Recipes For A Perfect Marriage/Morag Prunty

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

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

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

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

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.