Good Reads

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2009-10-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

See: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1559666

Things I want My Daughters to Know/Elizabeth Noble

2009-09-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

Thank You for All Things/Sandra Kring

2009-09-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Year of Fog/Michelle Richmond

2009-08-31T15:03:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Wednesday Sisters/Meg Waite Clayton

2009-08-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

Certain Girls/Jennifer Weiner

2009-08-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Keeping Faith/Jodi Picoult

2009-08-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

Another Mother's Life/Rowan Coleman

2009-08-04T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Accidental Mother/Rowan Coleman

2009-08-04T15:33:00.001-07:00

Deep in the Green/Anne Raver

2009-08-04T15:29:00.001-07:00

Gardening essays

Love in the Present Tense/Catherine Ryan Hyde

2009-08-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

The Time Travelers Life/Audrey Niffenegger

2009-08-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

The Reading Group/Elizabeth Noble

2009-08-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me/Karen Karbo

2009-08-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Knit Two/Kate Jacobs

2009-02-28T19:13:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-28T18:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-28T18:37:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-15T16:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

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.

A Thousand Splendid Suns/Khaled Hosseini

2008-10-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book very much. It gave me some perspective on a part of the world I shamefully admit I know little about.

As a reader who infrequently reads male authors, I was happily surprised at how well Hosseini captured his female characters.

I know that sounds discriminatory but with so many books out there, one has to narrow it down somehow. (Other male authors I admire for their ability to write women characters are Wally Lamb -- who could forget She's Come Undone? -- and Chris Bohjalian The Law of Similars and Midwives.)

The Amateur Gourmet/Adam D. Roberts

2008-09-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

A young law student ponders his future and food claiming that discovering his inner foodie helped save him.

After admitting he is ill-suited to a career in law, Adam Roberts has an epiphany about life.

The result is this book and his food blog of the same name. He shares his journey and encourages others to embrace their hunger for life as well as food.

Along the way he consults some big names in food writing but overall his musings seem, well I'm sorry to say, rather amateur.

Belong to Me/Marisa de los Santos

2008-09-27T18:36:00.000-07:00

I did not like this as much as the author's first book which featured the same protagonist. It seemed like there were too many voices and I would put it down when the voice changed to a character I found less interesting. I really thought I would love this as I had the author's first book, Love Walked In. The main character was just so cool, hip, urban, young, artsy, smart and kind. Here she settles down, moves to the suburbs and starts a family. She is just as likable, just not as interesting. While there was a plot twist that you don't really see coming, it did not have as much of an impact as the same technique did in the first novel. If you've read Love Walked In this is worth taking a look at but as a stand alone I'd pass it up.

And She Was/Cindy Dyson

2008-09-06T11:26:00.001-07:00

Bones to Ashes/Kathy Reichs

2008-09-06T11:16:00.000-07:00

Love Walked In/Marisa de los Santos

2008-09-03T11:12:00.001-07:00

Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant:confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone/edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

2008-09-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Comfort Food/Kate Jacobs

2008-09-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Time Is a River/Mary Alice Monroe

2008-08-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly

Monroe delivers another novel of strong Southern women, and though this one has its share of weak moments, the author's love for her characters is palpable throughout. Mia Landan, a cancer survivor, returns to Charleston after a fly-fishing retreat and finds her husband in bed with another woman. Shocked, Mia rushes back to the mountains where she'd been fishing and seeks the help of fly fisherman Belle Carson, who offers her the use of a ramshackle cabin for the summer. Upon Mia's first trip into town, she learns why the cabin looks like it hasn't been opened in years-it's where Kate Watkins, Belle's grandmother, allegedly murdered her lover. But after Mia conveniently finds Kate's diary tucked away in the cabin, she becomes determined to get to the bottom of things, despite Belle's warnings not to stir up the mud. Through a series of occasionally contrived diary entries, flashbacks and folksy recollections from locals, the narrative juxtaposes Kate's story with Mia's self-discovery, and while the predictable ending results from implausibly convenient plot twists, Monroe's fans will still enjoy the author's spin on love, mystery and the power of self-determination. (July 2008)

Also by this author:

The Book Club

Publishers Weekly

Monroe's new novel opens as five friends, all members of a monthly book club, face turning points in their lives. Eve's husband dies suddenly, shattering her comfortable lifestyle, while Midge's mother makes an unannounced and unwelcomed reappearance. Annie finally feels ready to have a child, only to find her health and her marriage in jeopardy. Gabriella strains to make ends meet after her husband is laid off; Doris slides into depression as she tries to deny signs of her husband's infidelity. Sometimes close to and sometimes at odds with each other, the friends struggle to face harsh realities and, in the process, gain new independence. The actual book club of the title plays an oddly small role in this celebration of friendship and growth--the books the club reads are mentioned only briefly and often seem irrelevant to the women's struggles. Still, Monroe offers up believable characters in a well-crafted story.

Songs Without Words/Ann Packer

2008-08-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

From www.bn.com:

Synopsis

Liz and Sarabeth were girlhood neighbors in the suburbs of Northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth's mother. In the decades that followed, their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz's adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters, the women's friendship takes a devastating turn, forcing Liz and Sarabeth to question their most deeply held beliefs about their connection. From the bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier, Songs Without Words is the gripping story of a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point.

Almost Moon/Alice Sebold

2008-08-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

From www.bn.com:

Synopsis

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

So begins The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's astonishing, brilliant, and daring new novel. A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this unforgettable work by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky.

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined.

Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers; the meaning of devotion; and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.

About the Author
Alice Sebold is the bestselling author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky: A Memoir. She lives in California with her husband, the novelist Glen David Gold.

The Quilter's Apprentice/Jennifer Chiaverini

2008-07-15T01:22:00.000-07:00

Predictable. Amateurish. Spawned about twenty sequels and companion books that include volumes with recipes and quilt patterns. This story center's around a quilting group that gathers weekly to share tales of life, love etc. Yada, yada, yada. Similar in format to The Friday Night Knitting Club and The Knitting Circle. The story was good but it was sparsely written. Publisher's Weekly says of Chiaverini "her prose is merely serviceable and the dialogue is stilted." Skip it unless there's nothing else available.

Frog Prince/Jane Porter

2008-07-15T01:13:00.000-07:00

Lighter than air. A girl from Fresno gets divorced, moves to San Fransisco and gets a job in event planning.

