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Things I want My Daughters to Know/Elizabeth Noble

Thank You for All Things/Sandra Kring

The Year of Fog/Michelle Richmond

This was well-written and compelling. I couldn't put it down and read it in one weekend. I have never been one to skip ahead to see how a book turns out but I was highly tempted. Highly recommendable. The author uses scientific research on the power of human memory to layer the story with more depth yet the chapters are short and easy to read.

The Book of Bright Ideas/Sandra Kring

Finally some literary fiction. I've been reading a lot of light stuff that I just couldn't fall in love with. This is a great story that is well written and is filled with likable and relatable characters. It reminded me of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, this time with a 9-year-old heroine.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons/Lorna Landvik

I read this a few years ago, one of the earlier novels about a woman's book group.

Heirloom: Notes From An Accidental Tomato Farmer/Tim Stark

The Wednesday Sisters/Meg Waite Clayton

Certain Girls/Jennifer Weiner

Keeping Faith/Jodi Picoult

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club/Gil Mc Neil

Another Mother's Life/Rowan Coleman

The Accidental Mother/Rowan Coleman

Deep in the Green/Anne Raver

Gardening essays

Love in the Present Tense/Catherine Ryan Hyde

The Time Travelers Life/Audrey Niffenegger

The Reading Group/Elizabeth Noble

Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me/Karen Karbo

Knit Two/Kate Jacobs

The sequel to the number-one New York Times bestseller The Friday Night Knitting Club, KNIT TWO returns to Walker and Daughter, the Manhattan knitting store founded by Georgia Walker and her young daughter, Dakota. Dakota is now an eighteen-year-old freshman at NYU, running the little yarn shop part-time with help from the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club.

Drawn together by the sense of family the club has created, the knitters rely on one another as they struggle with new challenges: for Catherine, finding love after divorce; for Darwin, the hope for a family; for Lucie, being both a single mom and a caregiver for her elderly mother; and for seventysomething Anita, a proposal of marriage from her sweetheart, Marty, that provokes the objections of her grown children.

As the club's projects-an afghan, baby booties, a wedding coat-are pieced together, so is their understanding of the patterns underlying the stresses and joys of being mother, wife, daughter, and friend. Because it isn't the difficulty of the garment that makes you a great knitter: it's the care and attention you bring to the craft-as well as how you adapt to surprises. --synopsis from barnesandnoble.com

Synopsis

Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty. Coming from a family with a literal skeleton in their closet, she's developed this talent all her life, whether helping her willful mother to smooth over the reality of her family's ugly past, or elevating humble scraps of unwanted fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts.

Her sister Thalia, an impoverished "Actress" with a capital A, is her opposite, and prides herself in exposing the lurid truth lurking behind life's everyday niceties. And while Laurel's life was neatly on track, a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in lovely suburban Victorianna, everything she holds dear is thrown into question the night she is visited by an apparition in her bedroom. The ghost appears to be her 14-year-old neighbor Molly Dufresne, and when Laurel follows this ghost , she finds the real Molly floating lifeless in her swimming pool. While the community writes the tragedy off as a suicide, Laurel can't. Reluctantly enlisting Thalia's aid, Laurel sets out on a life-altering investigation that triggers startling revelations about her own guarded past, the truth about her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming. --synopsis from barnedandnoble.com

Julia's Chocolates/Cathy Lamb

From Publishers Weekly
The quirky debut romance from Lamb opens as Julia Bennett flees the Boston altar where her blueblood abuser fiancé, Robert Stanfield III, awaits her. She leaves her wedding gown in a North Dakota tree, and arrives in the tiny town of Golden, Oregon to take refuge with her beloved Aunt Lydia. As Julia slowly returns to a semblance of normalcy, Lydia's eccentric friends soon become Julia's near and dear as well: minister's wife Lara, psychic Caroline and abused wife Katie all have their own hidden pains, to which Julia can relate. Robert, who hit her and made her feel bad about her body, is never far from her thoughts, nor is her incapacitating "Dread Disease"-a feeling of panic she can't name. The dialogue is funny and bawdy: "Don't cry, love! You escaped a life's prison sentence with King Prick." Julia's struggles with people's interest in her chocolate-making, and in her person, make her a winningly flawed heroine, and there is well-deserved come-uppance for abusers of all types.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This is definitely chick-lit in that it is whole-heartedly about female empowerment. However the domestic violence aspect makes it a little dark and graphic in places. Both traits I don't usually associate with chick-lit. Overall, I did find it and an entertaining read.

