My bookclub finally got me to read Freedom by Jonathon Franzen, and that is what I’ve been slogging through for the past week. I never would haven chosen to read this book on my own, despite all the hype. Almost 600 pages later I feel that I wasted a good many hours of my life reading it. Tedious is the word that keeps coming to mind. Is this the great American novel? I really really hope not. I found it…
The Book of Tomorrow is Cecilia Ahern‘s new novel. She is a very prolific writer. After the less than wonderful novel The Gift, this book is a welcome change. Just enough magic and interesting charcters to keep me up late at night turning the pages to see what was going to happen next. Young, rich and spoiled Tamara Goodwin has to leave her home after her father dies, to go live with her bereaved mother and her mother’s relatives in a small country town…
But Not For Long by Michelle Wildgen is about a smaill group of people living in a co-op in Madison, Wisconson, and what happens to them over the course of three days during a blackout. This seemed more like a short story than a novel to me. Introducing several characters, showing us a small slice of their lives, and ending after a particularly traumatic incident happens, leaving us all hanging on and wanting to know more, or perhaps care more…
Lovingkindness is a powerful little novel by Anne Roiphe. I had never heard of Roiphe until I found this book for a dollar at our local used book store. I picked it up because it looked really interesting-and it is! This is the story of Annie, a feminist Mom who became a young widow and raised her daughter Andrea with all of her own feminist values. Annie, however, gets very lost, and roams the world trying out drugs and men and looking for…
The Invisible Mountain is an epic debut novel by Caroilina de Robertis. Although it is fiction, it is based on factual accounts of Uruguay’s history. It is the family saga of three generations of Uruguayan women, spanning the 20th century. Pajarita, the grandmother, Eva, her daughter and Salome her grandaughter. These are all strong women living in difficult times in Uruguay, often in the midst of poverty and oppression, war, revolution and prison. But the spirit of all 3 women miraculously…
I loved The Outside Boy by Jeanne Cummins. This is a wonderful novel about Irish Travellers or Pavees, often referred to as Tinkers. The book is about their nomadic culture that is rapidly coming to an end in Ireland. These are people who have lived this way for centuries, but are now on the fringes of society and looked down upon by settled “buffers.” The story is told by 11 year old Christy, a Pavee gypsy roaming with his father and…
I absolutely loved this memoir-Just Kids by Patti Smith. It probably helps to start off as a big fan of Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe, but in the end I’m not sure if that even matters. I saw Patti Smith about 20 years ago, reading her poetry and playing her songs on just an acoustic guitar with no back up. She was hypnotic. Someone in the audience behind me kept yelling “Tell us about Mapplethorpe!” and I know she heard…
The new novel Claude & Camille- A novel of Monet, by Stephanie Cowell is my favorite type of historical fiction. Cowell has taken us on a journey with Claude Monet during his early years as a struggling artist in Paris. Here he meets the lovely Camille Doncieux who comes from an upper class family, but decides to go against her family’s wishes to live a poor, bohemian lifestyle with Monet and his friends. This is such a creatively rich time in Paris…
I love historical fiction, especially when it is based on strong women, so I was really looking forward to reading Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay. This is the story of Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann, and her relationship with Johannes Brahms. Clara was a much more accomplished pianist than her husband and toured all over the world playing concerts in the 1850’s, while raising eight children. However, after reading the book, I don’t feel like I…
A Thread of Sky is a beautiful debut novel by Deanna Fei. This is the story of six very strong Chinese and Chinese/American women-three sisters, their mother, aunt and grandmother all travelling on a tour of China together to find a connection that has been lost between them. It is a different journey for each of them, yet they are all united in a way they never have been before. The sisters are each struggling with their own issues after the death…