The Last Summer of You and Me/Ann Brashares

2008-07-15T01:01:00.000-07:00

The definition of summer reading. And it takes place on New York's Fire Island.

Garden Spells/Sarah Addison Allen

2008-05-16T20:17:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly

Two gifted sisters draw on their talents to belatedly forge a bond and find their ways in life in Allen's easygoing debut novel. Thirty-four-year-old Claire Waverley manifests her talent in cooking; using edible flowers, Claire creates dishes that "affect the eater in curious ways." But not all Waverley women embrace their gifts; some, including Claire's mother, escape the family's eccentric reputation by running away. She abandoned Claire and her sister when they were young. Consequently, Claire has remained close to home, unwilling to open up to new people or experiences. Claire's younger sister, Sydney, however, followed in their mother's footsteps 10 years ago and left for New York, and after a string of abusive, roustabout boyfriends, returns to Bascom, N.C., with her five-year-old daughter, Bay. As Sydney reacquaints herself with old friends and rivals, she discovers her own Waverley magic. Claire, in turn, begins to open up to her sister and in the process learns how to welcome other possibilities. Though Allen's prose can lean toward the pedestrian and the romance subplots feel perfunctory, the blending of horticultural folklore, the supernatural and a big dollop of Southern flavor should find favor with a wide swath of readers.

The Birth House/Ami McKay

2008-04-16T22:23:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly

Canadian radiojournalist McKay was unable to ferret out the life story of late midwife Rebecca Steele, who operated a Nova Scotia birthing center out of McKay's Bay of Fundy house in the early 20th century; the result of her unsatisfied curiousity is this debut novel. McKay writes in the voice of shipbuilder's daughter, Dora Rare, "the only daughter in five generations of Rares," who as a girl befriends the elderly and estranged Marie Babineau, long the local midwife (or traiteur), who claims to have marked Dora out from birth as her successor.

After initial reluctance and increasingly intensive training, 17-year-old Dora moves in with Marie; on the eve of Dora's marriage to Archer Bigelow, Marie disappears, leaving Dora her practice. A difficult marriage, many difficult births, a patient's baby thrust on her to raise without warning and other crises (including WWI and the introduction of "clinical" birthing methods) ensue.

Period advertisments, journal entries and letters to and from various characters give Dora's voice context. The book is more about the texture of Dora's life than plot, and McKay handles the proceedings with winning, unsentimental care. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Peony in Love/Lisa See

2007-08-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly

Set in 17th-century China, See's fifth novel is a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, a family saga and a work of musical and social history. As Peony, the 15-year-old daughter of the wealthy Chen family, approaches an arranged marriage, she commits an unthinkable breach of etiquette when she accidentally comes upon a man who has entered the family garden. Unusually for a girl of her time, Peony has been educated and revels in studying The Peony Pavilion, a real opera published in 1598, as the repercussions of the meeting unfold. The novel's plot mirrors that of the opera, and eternal themes abound: an intelligent girl chafing against the restrictions of expected behavior; fiction's educative powers; the rocky path of love between lovers and in families. It figures into the plot that generations of young Chinese women, known as the lovesick maidens, became obsessed with The Peony Pavilion, and, in a Werther-like passion, many starved themselves to death. See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, etc.) offers meticulous depiction of women's roles in Qing and Ming dynasty China (including horrifying foot-binding scenes) and vivid descriptions of daily Qing life, festivals and rituals. Peony's vibrant voice, perfectly pitched between the novel's historical and passionate depths, carries her story beautifully-in life and afterlife. (July)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Although it took me a few days to get into the story once I was hooked I found myself racing to the end. I loved this book.

Empress Orchid/Anchee Min

2007-08-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the heart of ancient China's Forbidden City to tell the fascinating story of a young concubine who becomes the nation's last empress. Min introduces the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid, and weaves an epic of a country girl who seized power through seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. When China is threatened by enemies, she alone seems capable of holding the country together.

Much like Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I devoured this in three days. 'Nuf said?

The Ghost at the Table/Suzanne Berne

2007-08-06T22:24:00.001-07:00

Sisters, living and dead, loom large in Berne's tale of family secrets unraveled. Cynthia Fiske writes a series of historical fiction for girls, depicting the lives of remarkable women through the eyes of their slightly less-remarkable sisters. An invitation to her own sister's house for Thanksgiving in New England coincides with her need to visit Mark Twain's home in Hartford to research a new novel on the writer's daughters, whose story of a charismatic father and three troubled siblings parallels the Fiskes' history. Complicating the usual holiday tensions is the presence of their elderly father, once brash and manipulative, now disabled and facing a divorce from his much-younger wife. As the family struggles with generations of dysfunction and unspoken secrets, including the mysterious death of their mother decades earlier, Cynthia rebels by sharing the most sordid details of the long-gone Clemens family. Although she is nearing middle age, her feelings of isolation and rejection that began in childhood have left her a perpetual adolescent in relation to her family.

The Friday Night Knitting Club/Kate Jacobs

2007-08-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

Between running her Manhattan yarn shop, Walker & Daughter, and raising her 12-year-old biracial daughter, Dakota, Georgia Walker has plenty on her plate in Jacobs's debut novel. But when Dakota's father reappears and a former friend contacts Georgia, Georgia's orderly existence begins to unravel. Her support system is her staff and the knitting club that meets at her store every Friday night, though each person has dramas of her own brewing.

I have to admit that I was drawn to this title mostly because of having read Ann Hood's The Knitting Circle. I found Hood's book the better of the two as The Friday Night Knitting Club had more of a soap opera feel to it and ended rather abruptly I thought.

Astrid and Veronika/Linda Olsson

2007-08-06T22:03:00.000-07:00

This debut novel recounts the unusual and unexpected friendship that develops between two women. Veronika, a young writer from New Zealand, rents a house in a small Swedish village as she tries to come to terms with a recent tragedy while also finishing a novel. Her arrival is silently observed by Astrid, an older, reclusive neighbor who slowly becomes a presence in Veronika's life, offering comfort in the form of companionship and lovingly prepared home-cooked meals. Set against a haunting Swedish landscape, Astrid & Veronika is a lyrical and meditative novel of love and loss.

Ordinary Life:Stories/Elizabeth Berg

2007-07-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

Berg is one of my favorite authors and this compilation of short stories doesn't disappoint. I particularly enjoyed Martin's Letter to Nan and the title story, Orinary Life: A Love Story. The first is the result of readers' queries to the author about characters from an earlier novel, Pull of the Moon one I really enjoyed. The latter is funny and touching at the same time.

