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Books I Gave and Got – 2015 Holiday Edition
I somehow managed to read a few more books this year but I’ll post about them next year. There’s no hurry so why pack them in? Instead, I’ll tell you about books I got and gave. The list is not long...
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Book Club: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Dystopian novels aren’t my thing and when I heard that the next book for the book club I frequent was about people surviving after a disastrous epidemic I figured I’d skip it but the folks at One More...
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Her by Harriet Lane
In this book with alternating points of view, we get different sides of the growing friendship (?) between two British women, Nina and Emma. It is clear that one of them is much more predatory than the...
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Book Club: We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride
Based on a real-life tragedy that touched the author’s life, this book covers a plethora of difficult hot topics, including: prejudice and racism, PTSD, domestic violence, immigration, infidelity,...
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Re Jane by Patricia Park
In Re Jane, Patricia Park reimagines Jane Eyre in a modern setting where Jane is a put-upon Korean orphan living in Queens and working in her uncle’s small grocery store. Echoing Jane Eyre’s journey,...
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The Turner House & The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
I’m not sure what took me so long to read both The Turner House and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie but it made sense to read them together as companion pieces. Both of these books are so amazing that I...
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Serafina’s Promise by Ann E. Burg
In this novel in verse, a young Haitian girl and her family struggle with poverty as she dreams of getting an education to become a doctor. She is inspired to dream of a career in medicine because she...
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The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks
This fascinating fictional account of Israel’s King David is told through the eyes of Natan (Nathan) the prophet who advised and chastised the king from the wandering years when the young David ran...
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What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
The title of this book, What is Not Yours is Not Yours,” seems to be the photo negative of the frequently uttered pop psychology phrase “What’s mine is mine.” Each of these short stories tangentially...
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Negroland by Margo Jefferson
Journalist Margo Jefferson, born in the 1940s to prosperous African Americans, begins asking critical questions as a child, the kind of questions that can make parents uncomfortable—“Are we rich?” “Do...
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Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen
In Miller’s Valley, Mimi Miller lives on a farm near a small town where everyone knows that government wants to come in and flood the valley as part of a dam construction project. The book is told in...
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The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonsson
Ads proclaiming The Summer Before the War to be just the thing for those who were missing “Downton Abbey” (which had just ended) were popping up everywhere when I first heard about this book…and while...
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Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
In Behold the Dreamers, the lives of two families become intertwined when Clark Edwards, a Lehman Brothers executive, hires Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant, to be his driver. While Edwards needs...
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Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies tells the story of a marriage using two different points of view but it is not a typical he said/she said. Instead a rather erudite narrator starts out giving us a story that mostly...
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Year of YES by Shonda Rhimes
I was all about Year of YES when I won it free from the publisher…everyone told me it was amazing and I started it with much enthusiasm…only to put it down not long after. But that is not because there...
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The Year We Turned Forty by Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke
I’m not there but I see the big 4-0 on the horizon so when my eye glazed over this book in the library, I was intrigued. I’ve read less of my usual literary fiction (and read less in general this...
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