I think it was the New York Times review that took me to this book. It was pleasant to be transported to Jamaica where we meet the loving Auntie Della. Christopher, a young artist recently bereaved was sent to her by his agent Stephen who had been plucked out of an orphanage by her when he was young. With her healing care, especially those hearty breakfasts, Christopher broadens his horizon to...
This has been the most enjoyable book I’ve read in a long time. This is my fourth Jennifer Johnston book, thanks to Reading Matters. The books are quite different from each other and I love them all. One piece of business they have in common is an interesting use of sound. In one book an echo across a lake came up several times, in another Christmas carols broke out from time to time. In...
Because I loved the Neapolitan quartet by Ferrante, I didn’t hesitate to read this new book of hers. Along with intense and detailed consideration of the thoughts and actions of each party to any interaction between characters, her quartet placed those actions and thoughts in historical and moral context. I was disappointed that I didn’t see much of either framework in this one. But...
When this book came out, I was moved to read Bennett’s previous book The Mothers and admired it; this one deserves the attention it has received. It is centered on the story of twins who came from a village in Louisiana populated by Black people with very light skin. They preferred to avoid those with darker skin while they were themselves subject to the oppression of whites. The story...
The developments in the lives of three teenager siblings is the heart of this book; their lives change when they discover a boy who had been knifed and left to die in a field. Their discovery saved his life. The three are Matthew, 18, Zoe, 16, and Duncan, 14 and they live in a village near Oxford in a comfortable and loving family. While the knifing is a key event and we do learn about the...
This turned out to be an excellent book for these times. A post in A Life in Books about Japanese novels tells that it features an elderly woman who had Hansen’s Disease (formerly known as leprosy) as a young teenager and spent her life confined to a sanatorium though she had recovered. Even after the law was changed allowing former patients to leave, Tokue had no home to go to, and her...
It was the pleasure Tony experienced in recognizing the setting of this book as his own alma mater that drew me to the book. What kept me reading is a little less certain. I did keep reading, despite thinking that the graduate student life of these friends does not resemble the real life of graduate students as I know them. But then the “real life’ referred to in the title is life...
I read somewhere that this book grew out of a fantasy of the author when he learned that his grandfather and Lucille Ball had both attended an event hosted by Fred Trump. The fantasy involved a kiss between strangers and later…..well, more. Though I knew this book was not a factual biography of Lucille Ball, still, time with that amazing woman seemed a good idea. And the bonus of a fantasy...
While I was reading Jesmyn Ward’s book, Sing, Unburied, Sing, I sometimes woke up at night worried about one or another of her characters. All her characters seem fully human and you care for them, even those whose actions are reprehensible. In Salvage the Bones, Katrina is in the background looming over all the action. Along with tardy and sometimes disastrous preparations for the...
One of my favorite books from 2017 was One Fine Day by this author. She wrote for nearly 50 years for The New Yorker and her writing there informed many about wartime in London. This is one of her early books and is somewhat autobiographical, though the marriage she describes is not her own. The narrator Nevis is a young woman who has published two novels and falls in love with an unsuitable man...