Diagnosis Love/Maggie Leffler

2007-07-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

From the Publisher

Dr. Holly Campbell is trying to outrun the symptoms of her life: her grief over her mother’s recent death, her chronic missteps at love, and, most of all, the doubts she’s had about her career since she started resenting her patients for being sick. So answering an ad for a residency program in rural England seems like the perfect escape.

By leaving home, Holly is following in her mother’s footsteps. But while her mother fled to medical school on Grenada, Holly has come to an odd little English hospital–where fate intervenes. For Holly no sooner learns that practicing medicine in England is like driving on the wrong side of the road than her twin brother’s runaway fiancée shows up on her doorstep, her grade-school crush turns up in her dormitory, and her mother’s old lover appears at lunch. How can Holly cure their ailments if she can’t even diagnose her own? Filled with the heartbreaking and healing powers of love, The Diagnosis of Love is the witty, warm, perceptive tale of a young doctor colliding with the past–and choosing her own future.

After purchasing a couple of books that haven't hooked me yet, I turned to the library catalog new purchase list for incentive. The title intrigued me and so far it is interesting enough to wile away these dog days of summer.

Abide In Me/Elizabeth Strout

2007-07-03T16:06:00.001-07:00

From the Publisher
In the late 1950s, in the small town of West Annett, Maine, a minister struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. At the same time, the community he has served so charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings-faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment-when a dark secret is revealed.
Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett, "just up the road" from where he was born. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe-as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was. He hasn't had The Feeling-that God is all around him, in the beauty of the world-for quite some time. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy.
A congregation that had once been patient and kind during Tyler's grief now questions his leadership and propriety. In the kitchens, classrooms, offices, and stores of the village, anger and gossip have started to swirl. And in Tyler's darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation's humanity-and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all.

This one is slow going. Started a few weeks ago, I have found the characters difficult to get close to.

The Knitting Circle/Ann Hood

2007-07-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

After the sudden loss of her only child, Stella, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle in Providence, Rhode Island, as a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days, not knowing that it will change her life. Alice, Scarlet, Lulu, Beth, Harriet, and Ellen welcome Mary into their circle despite her reluctance to open her heart to them. Each woman teaches Mary a new knitting technique, and, as they do, they reveal to her their own personal stories of loss, love, and hope. Eventually, through the hours they spend knitting and talking together, Mary is finally able to tell her own story of grief, and in so doing reclaims her love for her husband, faces the hard truths about her relationship with her mother, and finds the spark of life again.

More good summer reading. Interesting portrait of the trials and tribulations of a group of strong and colorful women.

Sleep Toward Heaven/Amanda Eyre Ward

2007-07-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Amanda Eyre Ward's debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer.

In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant librarian, mourns her murdered husband.

Over the course of the summer, fate pushes these eerily recognizable women together, culminating in a revelation of the possibility of faith, the responsibility of friendship, and the value of life. Sleep Toward Heaven is a luminous story of murder and desire, solitude and grace -- a rare literary page-turner where redemption seems perpetually within arm's reach.

I read this last summer I think. Good summer read that makes you think.

Happiness Sold Separately/Lolly Winston

2007-04-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

This was a soap opera and not a very good one at that. I had trouble really sympathizing with the characters. Overall, they were melodramatic and the story was maudlin to begin with. There were times when Elinor seemed more interesting, like when she communed with the tree on her front lawn and spent time with her best friend and next-door neighbor. I'd categorize this as a light read for its writing style, but as I said, the subject matter was a downer.

From the Publisher:

Elinor Mackey has lived her life in perfect order: college, law school, marriage, successful corporate career. But suddenly her world is falling apart. In her late 30s, she's discovered that she and her podiatrist husband, Ted, can't have children. When Elinor withdraws from Ted into an interior world of heartbreak and anger, Ted begins an affair with Gina, the nutritionist at their gym--a young woman with an oddball son who adores Ted. Meanwhile, Elinor falls in love with the oak tree in her front yard, spreading out her sleeping bag to sleep under the stars. Gina's jealous ex-boyfriend--a charming alcoholic with a mean streak--becomes a dark presence as his passion turns to violence. Ted, who may be the only one who can help Gina and her son, suddenly finds himself in love with two women at the same time. In the tradition of Anne Tyler, John Cheever, and Tom Perotta, Winston's second novel looks beyond the manicured surface of suburbia to a world of loss, longing, lust, and betrayal.

Author Biography: LOLLY WINSTON lives in Los Gatos, California.

Skylight Confessions/Alice Hoffman

2007-04-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been a huge Alice Hoffman for years. Open this book and by the time you finish the first page you are transported. Hoffman's style is mesmerizing. This story kept me captivated though the ending was somewhat unsatisfying. Yet it is perhaps Hoffman's goal that we are left to speculate what ultimately happens to the story's final generation.

From the Publisher

A stunning new novel about three generations of a family haunted by love from the bestselling author of Practical Magic and Here on Earth.

Arlyn Singer believes in destiny and in love.

But fate seems to be playing a trick on the night when John Moody knocks on her door to ask for directions. Opposites who cannot understand each other, they are drawn to one another even when it's clear they're bound to bring each other grief. Their marriage is dangerous territory, tracing a map no one should follow. It leads them and their children to the Connecticut countryside, the avenues in Manhattan, the blue waters of the Long Island Sound, all in a search for family and identity.

There is Sam, the brilliant explosive artist who is drawn to self-destruction and dreams. Blanca, the beautiful loner who tries desperately to protect her brother from his destiny and lives her own life in a world of books. And Will, the grandson, who is left a legacy of broken pieces he needs to put together, an emotional and mysterious puzzle made up of people who don't know the first thing about love.

Here is a family so real, so tragic, so devoted it is as if they have written their own riveting history--a quest for love and truth. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS is a luminous and elegant work of true originality. No one who reads this novel will ever forget it or look at their own family in quite the same way.

About the Author: Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of 18 acclaimed novels, including The Ice Queen, Practical Magic, Here on Earth, The River King, Blue Diary, Illumination Night, Turtle Moon, Seventh Heaven, and At Risk. She lives outside Boston.

