I loved Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, so I thought I’d read one of her earlier novels. Affinity is a Victorian Era crime mystery lesbian love story set in a women’s prison in London. Waters is an amazing storyteller, there were so many twists and turns, by the end I felt like I needed to read it all over again to see what I had missed. Not as good as Paying Guests, but Waters is such a brilliant writer it…
Dietland by Sarai Walker seems at first to be a light comedy, but quickly becomes quite subversive, a feminist call to arms. Plum, an overweight woman about to have surgery to release the skinny woman inside her has been struggling with her weight her whole life. Everything in her life gets turned upside down when she finds herself being followed by a mysterious girl in colorful tights and combat boots. From there she becomes involved with all kinds of women…
All the Stars in the Heavens by Adriana Trigiani is historical fiction based on the Golden Years of Hollywood in the 1930s. Trigiani reimagines the love affair between Clark Gable and Loretta Young and the daughter they had together that they hid from the world. I enjoy Trigiani’s novels, her characters, her storytelling and all the rich details she fills in the scenes with. This is not my favorite of her books, however. Much of the way she painted the…
Mobile Library by David Whitehouse is a novel about a group of misfits who somehow write their own story and become a family while traveling through England and Scotland in a huge Mobile Library. It’s a wonderful little book for all those who love stories and always imagined they could be the protagonist of a great adventure story. Funny, sweet, and entertaining; full of great characters, a good read.
Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal is a novel that really has very little to do with kitchens of the mid-west. We meet Eva Thorvald, the protagonist when she is just a six month old baby and can’t get enough heirloom tomatoes at the Farmers Market. However, from there the book jumps around so much and introduces so many other characters, with Eva often on the periphery, we never get to know her deeply, understand, or care…
The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild, the first woman chair of the National Gallery in London, is a wonderfully original and very funny novel about the absurdity of the London art market and the world’s mega-rich who will do anything to own the latest hot painting. It tells the story of Annie, a young chef, caught up in the madness by mistake and in a clever twist, many of the chapters are voiced by the painting itself. Well written,…
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…