Passionate Nomad, The Life of Freya Stark by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, is a biography of one of the most famous women travelers of the 20th century. Freya traveled through parts of the Middle East where no European woman had been before, wrote numerous books, spoke many languages, was self-taught, admired by many and disliked by even more. Surely hers was a fascinating life, and what started out as a fascinating book was bogged down by so many names and details,…
I had to take a break from reading Jodi Picoult books, as her subject matter is often disturbing. However, even though House Rules is a murder mystery, I couldn’t put it down. The main character, Jacob, is a teenager with Asperger’s, and Picoult gets inside his mind so we can see how he thinks, feels, expresses himself. It was fascinating. A well written, often hilarious, page-turner. Recommended read.
A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker is the sequel to his beautiful novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. It is now ten years later, and Julia, a lawyer in New York finds herself drawn back to visit her brother in her father’s native country of Burma. Beautifully written, and often times mystical, yet lacking the beauty of the first novel, it felt a bit contrived and left you hanging at the end. I assume there will be a third book…
The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips is a comedic take on the traditional stories of King Aurthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In this book, the less valued Knights sit at a rectangular table, with one leg shorter than the rest, far from the King, eating the leftover food. When one of these Knights sets out on a quest hoping to redeem himself, the real comedy begins. He leaves with his Squire, a small giant…
Land of Love and Drowning, the debut by Tiphanie Yanique, is the first book I’ve read by an author from the Virgin Islands. Yanique’s unique voice and writing style completely transported me to another world. Set in The Virgin Islands from the time of transfer to the US in the early 1900’s until the 1970’s, the novel follows three generations of Bradshaw women. Full of magic, love, island culture and a fair amount of incest, Yanique’s dazzling prose is what…
My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock is a memoir of a year of doing one thing each day that scares you, the idea taken from a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t usually like books where women take a year off to find themselves, but this one is quite amusing. Hancock decides to do one scary thing every day for a year, until her 30th birthday. Some of these are small things, like sending back food in a restaurant,…
A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan is a novel about a woman who thinks she has it all, the perfect balance of part-time work at a job she loves, and a wonderful family life. That is, until her husband loses his job and her perfect life is thrown into chaos. Egan creates such wonderful, well developed characters, I felt like they were old friends and I didn’t want this book to end. She writes with humor, intelligence and heart. A…
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho is a rather strange book, full of characters I never really understood, liked or believed in, other than the Sorcerer Royal, Zacharias. Cho creates a world where British magicians and Sorcerers are having their magic drained by nearby Fairy; the head Sorcerer is a former slave, and eventually an Indian woman. A British novel of magic and manners written by Malaysian born Cho, it never felt quite right to me, and I wasn’t…
The Lake House by Kate Morton is maybe her best novel yet, and I love all her books. Set in present day London and Cornwall and in 1930’s Cornwall, it tells the story of the seemingly happy Edevane family, Mother, Father, three daughters and a precious and beloved baby boy. One day at a Mid-Summer’s party, baby Theo disappears and is never found. The family abandons the house and it is left unopened for 70 years, until a young female…
Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin, author of Evensong, takes place in a Catholic girls school in North Carolina in the 50’s. Decades later the headmistress looks back on that time, and tells the tale of one group of girls and what happened on a fateful night. Goodwin exposes all the hidden parts of each personality, the queen bee, the brain, the girls in the background, and the jealousy and passion and concealed emotions that move them all. Goodwin is a…