The Strangeness of Beauty/Lydia Yuri Minatoya

2007-03-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Description: When Etsuko Sone's sister dies in childbirth in Seattle's shabby Japantown, love for the precocious child catapults Etsuko back across the Pacific and into the austere samurai household of her mysterious mother, Chie - a woman who rejected Etsuko at birth. The dubious reconciliation is for the sake of little Hanae, that she might learn her Fuji heritage and the Zen lessons of humility, dignity, self-discipline, and grace. In Japan, Etsuko is the ultimate outsider: a returning emigrant in a land she left years before; a common woman thrust into a house of secrets and riches; a childless mother and a motherless daughter. As Etsuko and Hanae do their often quite comic best to adapt to life within Chie's samurai household, Japan is changing in dangerous ways. Worldwide economic strife strips Japan's people of food and clothing even as wartime preparations strip them of information and freedoms. Chie and Etsuko greet the mounting militarism with resistance, and when the imperial army cuts cruelly into Chinese Manchuria, accusations of treachery, of antipatriotism, begin to rain on the Fuji household. It is then that the women realize their separate independence is their common bond. It is then that Etsuko finds hidden strength to pursue meaning and beauty in a situation beyond her control.

Recipes For A Perfect Marriage/Morag Prunty

2007-02-23T17:25:00.000-08:00

Description: Afraid she is too old to wait for "The One," successful 38-year-old food writer Tressa Nolan marries the next man who asks her-her building super, amiable, kindly, not-very-educated Dan Mullins. Less than two months into her marriage, she realizes she does not love her husband, and never has. Horrified by his blue-collar habits, his desire to move from their Upper West Side apartment to Yonkers and his combative mother, Eileen, Tressa wishes desperately for the counsel of her late Irish grandmother, Bernadine, who taught her to cook and whose 50-year marriage to grandfather James seemed like the model of the perfect relationship. Along with old-fashioned recipes (e.g., Slow-Roasted Clove Ham and Honey Cake), Bernadine's tale, set in 1930s and '40s Ireland, is interspersed with Tressa's, in 2004 Manhattan. The two stories run parallel, each woman learning that as food too hurriedly made is inferior to its long-cooking counterpart, so the passionate love that immediately strikes the heart may be pale in comparison to the slow-growing, long-lasting love of marriage.

Comments: I read this a year ago and remember feeling it was very much a "romance novel" yet it had nuggets of truth worth pondering. I particularly liked the grandmother's story which is told in alternating chapters.

These Granite Islands/Sarah Stonich

2007-02-23T16:54:00.000-08:00

Description: In the small town of Cypress, Minnesota, Isobel, a former milliner, now an older woman on her deathbed, recalls the summer of 1936 -- a pivotal season that forever changed her life. That summer her husband, Victor, bought a remote island where he took their two young sons to vacation while Isobel slaved at home in her hat shop with her daughter, Louisa. When a striking, enigmatic woman named Cathryn enters the shop, she and Isobel forge a fast friendship, sharing intimacies and deep secrets. As Isobel says, "A person need only walk over your threshold and your life can become forever changed, lived under a different sky." Stonich weaves her story seamlessly between the present -- the elderly Isobel's hospital bed in the wake of a stroke -- and the past, where she acted as a lookout for Cathryn and her lover, Jack, a handsome forest ranger. But Cathryn and Jack not only hide but disappear that summer, culminating in a fiery mystery. Reflecting on that summer and beyond, Isobel examines her own tragic losses -- losses even more devastating than that of her friendship with Cathryn, forcing Isobel to view her life, her marriage, and her own choices in a new light.

Comments: I found this title while browsing at the library. After a solid start the story becomes a little slow in the middle and I found myself not liking the main character so much at that point in her life. It resumes a good pace later and I found myself racing to the end to solve the mystery of the lovers' disappearance.

Light On Snow/Anita Shreve

2007-02-19T18:23:00.001-08:00

Description: The events of a December afternoon, during which a father and his daughter find an abandoned infant in the snow, will forever alter the 11-year-old girl's understanding of the world and the adults who inhabit it: a father who has taken great pains to remove himself from society in order to put an unthinkable tragedy behind him; a young woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is exceeded only by his sense of justice.

Comments: This is the first book I've read by this author. The story is intriguing and true and holds the attention until the end but the conclusion falls short. Shreve seemed to wrap up the story too quickly and simply for my taste. This may be accountable to the fact that the narrator tells the story 20 years after the events occur. I'd recommend this title when you're looking for something to wile away a lazy, perhaps snowy, afternoon.

Rise and Shine/Anna Quindlen

2007-02-19T18:17:00.000-08:00

Two little words; that's all that's necessary to plunge Meghan Fitzmaurice into a major career disaster and life crisis. A pair of verboten words spoken impulsively into an open mike not only costs the morning-talk show star her job; it destabilizes her relationships and her sense of self-esteem. The effects of this personal earthquake extend even to Meghan's sister Bridget, a Bronx social worker who has always existed in the afterglow of Big Sis's glory.

This was a huge disappointment. The writing style was simplistic. The story was soap operatic. Black and Blue and One True Thing were much better reads. It's hard to believe this is even the same author.

When Madeline Was Young/Jane Hamilton

2007-02-19T18:09:00.000-08:00

Shortly after Aaron Maciver married Madeline, his wife suffered a debilitating brain injury that left her with mental capacity of a small child. Years later, Aaron remarries, but he and his new wife, Julia, refuse to leave Madeline stranded. They take her into their suburban Chicago home, caring for her and accepting her into their lives almost as a beloved child; during nights of high anxiety, she even shares their marriage bed. Decades later, their son, Mac, reflects on this unusual, even eerie ménage, pondering its effects on his parents and himself.

This was thoroughly engrossing. The subject matter so unique. I also loved Hamilton's Map of the World.

Each Little Bird That Sings/Deborah Wiles

2006-11-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Also a Young Adult title this story was at times exciting, sweet and wise.

Publisher's Description:
Ten-year-old Comfort Snowberger has attended 247 funerals. But that's not surprising, considering that her family runs the town funeral home. And even though Great-uncle Edisto keeled over with a heart attack and Great-great-aunt Florentine dropped dead--just like that--six months later, Comfort knows how to deal with loss, or so she thinks. She's more concerned with avoiding her crazy cousin Peach and trying to figure out why her best friend, Declaration, suddenly won't talk to her. Life is full of surprises. And the biggest one of all is learning what it takes to handle them.

A Step From Heaven/An Na

2006-11-08T14:49:00.000-08:00

From time to time I find myself choosing titles shelved in the Young Adult section. Here is one of many I encourage you not to miss.

