It was the NYT review that took me to this book; that review referred to the “traumatic family secret” of the young woman Saoirse, an American who made her way to Ireland in 1990. So, SPOILER ALERT, here’s that secret: it’s a book about the trafficking of children to move drugs in the US and this young woman’s escape to Ireland. I’m afraid that makes the book...
I was drawn to this book when I learned it featured a student of music from Indiana University in the 1970s who grew up in East Tennessee and moved back there. Having lived for a time in both places, I was interested. For me it was Knoxville in the late 1960s and Bloomington in the 1970s. Livia, the main character, grew up in a troubled family in the hills of East Tennessee and escaped by way of...
I am writing about this book even though I didn’t finish it, something I rarely do. It was a library audiobook and I couldn’t renew it because others were waiting for it. The book is really an art history book; it has a flimsy premise that allows the author to give a thorough take on 52 works of art from the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay through the eyes of a ten year old and her...
This is Earl’s latest book and the third one of his that I have read. Mr. Booklog and I knew him slightly when he rented an apartment in our friend’s house after winning a grant and we found him delightful. I was enthralled by the two books of his that I have read, and one of them, Auto Biography, was reviewed here twice: by my brother and by me. So though I haven’t seen him in...
The author says that a re-run of the I Love Lucy, which was on television from 1951 to 1957, is on somewhere in the world at any time. Its fame is not limited to those who saw it as it ran; my 12-year-old granddaughter knows the candy-factory episode. I just watched it again on YouTube and it remains funny and appealing. In the Prologue Purdum spells out Desi and Lucy’s strengths clearly:...
Another wonderful book. I quickly came to love and care for the main character, Magnolia. When the book opens, she is crawling around on the sticky floor of a restaurant in a mall in Miami to avoid being shot by a young man intent on destroying as many people as possible. She and the others in the restaurant hear more gunfire, then instructions by police getting them out of the building. She is...
Like the last book I wrote about, this is a memoir by a woman. Catherine Coldstream’s background is about as different from Emilee Hackney’s as possible. Her father, Sir William Coldstream, born in 1908 (same year as my father), was a well-known British painter and taught at the Slade School of Arts and Crafts, which flourished under him. Catherine is one of three children from his...
I can hardly find the words to say how much this book has brought to me. It’s a self-revelatory book and lets us into this person’s effort to understand her own thinking as a teen and young adult. I first learned about it from a local story that about this young woman who grew up in the former coal country of Tazewell County in Southwest Virginia. She now lives in Nelson County and...
I listened to this 2022 memoir after I saw it listed as one of the ten best books of that year by both the NYT and The Washington Post. Having read a review of it, I knew it focused on a college friendship the author had at Berkeley in the 1990s with a fellow student who was tragically killed by carjackers. After listening to it, I read about the author and learned he is a professor of English at...
Some months ago Reading Matters posted the names of books shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the year award. This is the third one of that list I have read. A young Irish woman working on costumes for a theatre production in London tells her story set over a short period in 2002. Mairéad has made her way to a job in London. While she worked to escape her life in Ireland, she misses it too...