Recent Reads

It’s been almost 2 months since I posted about my Recent Reads, so it’s time to catch you up. My book consumption habits are mostly audio books, as the only time I really read a physical book lately seems to be at bedtime, whereas I listen to audio books while taking my morning walk or while cooking dinner. I sometimes even listen while running errands, which gives mixed results, as if I get distracted, I miss things and have to rewind a bit. Anyway, here are the books I’ve read or listened to in December and January. Format – 1 physical library book, 1 physical book that I got for Christmas, all of the others, I listened to on my Libby app, so they were free from my local library.

The Book Woman’s Daughter – Kim Michele Richardson

In the ruggedness of the beautiful Kentucky mountains, Honey Lovett has always known that the old ways can make a hard life harder. As the daughter of the famed blue-skinned, Troublesome Creek packhorse librarian, Honey and her family have been hiding from the law all her life. But when her mother and father are imprisoned, Honey realizes she must fight to stay free, or risk being sent away for good.

Picking up her mother’s old packhorse library route, Honey begins to deliver books to the remote hollers of Appalachia. Honey is looking to prove that she doesn’t need anyone telling her how to survive, but the route can be treacherous, and some folks aren’t as keen to let a woman pave her own way. If Honey wants to bring the freedom that books provide to the families who need it most, she’s going to have to fight for her place, and along the way, learn that the extraordinary women who run the hills and hollers can make all the difference in the world.

Goodreads

I read this book in physical form, and it kept me engaged, though I didn’t like it as much as the first book. Recommended, but in this case only if you read the first one.

Talking at Night – Claire Daverley

Will and Rosie meet as teenagers.

They’re opposites in every way. She overthinks everything; he is her twin brother’s wild and unpredictable friend. But over secret walks home and late-night phone calls, they become closer—destined to be one another’s great love story.

Until, one day, tragedy strikes, and their future together is shattered.

But as the years roll on, Will and Rosie can’t help but find their way back to each other. Time and again, they come close to rekindling what might have been.

What do you do when the one person you should forget is the one you just can’t let go?

Goodreads

Will and Rosie were likable characters, and I wanted them to end up together. It was not your typical rom-com, though some of it was formulaic enough. Recommended if you can get it for free like I did, via my Libby app.

Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent

Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died.

Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media and worried police, but also a sinister voice from a past she has no memory of. As she begins to discover the horrors of her childhood, recluse Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends, finding independence, and learning that people don’t always mean what they say.

But when messages start arriving from a stranger who knows far more about her past than she knows herself, Sally’s life will be thrown into chaos once again . . .

Goodreads

I liked Strange Sally Diamond a lot. I was very sympathetic to Sally, and while I saw some plot twists coming, others were a surprise, and I was entertained throughout, trying to figure out Sally’s thought processes.

Heartburn – Nora Ephron

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of “Sleepless in Seattle” reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.

Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has “a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs” is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron’s irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. “Heartburn” is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.

Goodreads

I wanted to like this book, it was recommended to me by my step-mom, and we generally agree about most books. But I didn’t find it funny, didn’t like the characters, didn’t like the story. I’ve heard that she writes some good stories, maybe I’ll try again. This one just didn’t do it for me.

The Change – Kirsten Miller

In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment…

After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn’t take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead—a gift she’s inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn’t left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett’s life is far from over—in fact, she’s undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw—until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl’s murder leads to more bodies, and to the town’s most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don’t apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands…

Goodreads

I really enjoyed this murder mystery, it was fun and gripping at the same time, full of both justice and revenge. I liked it enough that I recommended it to my cousin and my best friend.

Maybe Once, Maybe Twice – Allison Rose Greenberg

You know that old saying, “if we are still single when we’re 35, we should get married?” Well, Maggie Vine made that vow with two different people, at two very different stages of her life.

And they both showed up.

Maggie Vine’s life is going extra-medium. At 35 she’s pursuing her dreams of being a singer and being a mother—though neither is successfully panning out. So when Garrett Scholl—stifled hedge fund manager by day but electrifying aspiring rock singer by night—comes to her 35th birthday party with the intention to kiss Maggie senseless, it feels like one piece might click into place. Except he’s engaged to someone else, and Maggie knows she won’t fit into the cookie-cutter life he’s building for himself.

Enter Asher Reyes. Her first boyfriend from summer camp, turned into heartthrob actor, he’s lived a successful yet private life ever since he got famous. When a career-changing opportunity is presented to Maggie after her re-connection with Asher, it feels like everything—music, love, family—will fall into place. But her past won’t let her move on without a fight.

Goodreads

This is your typical love triangle story, and as always in such fictional situations, the guys are both so damned madly in love with Maggie, they can’t get her out of their mind. In real life, we generally break up with someone and move on, right? I don’t carry a torch for any past loves, and if I had, I think I would have tried harder to not have them be ‘past’ loves. Maybe that’s pragmatic 58 year old me. Anyway, the plot is more than just ‘which one will she choose’, there is some character growth for Maggie along the way, which is a good thing. I’ll admit to being worried that she was going to pick the wrong guy for a bit, but it all worked out fine.

Fates and Furies – Lauren Groff

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.

At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.

Goodreads

The first half of Fates and Furies is told by Lotto, the 6 foot 6 golden boy, who falls desperately in love with Mathilde near their college graduation. They marry within weeks of marriage. Lotto is an aspiring actor, Mathilde works in an art gallery. We are shown Lotto’s successes and failures, and his undying love of his wife. The second half is told from Mathilde’s point of view, and turns almost everything we learned in the first half on its head. Mathilde was a more interesting character to me, perhaps because she is more complicated.

Eileen – Ottessa Mosheegh

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.

Goodreads

We did some bookstore shopping on my birthday, and Maya told me she enjoyed listening to this book. Eileen was a really interesting character, doing her best in the midst of an entirely strange life. Recommended. There is a movie version out, I think I’d like to see it once it is free to watch somewhere.

Small World – Laura Zigman

A year after her divorce, Joyce is settling into being single again. She likes her job archiving family photos and videos, and she’s developed a secret comforting trolling the neighborhood social networking site, Small World, for posts that help solve life’s easiest problems. When her older sister, Lydia, also divorced, calls to tell her she’s moving back east from Los Angeles after almost thirty years away, Joyce invites Lydia to move into her Cambridge apartment. Temporarily. Just until she finds a place of her own. But their unlikely cohabitation—not helped by annoying new neighbors upstairs—turns out to be the post-divorce rebound relationship Joyce hadn’t planned on. Instead of forging the bond she always dreamed of having with Lydia, their relationship frays. And they rarely discuss the loss of their sister, Eleanor, who was significantly disabled and died when she was only ten years old. When new revelations from their family’s history come to light, will those secrets further split them apart, or course correct their connection for the future? Written with wry humor and keen sensitivity, Small World is a powerful novel of sisterhood and hope—a reminder that sometimes you have to look back in order to move ahead. 

Goodreads

Ted bought me this book as a gift for Christmas, a physical book to read at bedtime. I was sucked in and really enjoyed it. Much like Eileen and Sally, Joyce is a complicated character with a lot going on beneath the surface. This book was unpredictable, but never felt like it was pulling a switch on you either. I think I’m going to read another book by this author, Separation Anxiety.

Whew, that was a lot of books.?I need to be better about posting about my reads.?Currently I’m reading Mika in Real Life and My Brilliant Friend (for Engie’s book club), and enjoying both immensely.