A Step From Heaven/An Na
Publisher's Description:

The story of a Korean family that immigrates to California in search of a better life, only to find that the American Dream is harder to achieve than they thought. Told through the eyes of Young Ju, who is a preschooler when the book begins and a young woman heading off to college by the time it ends, A Step from Heaven is a moving and sometimes painful tale about cultural differences, family dynamics, and the struggle to survive.

As little Young Ju's plane leaves Korea and climbs high into the sky, she thinks she is headed for heaven. In a way, so do her parents, who believe that America will offer them big opportunities and a more heavenly lifestyle. But life is much harder than they anticipate, and both of Young Ju's parents must work multiple jobs just to make ends meet while they share a house with relatives. Disillusioned and ashamed, Young Ju's father tries to drown the harsh realities of his life in liquor, eventually descending into a pit of alcoholism that turns him emotionally and physically abusive.

Though the family as a unit doesn't adapt well, Young Ju adjusts quickly and soon excels in school. But the shame of her family's poverty and her father's worsening alcoholism leads to several lies and cover-ups that prevent her from ever fully embracing her new life. Caught between two cultures and increasingly isolated by the growing tension within her family, Young Ju eventually finds herself at a crossroads, forced to make a decision that will likely tear her family apart.

Some Things that Stay/Sarah Willis

2006-11-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across this one by chance at the library which prompted me to seek out the author’s other titles. “Some Things that Stay” is an accurate portrayal of family life. The narrator, Tamara, is a highly likeable character who tells her story with wit and sensitivity and without sentimentality.

Publisher’s Description:

Tamara Anderson's father is a landscape artist who quickly tires of the scenery, so every year her family seeks out new locations for his inspiration. When the Andersons move to a farmhouse in Sherman, New York, in the spring of 1954, fifteen-year-old Tamara and her mother want to settle down and make it home. Sherman begins to work a strange magic on Tamara and her siblings: there's the proselytizing family in the tar-paper house across the street; the dairy cow that becomes a beloved pet; the dead boy who used to live in Tamara's bedroom; her friend Brenda, who teaches her to swear; and Brenda's big brother, Rusty, an irresistible freckle-faced redhead. While Tamara experiences her first real year of happiness, her mother is diagnosed with tuberculosis, forcing her into a sanatorium. Tamara struggles with her desire to stay in Sherman, her fear of losing her mother, and her anger at being left in charge of two younger siblings while her father escapes into the world of his art.

The Sound of Us/Sarah Willis

2006-11-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

Though Alice has struggles like everyone else the story is more uplifting than “A Good Distance” also by Sarah Willis. The story has adventure, touches the heart and is true to life.

From the Publisher:

Alice Marlowe accepts her life the way it is. She is single, in her late forties, lives with a cat named Sampson, and has imaginary conversations with her dead twin brother. As a sign-language interpreter for the deaf, she is used to standing between people, facilitating their conversations with each other. But then a late-night phone call brings a beautiful, scared six-year-old girl into her life.

Author Biography: Sarah Willis, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, is also the author of A Good Distance, The Rehearsal and the New York Times Notable Book Some Things That Stay, which won the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction.

A Good Distance/Sarah Willis

2006-11-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

Two difficult subjects are covered – the aftermath of a parent and husband’s death and Alzheimer’s disease – and both are handled well. The story switches voices between mother and daughter and the writing from the mother’s point of view seemed like an accurate portrayal of what it might feel like to be in the shoes of an Alzheimer’s patient. The daughter, Jennifer, is seemingly desperate in her search for redemption from her mother for past transgressions as she races to her goal before time runs out and her mother no longer comprehends what she wants to say. The story of each the mother’s and daughter’s pasts were quite engaging. However reading this immediately after “You’re Not You” was hard due to similarly serious subject matter. Each book was so absorbing I have needed to take a few days off from reading to shake the dark shroud of the weighty subject matters. I don’t recommend reading these titles back-to-back.

From the Publisher

“A Good Distance” is a heartrending story about mothers and daughters doing their best to negotiate the distance between freedom and love.

Jennifer's mother, Rose, belongs in a home. At least that's what everyone else thinks. But Jennifer has walked away from her mother too many times already, and this is one duty she intends to fulfill herself. So she takes a leave of absence from her job and invites Rose to live with her and her family. Jennifer's teenage daughter and new husband can hardly tolerate Rose and her short temper, but Jennifer is desperate to know about the memories drifting in and out of her mother's reach, sometimes comforting her, sometimes tormenting her. Jennifer longs to use these memories to help rebuild her mother's life—to remind herself, and her mother, what went wrong, so she can ask for forgiveness—or is it the other way around?

Author Biography: Sarah Willis, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, is also the author of The Rehearsal and the New York Times Notable Book Some Things That Stay, which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction.

You're Not You/Michelle Wildgen

2006-11-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

Definitely a good read. The main characters Kate and Bec are so incredibly well drawn it was easy to stay with this story stopping only when necessary (at times life does intrude on my reading time.) It should be noted that this book deals quite frankly with the sexuality of both characters but it is handled gracefully and makes a valid point: those ill or disabled have desires like everybody else. A thought-provoking and satisfying novel.

From the Publisher

College student Bec is dangerously adrift. Self-conscious and increasingly uncertain about her long-term plans, she's studying a major that no longer interests her and is caught up in a bewildering affair with a married professor. In an impulsive attempt to redeem herself, she answers a want ad seeking a caregiver. What she finds is a wealthy, cultivated woman in her mid-thirties. Once an advertising executive, accomplished chef, and skilled decorator, Kate is now in the advanced stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). She and her husband, Evan, handle their situation with humor, careful planning, and a lot of determination. Yet while Bec perceives the couple as charmingly frank and good-humored, strains exist beneath the surface. Bec is soon a vital part of her employer's household, and their increasing closeness transforms both women's lives and their relationships. The more she acts on Kate's behalf, the further Bec strays from her stringent comfort zone. She performs every task, from the most administrative to the most intimate, and she translates Kate's speech for strangers, friends, and even family. Sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly, Bec advances further and further into Kate's world, surprised by her own increasing dedication and ease. But how closely can Bec intertwine her own life with Kate's? The two confront their obstacles unsentimentally, with dark humor and unflinching candor, as their relationship is slowly stripped of pretense. Honesty becomes their touchstone: They may find humor in the most devastating moments, but they won't pretend to believe in silver linings that don't exist. With crystal clarity, debut author Michelle Wildgen has crafted a deeply affecting novel about the singular relationship between two women, balancing humor and regret, sensuality and necessity, and testing the outer limits of friendship.

