Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood

I just finished this book and have two words for you:  read it.  Monica Wood writes with such stunning and thought provoking imagery that there were several paragraphs that I have slowed down and re-read savoring the words like poetry. The plot is completely unexpected and flowed smoothly from one shocking revelation to the next. The victim of a hit-and-run accident, Lizzy Mitchell is left by the driver in the middle of the median, hurt and adrift. Later Lizzie comes to see the accident as indicative of her life up to that point. Raised by her uncle Mike, a Maine priest, Lizzy grows up surrounded by his devotion to ministry.

I absolutely fell in love with Father Mike and how he raised Lizzy.  At age nine, Lizzy's comfortable world crumbles. In present day Lizzy, now a high-school counselor, is still trying to make sense of what happened. Wood's characters show refreshing depth and complexity as they each grapple with the irrefutable power of the past. This emotional story is filled with crisp, rich details that linger in the memory. Wood's stirring domestic drama is full of surprises as it explores the weighty themes of religion, perceived innocence, and the corrosive quality of best intentions.  The character development and reliving through memory is reminiscent of Crow Lake by Mary Lawson.  The plot twists kept me engrossed as, tearily, I turned the very last page. 

Rating: 4.9  Definite Recommend

Peace Like A River by Leif Enger

I had a friend recommend this book to me over and over again and I definitely wasn't disappointed once I finally read it (thanks Luce!!) This is a wonderful epic tale in a book that you won't want to put down. It is impossible not to love Reuben, the young boy who narrates this novel, as well as his father, a man who is driven by his faith and love of his family.

 

However, there is far more that will captivate you as no other book has done. I am completely amazed by the superb prose and eloquent style. This is truly a gem that I couldn't wait to get back to and thoroughly enjoyed.

Rating: 5   Definite Recommend

Outlander by Gil Adamson

I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful quiet book.  If you are in the mood for a slow story that gently unfolds without a lot of fanfare but, when you read every line, captures you with it's beauty, then this is the book for you.  The story is set in 1903 and about a 19 year old woman who is on the run for murdering her husband.

She is being tracked by brutal-looking redheaded twins, over the plains of western Canada and into the mountains. She hears voices and sees events that may or may not be happening, causing her and other characters (and me!) to question her sanity. This adventure-suspense novel has a refined, often poetic style and maintains suspense while portraying the wilderness of Canada’s far west and providing fine portraits of the people who lived in and were shaped by it. The slow unfolding of story and characters coupled with lyrical descriptions of the terrain, an occasional touch of bizarre humor, and a multitude of well-chosen historical details is very appealing. 

Rating: 4.8  Definite recommend

The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin

How to do this book justice?  From the first page, I was enthralled and couldn't wait to turn the next page. Light, easy and completely a pleasure to read. This is such a beautiful book.

Each chapter is told by a different person and at the end of each chapter, I miss that person's voice until I start the next chapter and am completely engrossed by the new voice. This amazing book spans 30 years and the individual's stories and perspectives unwind and interwine seamlessly. A definite MUST read. including love, war, disease, loss, betrayal, and redemption. The book revolves around the story of Harry Wainwright, a wealthy entrepreneur who falls in love with the camp as a young man and returns decades later for one last day of fishing before he succumbs to terminal cancer. I was sad to finish it as I didn't want it to end.

Rating: 4.7  Definite Recommend!

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Each chapter is told from a different person's perspective. A wonderful read.

Laura marries Henry but gets more than she bargains for when Henry moves her from the city to a remote farm (no water or electricity!) where she also has to try to get along with Henry's Pappy who is a very ornery man and his charming brother Jamie. One of their tenants on the farm is Hap, his wife Florence and their children, including their grown son Ronsel who has been serving in the first Black infantry in WWII. A great plot that the author unfolds in an effortless way. A truly good story that I kept wanting to get back to.


Rating: 4.8 Recommend

Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

A tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn Sarajevo. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Arrow, a young woman sniper, picks off soldiers; Kenan makes a dangerous trek to get water for his family; and Dragan, who sent his wife and son out of the city at the start of the war, works at a bakery and trades bread in exchange for shelter.  All the while, the cellist continues to play. With wonderfully drawn characters and a stripped-down narrative, Galloway brings to life a distant conflict.

Rating: 4.7 Recommend

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

There is a reason that I picked this book as the first book to start my recently founded Book Club.  It is spectacular and I wanted to set the bar high for all future reads.  In a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.

Rating: 5 Definite Recommend!

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I normally like to know a high level plot before I start reading a book.  With this one, the publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.

Rating: 5 Definite Recommend

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

Rating: 4.9 Definite Recommend

Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. 

During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata's related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history's most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.

The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The richness of the translation comes through in every page.  Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from high school in post-World War II Germany when he becomes ill and is befriended by a woman who takes him home. When he recovers from hepatitis many weeks later, he dutifully takes the 40-year-old Hanna flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in the young man's education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

Rating: 4.7 Definite Recommend

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

A young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy. I will be reading more Yates in the future.

Rating: 4.8 Recommend