I have listened to this one-hour audiobook three times now and have grown to love it more each time. It is a sad story with warm loving characters. I will begin with a SPOILER ALERT; after all, I am writing to revisit what I loved about the book and it’s hard to go far without revelations in this case. It is written from the point of view of a child and begins with her being driven to stay...
It was my enjoyment of Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that took me to this 2014 book of hers which has been made into a movie. It’s a little tough to imagine that a cranky literary snob who owns a failing bookstore could be made a sympathetic character. Throw in the tragic death of his wife, the theft of a rare book, and an abandoned baby on his doorstep, and things can...
It was a NYT review that took me to this book. Julian tells us—in surprising detail—about his life as a Black man who lives in that very White city, Portland, Oregon. Christian faith was important in his family and he had gone to a Christian college. When we meet him at age 24, he has given up his teaching job, ended his marriage, rejected his Christian belief, and moved to the West Coast. What...
I was not expecting to be so enthralled by a novel about people who create video games, a topic I know nothing about. The characters might have been involved in any undertaking where a combination of talent, luck, and hard work can result in a big reward and great recognition within that field. It was the unique connections among the characters that made it such an appealing story. Sam and Sadie...
Agnès, the adult narrator, begins by recounting that this book is her telling the story of Fabienne, her childhood friend. They were young teens in postwar rural France, in Saint Rémy, where Fabienne dropped out of school at age 11 to herd animals while Agnès continued in school. It is Fabienne who dominates, with her cruel games and her declarations that Agnès is an idiot. Fabienne will pet an...
This is the second of Laura Lippman’s books I’ve written about, and like Lady in the Lake it has many of the characteristics of the Tess Monaghan detective series I’ve listened to, as well as qualities that set it apart. Tess even makes an appearance in this one, but finds the location so creepy she won’t take the job. The main character is a successful author who has...
This is my third novel by Urrea and it has opened a new dimension of this author for me. One of his previous books, The House of Broken Angels, was an affectionate portrait of an extended Mexican-American family in San Diego; I’ve read that one of the angels was based on Urrea himself. This book centers on the experience of a woman who grew up in the New York area and dispensed coffee and...
Now I’ve read four books by Jennifer Johnston and continue to be impressed by her work. This one was shortlisted for the Booker prize. She is not a well-known writer outside Ireland and without Reading Matters I would not have known about her. In the first book I read by her, The Gingerbread Woman, the main character declares to a visitor that there will be no talk of “the...
I listened to this book having recently read Künstlers in Paradise that I liked so much. This one was about an interesting family dynamic. I will be restrained about plot revelations because those revelations were my favorite part of the book. Fin was so-named because after his birth, his father wandered into a theatre showing a French film that was just ending. He was clear that this son would...
Lynne Olson has found another brave and impressive woman to write about. I was enthusiastic about Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, about a resistance warrior in World War II, as well as Citizens of London. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, born in 1913, became an Egyptologist for the Louvre in the mid-1930s. She was a rare, perhaps unique, female figure in digs and was unusual in making good...