Little Beauties/Kim Addonizio

2006-10-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

This has been featured pretty prominiently on the shelves at Target. It's a good one to take on a cross-country plane trip or a three-day weekend at the beach. Although it deals with weighty topics like obsessive compulsive disorder and teen-age pregnancy, I found it only mildly compelling.

From the Publisher

Diana McBride, a thirty-four-year-old former child pageant contender, now works in a baby store in Long Beach. Between dealing with a catastrophic haircut, the failure of her marriage, and phone calls from her alcoholic mother, Diana has gone off her OCD medication and is trying to cope via washing and cleaning rituals. When pregnant teenager Jamie Ramirez enters the store, Diana's already chaotic world is sent spinning.

Jamie can't stand being pregnant. She can't wait to get on with her normal life and give the baby up for adoption. But her yet-to-be-born daughter, Stella, has a fierce will and a destiny to fulfill. And as the magical plot of Little Beauties unfolds, these three characters' lives become linked in ever more surprising ways.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter/Kim Edwards

2006-10-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted family drama that explores every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you?

On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down's syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by David Henry's fateful decision that long-ago winter night.

A rich and deeply moving page-turner, The Memory Keeper's Daughter captures the way life takes unexpected turns and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan/Lisa See and Ties That Bind, Ties That Break/Lensey Namioka

2006-10-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Captivating. You'll want to savor the writing but the story is so gripping you'll race to the end then want to go back and read it again.

Publisher's description:

Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

Another interesting story that deals with the issue of foot-binding is the Young Adult title "Ties That Bind, Ties That Break" by Lensey Namioka .

The third sister in the Tao family, Ailin is not quite five years old in 1911, a time of transformation in China, when Western philosophies are creating a wave of revolutions and the empire is crumbling. More spirited than her older sisters, Ailin rebels against the torturous age-old tradition of binding girls' feet. When the family of her intended husband breaks the marriage agreement because her feet are not bound, Ailin feels no remorse. But as she enters adolescence, her family is no longer willing to support her. She realizes for the first time just how powerless a girl of good family with no prospect of marriage is in Chinese society.

Ailin has no intention of following that society's traditions. Not only can she read and write Chinese, but she also learns English and seeks a way to make her own living. When she is offered an opportunity that shocks her already estranged family, Ailin faces a decision that may further alienate her from her familial duty and from her country.

Lensey Namioka has written an unforgettable saga of a girl who defies the ancient traditions of her class and heritage, emerging at last as a young woman with an indomitable spirit.

A Brief Lunacy/Cynthia Thayer

2006-10-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

This book was fascinating. It explored many interesting elements including mental illness and World War II Nazi Germany. It was so compelling I completed it in one day. The publisher's synopsis follows:

A haunting edge-of-the-seat thriller that begins with a simple act of kindness and ends in a scene of escalating violence in a secluded Maine cabin.

The stranger arrived on a cool October evening. Jessie and Carl invited the stranded young man into their cabin, fed him supper, and let him spend the night. The next morning he repays their kindness by taking them prisoner in their own home.

Who is this man who calls himself Jonah? Why does he seem to know everything about them? What is his connection to their troubled, missing daughter, Sylvie? As Jonah's behavior grows increasingly erratic and frightening, Jessie and Carl are trapped in a single day of brutality and shattering revelations that will test the limits of their sanity and their will to survive.

Other books by Thayer that I've enjoyed include "A Certain Slant of Light" and "Strong for Potatoes."

Tilt/Elizabeth Burns

2006-10-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

The things that happen to Bridget Fox in this debut novel could make Job weep, but Bridget is funny on every page, and equally poignant. The overwhelming fact of Bridget's life is that her five-year-old daughter, Maeve, is autistic. Bridget describes what it's like to love a child when "she can't let you know she loves you back." Maeve wears a weighted vest to calm her and alternately giggles and moans to herself. She throws herself against a window and cracks it. This child would be too much for anyone, but Bridget has also suffered grievous losses: she divorced her philandering first husband and weathered the death of her beloved cousin. She and her current husband, Pierce, recently left their longtime home in Manhattan for Minneapolis, where Pierce, an internationally known sculptor, has a teaching job. Bridget has virtually no support system. Her father dies of cancer, her mother is chilly (she tells the desperate Bridget that she needs to find a good rinse for her graying hair). Pierce is soon diagnosed as manic-depressive. It's no wonder that Bridget tilts toward mental breakdown, but it is a wonder that she can be so engaging while coming unhinged-and that Burns manages to stave off melodrama with her dry wit and down-to-earth narration. Burns is a poet whose prose is lyrical, energetic and original. "We have crossed over into some world that I used to imagine was inhabited only by saints and martyrs, by mothers who grow patience like lizards grow tails." This hip and witty novel doesn't mince words about sex, mental illness or the exhaustion of child-rearing.

The Secret Life of Bees/Sue Monk Kidd

2006-10-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh, unyielding father, Lily Owens has shaped her entire life around one devastating, blurred memory - the afternoon her mother was killed, when Lily was four. Since then, her only real companion has been the fierce-hearted, and sometimes just fierce, black woman Rosaleen, who acts as her "stand-in mother."

When Rosaleen insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily knows it's time to spring them both free. They take off in the only direction Lily can think of, toward a town called Tiburon, South Carolina - a name she found on the back of a picture amid the few possessions left by her mother.

There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters named May, June, and August. Lily thinks of them as the calendar sisters and enters their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey, and of the Black Madonna who presides over this household of strong, wise women. Maternal loss and betrayal, guilt and forgiveness entwine in a story that leads Lily to the single thing her heart longs for most.

Breathing Water/T. Greenwood

2006-10-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

Effie Greer watches the final days of summer play out from her grandparents' home in Lake Gormlaith, Vermont, with her boyfriend, Max. Despite the idyllic setting, Effie is hiding a secret. With a heated temper and shattered past, Max is heading toward self-destruction and Effie, unwilling to let go, is close behind. Slowly, Effie begins to gain the strength necessary to leave the suffocating relationship. But on the evening she decides to go, Max's violence results in a tragic boating accident and the death of a child. Unable to deal with her role in that terrible August night, Effie drifts aimlessly from city to city. Only when she learns that Max has died of a heroin overdose does she find the strength to return to Lake Gormlaith to face the demons that have kept her away. No longer a naive young girl, Effie is now a woman desperately seeking absolution. She ultimately finds her chance in the most unlikely of people.

