to shore, but soon discover that they’re stranded on an uninhabited island.

At first, their only thought is survival. But as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.’s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.

Happy reading!

We combined December and January for book club and read The Paris Wife. I had a hard time getting into it, but the other ladies loved it.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris. As Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history and pours himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises, Hadley strives to hold on to her sense of self as her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Eventually they find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

I did finish it…a couple days after we met for book club. It was well written, I just didn’t care much for the characters. He was a jerk and she was kind of a pushover. But overall, fairly enjoyable. It’s gotten good reviews from many people, so maybe you’d like to add it to our list of books to read.

Happy reading!

A couple months back we read The Red House for book club. It didn’t go over very well. Only one person finished it and most didn’t come close to finishing it….including me. Here’s a summary.

The set-up of Mark Haddon’s brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. The stage is set for seven days of resentment and guilt, a staple of family gatherings the world over.

But because of Haddon’s extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but simple. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly-guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt. As we come to know each character they become profoundly real to us. We understand them, even as we come to realize they will never fully understand each other, which is the tragicomedy of every family.

It was just really hard to read. It was very choppy writing and I found it hard to read and hard to follow. I might finish it some day, but for now, I’ll just say….skip it.

Happy reading!

Our book club book for the month of October was One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd. All of us really enjoyed the book. Here’s a synopsis:

One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial “Brides for Indians” program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man’s world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.

It was a different kind of book. Most of the time, you wouldn’t know that it was fiction. You could almost read it as true events. I found that to be fascinating. There were some great characters as well as some disturbing ones.

I wouldn’t call this one a “beach read” because there were lots of details in it, but it was a good book if you want something slightly more in depth. I think everyone in book club would recommend this book.

Happy reading!

I recently finished reading Moon Over Manifest and really enjoyed it. This was our book club book for September. In early October, the author is coming to a local place to talk about the book. I think it will be fun to hear what an author has to say about their book. And I will be sure to let you know if anything exciting happens.  

Here’s a description of the book:

The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby. I closed my eyes to the dusty countryside and imagined the sign I’d seen only in Gideon’s stories: Manifest—A Town with a rich past and a bright future.

Abilene Tucker feels abandoned. Her father has put her on a train, sending her off to live with an old friend for the summer while he works a railroad job. Armed only with a few possessions and her list of universals, Abilene jumps off the train in Manifest, Kansas, aiming to learn about the boy her father once was.

Having heard stories about Manifest, Abilene is disappointed to find that it’s just a dried-up, worn-out old town. But her disappointment quickly turns to excitement when she discovers a hidden cigar box full of mementos, including some old letters that mention a spy known as the Rattler. These mysterious letters send Abilene and her new friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, on an honest-to-goodness spy hunt, even though they are warned to “Leave Well Enough Alone.”

Abilene throws all caution aside when she heads down the mysterious Path to Perdition to pay a debt to the reclusive Miss Sadie, a diviner who only tells stories from the past. It seems that Manifest’s history is full of colorful and shadowy characters—and long-held secrets. The more Abilene hears, the more determined she is to learn just what role her father played in that history. And as Manifest’s secrets are laid bare one by one, Abilene begins to weave her own story into the fabric of the town.

Powerful in its simplicity and rich in historical detail, Clare Vanderpool’s debut is a gripping story of loss and redemption.

I really enjoyed this book and so did the other members of book club. I would definitely recommend this book for a good read.

Happy reading!

I just finished reading this book for book club.

Here’s a quick description for you:

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

I have to say, as I was first reading the book, I was pretty excited about it. As I got into it, though, I was bored and kind of hoping it would end soon. (Great way to motivate you to read it, huh?!) But once I finished the book and was able to see the book in its entirety, I actually enjoyed it. Or maybe just appreciated it a little more.

I found the main character (an 11 year old girl) a bit hard to take seriously. She had an astounding vocabulary which just wasn’t believable. I don’t know how I would have felt if the author had dumbed it down, but it was just hard to take her very seriously because it didn’t seem like things an 11 year would ever say; even a very intelligent one.

I don’t think I’ll be rushing out any time soon to read the other books in the series, but it was a cute twist on a mystery novel and a lighter read than some we have read for book club. I think a young teen would enjoy the book, though. They may not understand some of the vocabulary, but there wasn’t anything in it that a younger reading wouldn’t be able to handle.

So, this might not be for you, but if you know of a young reader looking for a fun read, this just may be for them!

This is the book we read for July for book club. A friend of mine pointed out that it is only available for an e-reader. I did see online that you can buy a paperback copy used if you really wanted one. Here’s a little about the book.

Stuck in a job he no longer found fulfilling, journalist Mike McIntyre felt his life was quickly passing him by. So one day he hit the road to trek from one end of the country to the other with little more than the clothes on his back and without a single penny in his pocket. Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life–and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than he’d ever thought possible. The gifts of food and shelter he received along the way were outweighed only by the touching gifts of the heart–the willingness of many he met to welcome a lonely stranger into their homes…and the discovery that sometimes those who give the most are the ones with the least to spare.

I liked the book. It was different than the other ones we have read for book club. I did feel like the book was a little detached at times and felt sort of thrown together at parts. But maybe it was supposed to be more journal-like instead of so planned out. Not really sure. I started to feel like some of the stories were a little repetitive. But he did meet some very kind, generous and interesting people along his way.

He wrote a another book, called The Wander Year, where he travels around the world with his wife. I am putting that book on my “to read” list because I think this would be an interesting story with a woman’s perspective as well. Since, I don’t think it would have been wise for a woman to do what he did for “Kindness of Strangers.”

If you have a Kindle or e-reader, this was a good book. It was worth reading to give you hope that there are still good people out there. Happy reading!

The Kitchen House was the most recent book we read for my book club. Here’s a summary of the book.

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.

Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.

Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

The Kitchen House is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail.

We meet next week to talk about the book. I briefly talked to a friend about it yesterday when I saw her. I think we are going to have a good discussion about it.

The one thing the description doesn’t mention is that this takes place from the later 1700s through about 1810. People lived so differently then. It is just horrifying at times. The book was tragic yet seemed empowering in ways at the same time. I know I was in shock at a number of the scenes in the book.

The book was from the view of two of the characters. I don’t think one of the characters was the best choice for her own voice, but I did like that we could really see how the main character grew up throughout the book.

Overall, I did enjoy the book. It was a little hard to get into at the beginning because I felt like so much time had passed and events happened in the first part of the book, I couldn’t figure out where the book was going to go. But by the end of the book, I couldn’t put it down and needed to know what was going to happen next.

Happy reading!

Last night we met for book club. The book we read was Sarah’s Key. It seemed to be a big hit with everyone. Here is a summary.

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d’Hiv’, to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

It was a touching story that really made you think about and remember the events of the past. It was a pretty quick read. Many of my friends said they didn’t want to put it down. If you need a new book to read, I think we would all recommend this one.

Happy reading!