I’m a little late to the party that is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, but I’m here now! Like most people who read this book, I came away with a sense of awe that Cheryl not only accomplished her goal of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but also that she didn’t freaking die in the process since she was so wildly (ha!) unprepared for the task. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we […]
The Flamingo Rising by Larry Baker
Larry Baker’s The Flamingo Rising came off as sort of John Irving-lite: quirky characters, meandering stories, but none of the impact that Irving novels have. Still, it was a cute, sweet story and I enjoyed slipping into the Lees lives for a bit. Set in the 1960s along the Florida coast, The Flamingo Rising is a coming of age story starring Abe Lee, who has fallen in love with his father’s mortal enemy’s daughter, Grace. Told primarily in flashbacks, we meet the Lee family, headed by genuine lunatic […]
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
I liked this book, but I’m slightly annoyed because I feel like I should have liked it more than I did, and that makes me like it less. That makes no sense, I’m sure, but there it is. People of the Book is a mostly fictional story about the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. The book existed, and so did some of the events the author includes, but it’s mostly fiction. In the novel, a rare book expert named Hannah […]
An Echo in the Bone (Outlander #7) by Diana Gabaldon
First of all, don’t read this review if you haven’t read the previous six books. It won’t make any sense and it’ll spoil quite a bit. The Outlander series is fantastic, but it is not a series you can pick up in the middle. Go find the first six books (and you totally should), and come back when you’re done. I’ll wait. “True, the body’s easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled – yet there’s that in a man that is never destroyed.” An Echo in […]
Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss states right off the bat that his novel, Chang and Eng, is just that: a novel. He has taken real historical events: the birth of the conjoined twins in Siam, their kidnapping by the king, their return to their family only to be sold to an American entrepreneur, their gradual retirement from the “freak show” life and subsequent marriage to two sisters in North Carolina, followed by dozens of children and decades of sadness; he takes all this and weaves a narrative around it […]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
I saw The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on a hundred best-of lists when it first came out, and after I finally got around to reading it, I was pleased that it lived up to the hype. It’s really a great story. In 1946, author Juliet Ashton is surrounded by the damage of the war in London, and is looking for inspiration for a new book. She stumbles across a group of friends in Guernsey (an island in the English Channel), that formed a […]
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