We Are All Welcome Here/Elizabeth Berg

2006-10-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

I have loved everything Elizabeth Berg has published and strongly recommend each of them. Her latest novel is equally satisfying. It features three women, each struggling against overwhelming odds for her own kind of freedom.

It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis's birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently-and violently-across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit-with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.

Diana is trying in her own fashion to live a normal life. As a fourteen-year-old, she wants to make money for clothes and magazines, to slough off the authority of her mother and Peacie, to figure out the puzzle that is boys, and to escape the oppressiveness she sees everywhere in her small town. What she can never escape, however, is the way her life is markedly different from others'. Nor can she escape her ongoing responsibility to assist in caring for her mother. Paige Dunn is attractive, charming, intelligent, and lively, but her needs are great-and relentless.

As the summer unfolds, hate and adversity will visit this modest home. Despite the difficulties thrust upon them, each of the women will find her own path to independence, understanding, and peace. And Diana's mother, so mightily compromised,will end up giving her daughter an extraordinary gift few parents could match.

More Than You Know/Beth Gutcheon

2006-10-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

More Than You Know is a haunting novel that bridges two centuries, two mother-daughter relationships, and two tragic love stories. In a small town called Dundee on the coast of Maine, an old woman named Hannah Gray begins her story by saying "Somebody said 'true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen.' I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse."

Hannah has a passionate and painful story of true love and loss: the story of a ghost that appeared in her life, and in the life of Conary Crocker, the wild and appealing boy who loved her.

Interwoven with their love story is a story of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier. As the parallels and differences between the two families are revealed, the reader comes to understand that someone in the nineteenth-century story has become the very unquiet soul haunting the twentieth. But not until the end do we learn (as Hannah never can) what force of mischance and personality has led to so much damage, and no one knows if such damage is ever at an end.

A Certain Slant of Light/Cynthia Thayer

2006-10-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

A hermit opens his heart to love in Thayer's moving second novel (after Strong for Potatoes), which takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson. When a fire kills his wife, son and daughter, Peter MacQueen retreats to his coastal cabin in Maine, interacting with nobody except Dora, an old Passamaquoddy Indian, and his faithful pet, Dog. He also finds solace in his bagpipes, his few books and a mournful ritual involving his dead daughter's dollhouse, but a guilty secret relentlessly haunts him. A pregnant woman, Elaine, on the run from her cruel husband, shows up on his property, desperate for shelter from a winter storm; the two share a bittersweet healing. Initially irritated by Elaine's presence, Peter eventually opens a tentative crack in his emotional door. Elaine tells him about the miscarriage she suffered when she was a teenager and about the excruciating tensions of growing up with healthy hormones in a restrictive Jehovah's Witness environment. After Elaine's daughter is born and named Azelin--"Spared by Jehovah"-- Elaine must decide whether to stay or return to her husband. Thayer's tale is deeply poetic and quasi-Freudian, with the dollhouse in Peter's cabin serving as a potent symbol of the characters' unconscious desires. The other central motif is Elaine's pregnancy: ideas of renewal, fear and sacrifice in bringing forth new life come to the surface when it becomes clear that Azelin may need a blood transfusion, which Elaine's religion prohibits. If Thayer is heavy-handed with such themes, her characters are plainspoken and lucid as well as complex, and their progress toward emotional healing becomes an engrossing story with inspirational power.

Strong for Potatoes/Cynthia Thayer

2006-10-04T20:47:00.000-07:00

Strong for Potatoes is the story of the difficult coming of age of Blue Willoughby, a remarkable girl growing up in eastern Maine. Blue's young life is defined by two events: an accident that left her with a glass eye and a scarred face, and the death of her twin sister, Berry, born without a brain and unable to survive beyond a few days after their birth. For Blue, faced with her mother's dreamy indifference and her photographer father's habit of hiding behind a camera, Berry's image serves as a mute, supportive presence Blue can call forth into her mind practically at will. But Blue's real, flesh-and-blood ally is her grandfather, a full-blooded Passamoquoddy Indian who teaches Blue the lessons that could save her when everything else fails: that the ways of nature can illuminate life; that family can be depended upon; that true passion is worth waiting for; and that grief can heal. Most important, he teaches her the ways of the Passamoquoddy, including the art of weaving baskets from ash and sweet grass - knowledge Blue will need to find a sense of herself to discover where she came from, and even to determine where she's headed.

Nearer Than the Sky/ T. Greenwood

2006-10-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

Indie Brown is a woman haunted by a childhood she'd rather forget. As an adult, Indie has moved far away from her parents and created a new life with her longtime companion, Peter, a sensitive and steadfast partner. Together they have forged a simple and happy life in the backwoods of Maine. But one autumn evening, a late-night phone call from her younger sister sends Indie reeling back into the chaos of her troubled family, and she reluctantly returns home." "It is back in the mountains of Arizona that events from her past are suddenly and painfully illuminated. From her mother's disturbing relationship with her younger sister to the death of her brother, Indie is assaulted by the nightmares of her childhood. And after a sudden and unpredictable turn of events, she is ultimately forced to reevaluate her relationships with her mother, her sister, and with Peter." "Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the elusive and horrific mental disorder that causes afflicted mothers to make their own children ill, comes to life in this tragic yet beautiful story.

Undressing the Moon/T. Greenwood

2006-10-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

Piper Kincaid is 30 years old and has already endured three years of treatment for breast cancer. As she considers life with metastatic breast disease, she also returns to the year she was 14, when her mother left and she came to understand how lives get broken. In Greenwood's third novel (after Breathing Water and Nearer Than the Sky), chapters alternate between Piper's story today and 16 years earlier. Her mother collected broken glass and created beautiful pieces of art, but she couldn't live with her husband's fears of losing her. She managed to get away, leaving Piper and her older brother, Quinn, with their father, who eventually found a new girlfriend and ostensibly moved out. How Piper grew up that year without either parent, how she and her best friend, Becca, discovered performing, and how she became aware of the neediness and cruelty of others intersects with Piper's cancer ordeal. Greenwood uses glass to represent both beauty and baseness, creation and destruction, and life and death.

