Books
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Same as it Ever Was
Same as it Ever Was ~ Claire Lombardo Julia Ames is the 57 year old mother of two. Ben, her 24 year old son, is planning his wedding. Alma, her daughter, is getting ready to graduate from High School and is worried about college admissions. Her husband, Mark, is loving and attentive. Julia isn’t quite sure why she isn’t happier, why she can’t ever quite accept that life is good. At the grocery store one day, Julia runs into Helen, an elderly woman she was close to 20 years earlier, bringing back memories of their time as friends, and how her friendship with Helen brought about events that shook her…
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Mobility
Mobility ~ Lydia Kiesling The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age—from Azerbaijan to America—as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of…
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Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers ~ Jesse Sutanto Thank you to those of you who suggested this book. I’m not really into the murder mystery genre, though when I read them I seem to enjoy them, so maybe I am into the murder mystery genre? Maybe I need to read some Agatha Christie books, my mom sure loved the hell out of them. Anyway, I loved Vera, though there are so many descriptions of her as being elderly and old, and she’s (ahem) 60. I mean, I guess when I was younger, 60 seemed pretty old to me, and my mom died at 66, and it’s close to retirement…
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The Bee Sting
The Bee Sting ~ Paul Murray Cassie is finishing up secondary school, ready for college. She’s a straight A student, bright and interested in poetry, but she’s angry with her father, and she blames him for their reduced position in town. She worries that she will not get to go to Dublin to attend college with her best friend, Elaine, and seems determined to sabotage her chances. She has a lot of disdain for her mother, who she thinks of as shallow and uneducated. PJ is Cassie’s little brother, lover of science and strange facts, who inconveniently outgrows his shoes right when money is tightest. He’s worried that his parents…
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10 Things that Never Happened
10 Things that Never Happened ~ Alexis Hall Sam manages a big box bed and bath store in Northern England, though he doesn’t run it very well. His employees are either taking too many breaks, or they are damaging the expensive mattresses, that sort of thing. He should probably fire the one that does the damage, but that employee is caring for his Gran, right? He should come down on the one who takes too many breaks, but really, he doesn’t care enough. That’s the real issue. He’d like things to go more smoothly, but this isn’t his dream job, and he’s just going through the motions. It’s a small…
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The Night We Lost Him
The Night We Lost Him ~ Laura Dave Nora Noone is a successful architect living in New York, who has recently gone through the horrible loss of both of her parents, her mother from cancer, her father when he fell from a cliff side above the ocean in California. They divorced when she was young, and her father remarried, twice. Nora was extremely close with her mother, and is having a lot of trouble processing that loss. She loved her father, but they weren’t terribly close, and she was not close with her twin brothers, who he had with his second wife. She is struggling with her grief, which is…
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Saturday Randomness
I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations, and that life is returning to normal (if that is what you want) or that the festivities are continuing (if that’s more your jam). My company gave us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as holidays, and then next week we will have both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as holidays, plus we still have Fabulous Fridays off (at least we did yesterday, they haven’t told us whether this wonderful benefit will carry in to 2025, and let me tell you, WE ARE ON PINS AND NEEDLES waiting to find out!), so I went ahead and took a couple…
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Wellness
Wellness ~ Nathan Hill Jack and Elizabeth meet in 1993. They are neighbors who have been creepily spying upon each others through their windows, kind of like the cast of Friends spying on Ugly Naked Guy. They fall in love quickly and completely after finally meeting in a bar when Jack rescues Elizabeth from a creeper trying to pick her up. 20 years later, they’re trying to figure out how to maintain their marriage, planning the layout of their new luxury condo. Will they have open shelving or cabinets? One en-suite bedroom, or two? Can they find the meaning that they are missing by making such decisions? They are unhappy.…
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store ~ James McBride This is the story of Chicken Hill, a black and Jewish community in Pottstown, PA, that starts in the early 1970s when the skeleton of a man is found in a well, then travels back to the 1930s, where we meet the characters of Chicken Hill, and eventually discover the identity and story behind the discovery. There is Chona, who owns The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and refuses to sell it and move when her husband, Moshe, makes good money running his jazz theater. Then there is Dodo, a young voiceless black boy with special needs, who is being cared…
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The Vanishing Half
The Vanishing Half ~ Brit Bennett Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twin sisters from the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana, a town inhabited by very light skinned black people. The sisters witness the lynching of their father in the 1940s, and their mother pulls them out of school in order to help support their household by becoming housekeepers for a local family, where Stella is assaulted. At the age of 16, the sisters run away. In order to find a job, Stella starts passing for white, and eventually falls in love with a white man and moves away, leaving her heartbroken sister behind. Stella marries and lives in Los…
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The Women
The Women ~ Kristin Hannah Frances “Frankie” McGrath is a San Diego nursing student from a wealthy family turned Army nurse, who goes to war in Vietnam. She is dropped into a field hospital with barely any training, and quickly learns the ropes and shows herself to be a gifted trauma nurse. While there, she makes close friendships and falls in love with an (unbeknownst to her) married man. She comes home after her second tour and faces a world that is hostile to veterans in general, and an absolute lack of support for female veterans. Again and again she tries to get help for her trauma, and again and…
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The Monsters of Templeton
The Monsters of Templeton ~ Lauren Groff The corpse of a 50-foot underwater creature surfaces from Lake Glimmerglass. Like Nessie, there were stories about a monster in the lake, but no one really believed them before now. Willie Upton returns to her home in Templeton, New York, to her mother’s home near the lake shore. Willie has had a rough time of it lately. She’s a Stanford graduate student who is pregnant with the child of one of her (married) professors, whose wife she tried to run over with a prop plane in Alaska. Willie’s mother, Vi, drops a bombshell on her. Willie has been told her entire life that…
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Playground
Playground ~ Richard Powers Todd Keane is a middle-aged white tech billionaire diagnosed with dementia. He had a privileged childhood in Illinois, and develops an extremely popular online app, Playground. Rafi Young is a worker with an NGO who went to prep-school and college with Todd. He is a black man from a poor neighborhood, whose parents sacrifice in order to give him the education he clearly craves, as his is a gifted mind. Ina Aroita is a sculptor from the South Pacific who meets Todd and Rafi in college. She and Rafi fall in love and start a tumultuous relationship. Evelyne Beaulieu is a gifted deep sea diver who…
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The God of the Woods
The God of the Woods ~ Liz Moore Barbara Van Laar is a 13 year old girl at a summer camp owned by her wealthy parents. One morning in 1975, her bunk is empty, and she is discovered to be missing. Her camp counselor is worried that she will be blamed, and for just reason. The mystery behind The God of The Woods is what happened to Barbara. Her older brother, Bear, went missing at the age of 8, a year before Barbara was born, and was never found. Are their fates entwined? There are plenty of suspects. There is her camp counselor. There is the son of the family…
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Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Margo’s Got Money Troubles ~ Rufi Thorpe Margo is a student at a local community college who makes the stupid decision to sleep with her English professor. This winds her in predictable trouble when she finds herself pregnant and dumped. She is encouraged to either have an abortion or give the baby up, but she wants to be a good mother. At least, a better mother than the one she was raised by, a former waitress at Hooters who has moved on to working at Saks Fifth Avenue. Margo tries to juggle it all, roommates, work, school, but soon reality sets in and she realizes that babies are disruptive and…