Raising Hope/Katie Willard

Synopsis

"There couldn't have been two more dissimilar girls in the town of Ridley Falls, New Hampshire. Ruth Teller, raised by a hardworking single mother, barely scraped through high school before she settled into a minimum-wage job. Sara Lynn Hoffman, doted upon by her well-to-do parents, graduated class valedictorian before conquering college and law school. Their paths shouldn't have crossed again, but life threw them some curveballs and now they are sharing a house...and more. Together, they are raising a girl named Hope, who came into their lives as an infant and changed everything." "Set in the summer of Hope's twelfth year and moving back and forth in time, this is the story of an unlikely family. It's the story of Hope, on the edge of growing up and yearning to find out everything she can about her birth parents. It's also the story of Ruth and Sara Lynn - the girls they once were and the women they've become. Finally, it's the story of Aimee, Sara Lynn's mother, and Mary, Ruth's mother - both of whom formed their daughters for better and for worse." Told from the perspectives of four unique female voices from three generations, this debut novel is about mothers, daughters, and the power of family love.

--from barnesandnoble.com

I picked this up at the library before realizing I had already read it. I went ahead and read it again as it was an easy, "feel-good" read. This was precisely the reason I began blogging the books I read.

The Richest Season/Maryann McFadden

Publishers Weekly

A quirky charm takes the place of easy answers in this midlife tear-up, originally self-published by debut author McFadden. A neglected corporate wife for 25 years, Joanna Harrison rebels when husband Paul receives yet another move-necessitating promotion. Before they go, with her children grown, Joanna gets in her car and leaves their upscale Jersey digs. Ending up at Pawley's Island, S.C., Joanna meets Grace, an elderly artist who has a house on the ocean and needs a live-in companion. A floundering Paul heads to Pawley Island to try to woo Joanna back, but soon has further crises to face. Skillful plotting keeps pages turning, and McFadden quickly has readers rooting for intriguing Joanna, on the cusp of change.

Time of My Life/Allison Winn Scotch

A cute read about the what-ifs and if-onlys of the road not taken. Heard about it in Family Circle magazine.

Nice to Come Home To/Rebecca Flowers

I picked this up on the new books shelf at the local library branch. I'm always so tickled when I find a title this way and then wind up loving it.

I liked this almost as much as Love Walked In. A nice little chick-lit book, it is an easy read, yet the characters had considerable depth. Thanks Rebecca.

Little Earthquakes/Jennifer Weiner

This was a sequel to Good In Bed. I liked it a little better. Could relate more to it I guess as the main characters were new mothers and I remember those days well.

Good In Bed/Jennifer Weiner

I finished this in November.

After seeing the movie version of "In Her Shoes" by the same author, I expected this to be better. It was formulaic and predictable in a my-father-never-loved-me-therefore-I-don't-love-myself-therefore-I-make-poor-choices-regarding-men way. It's definitely chick-lit, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I am all for chick-lit. This was kind of a plus-sized girl's "Sex in the City." I was attracted to it and intrigued by it in a vicarious thrill seeking way. The heroine is a twenty-something single girl working at a newspaper which is something I once was (though, not as lucky to have a plum assignment like entertainment reporter at a large east coast daily)so I couldn't resist. It turns out I could also relate to her in the father abandonment department also. While I could thoroughly feel her pain and am prone to histrionics myself, I was surprised that I found the character to be somewhat melodramatic. Final words, it wasn't awful. I thought it was just okay and was disappointed a little since I had expected a little more from the author. Of course this was the author's first book, so I feel like a heel being critical.