Falling Angels/Tracy Chevalier

2006-10-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

A fashionable London cemetery, January 1901: Two graves stand side by side, one decorated with an oversize classical urn, the other with a sentimental marble angel. Two families, visiting their respective graves on the day after Queen Victoria's death, teeter on the brink of a new era. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are divided by social class as well as taste. They would certainly not have become acquainted had not their two girls, meeting behind the tombstones, become best friends. And, even more unsuitably, become involved with the gravedigger's muddy son.

As the girls grow up, as the new king changes social customs, as a new, forward-thinking era takes wing, the lives and fortunes of the two families become more and more closely intertwined-neighbors in life as well as death.

Against a gas-lit backdrop of social and political history, Tracy Chevalier explores the prejudices and flaws of a changing time.

The Virgin Blue/Tracy Chevalier

2006-10-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin -- two women born centuries apart, yet tied together by a haunting family legacy. When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start working on a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a strange series of events propels her on a quest to uncover her family's French ancestry. As the novel unfolds -- alternating between Ella's story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier -- a common thread emerges that pulls the lives of the two women together in a most mysterious way. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

2006-08-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

From the Publisher:

With wry candor and tender humor, acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman has crafted a strikingly beautiful novel for our time, tackling the absurdities of modern life and reminding us why we love some people no matter what.

For Emilia Greenleaf, life is by turns a comedy of errors and an emotional minefield. Yes, she's a Harvard Law grad who married her soul mate. Yes, they live in elegant comfort on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But with her one-and-only, Jack, came a stepson--a know-it-all preschooler named William who has become her number one responsibility every Wednesday afternoon. With William, Emilia encounters a number of impossible pursuits--such as the pursuit of cab drivers who speed away when they see William's industrial-strength car seat and the pursuit of lactose-free, strawberry-flavored, patisserie-quality cupcakes, despite the fact that William's allergy is a figment of his over-protective mother's imagination.

As much as Emilia wants to find common ground with William, she becomes completely preoccupied when she loses her newborn daughter. After this, the sight of any child brings her to tears, and Wednesdays with William are almost impossible. When his unceasing questions turn to the baby's death, Emilia is at a total loss. Doesn't anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job? Ironically, it is only through her blundering attempts to bond with William that she finally heals herself and learns what family really means.

Cage of Stars

2006-07-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

Jacquelyn Mitchard is one of my favorite authors. Her rise to fame after her first novel was featured as one of Oprah's early book club picks is almost as great a story as are each of the titles by her I've read. Another reason I like her is she is so down-to-earth. She seems like an ordinary person who hasn't allowed her fame to change her. I also feel an affinity because we were both once newspaper reporters.

Initially I wasn't excited about reading her latest book as it involved a gruesome murder, two in fact, as the main character's sisters are slain early in the story. It sounds corny I know but after visiting Mitchard's website and hearing the author talk about the book in her own voice I was compelled to check it out.

Mitchard is fantastic with character development and creating ambience. It's easy to get caught up in her stories because they are so well drawn. You feel like you're there.

This story isn't so much about the murders of two young girls as it is about the aftermath. I got to know and understand heroinne Ronnie Swan and I liked her. I could relate to her reaction to the killings and how she dealt with her grief.

Other Mitchard titles I enjoyed are:

The Breakdown Lane
Deep End of the Ocean
The Most Wanted
Christmas, Present and
Rosalie, My Rosalie: The Tail of a Duckling which is a novella for children that I read with my 7-year-old. It was exciting sharing one of my favorite authors with him.

Mitchard also published a memoir on her battle with infertility and the subsequent adoptions of her children. I don't recall the name of the book and can't find it listed in my library's catalog or at Barnes & Noble's website.

The Myth of You & Me

2006-07-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished this title by Leah Stewart. It's a quick yet satisfying read that examines the complexities of friendship.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Cameron was fifteen, she and Sonia were best friends -- so close it seemed nothing would ever come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.

Nearly a decade after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron receives an unexpected letter from her old friend. Despite Oliver's urging, she doesn't reply. But when he passes away, Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her.

Good Reads

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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

The Book of Bright Ideas/Sandra Kring

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons/Lorna Landvik

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

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

Julia's Chocolates/Cathy Lamb

Raising Hope/Katie Willard

The Richest Season/Maryann McFadden

Publishers Weekly

Time of My Life/Allison Winn Scotch

Nice to Come Home To/Rebecca Flowers

Little Earthquakes/Jennifer Weiner

Good In Bed/Jennifer Weiner

A Thousand Splendid Suns/Khaled Hosseini

The Amateur Gourmet/Adam D. Roberts

Belong to Me/Marisa de los Santos

And She Was/Cindy Dyson

Bones to Ashes/Kathy Reichs

Love Walked In/Marisa de los Santos

Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant:confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone/edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Comfort Food/Kate Jacobs

Time Is a River/Mary Alice Monroe

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Songs Without Words/Ann Packer

Synopsis

Almost Moon/Alice Sebold

Synopsis

The Quilter's Apprentice/Jennifer Chiaverini

Frog Prince/Jane Porter

The Last Summer of You and Me/Ann Brashares

Garden Spells/Sarah Addison Allen

Publishers Weekly

The Birth House/Ami McKay

Peony in Love/Lisa See

Empress Orchid/Anchee Min

The Ghost at the Table/Suzanne Berne

The Friday Night Knitting Club/Kate Jacobs

Astrid and Veronika/Linda Olsson

Ordinary Life:Stories/Elizabeth Berg

Diagnosis Love/Maggie Leffler

Abide In Me/Elizabeth Strout

The Knitting Circle/Ann Hood

From the Publisher

Sleep Toward Heaven/Amanda Eyre Ward

From the Publisher

Happiness Sold Separately/Lolly Winston

Skylight Confessions/Alice Hoffman

The Strangeness of Beauty/Lydia Yuri Minatoya

Recipes For A Perfect Marriage/Morag Prunty

These Granite Islands/Sarah Stonich

Light On Snow/Anita Shreve

Rise and Shine/Anna Quindlen

When Madeline Was Young/Jane Hamilton

Each Little Bird That Sings/Deborah Wiles

A Step From Heaven/An Na

Some Things that Stay/Sarah Willis

The Sound of Us/Sarah Willis

A Good Distance/Sarah Willis

From the Publisher

You're Not You/Michelle Wildgen

From the Publisher

Little Beauties/Kim Addonizio

The Memory Keeper's Daughter/Kim Edwards

This had me on edge the whole way through. Though I am not a reader who flips to the end just to get to the resolution, the idea did flash through my mind. The writing is simple and straight-forward so it's easy to get through quickly.