This is a love story. Daniel Emerson is a New York City lawyer who has returned to his hometown of Leyden, N.Y., a picturesque Hudson Valley village, with his girlfriend Kate, a novelist, and her daughter, Ruby. Kate drinks and obsesses about the O.J. Simpson trial instead of writing fiction. Daniel finds himself falling in love with Iris Davenport, an African-American grad student at the local university. Iris is married to Hampton Welles, an investment adviser. The book records Iris and Daniel's affair from both perspectives and poses the question, is their fleeting happiness really worth so much ruin?It is entertaining. At times, this is more about interracial relationships than an affair. I didn't like how Kate and Hampton are both very unlikeable characters....probably to help us find Daniel and Iris' affair less objectionable to our moral standards and maybe even to sympathize with them when they each have such unappealing spouses. Still, it is an enjoyable enough read that I am staying with it for quotes such as this: "Time passes, bodies decay, every day spent without love is lost forever, the time cannot be recaptured or made up for."
There are enough twists to the story to keep your interest. The ending felt hanging but, I think it was to show that nothing in life ends how we want and is definitely not in a neat and tidy box.
Rating: 4.2 Good
Annabelle McKay's midlife crisis as her empty-nest marriage to historian Grant falls into the doldrums, flashes from current day back to the 1970's when they first met. Annabelle and Grant love each other deeply, but the glue that holds their marriage together might not be enough once the kids are (mostly) grown. The new emptiness in their house begins to fill up with dangerous thoughts and emotions related to an earlier, difficult time in their life together, a time they have agreed never to speak of again. This chapter in their marriage becomes "the stuff that never happened." It did happen, though, and when a new crisis in their lives threatens to break through the silence, Annabelle and Grant have to face the ramifications of keeping their mutual secret. This book is wry, witty, cynical and worldly.
It's generally thought that the story of a man or woman "coming of age" is about their struggle to define themselves and their place in the world when they are young and moving into adulthood. Certainly that is true. But the process is one that never really ends. Things like injury, illness, or tragedy can force us to re-examine our lives and our place in the world.
This extremely short non-fiction recounts the life and death of her beloved Labrador retriever, Beau. Of the dog that once possessed a catcher’s mitt of a mouth, Quindlen reminisces, “there came a time when a scrap thrown in his direction usually bounced unseen off his head. Yet put a pork roast in the oven, and the guy still breathed as audibly as an obscene caller. The eyes and ears may have gone, but the nose was eternal. And the tail. The tail still wagged, albeit at half-staff. When it stops, I thought more than once, then we’ll know.”
Silas Jones and Larry Ott have known each other since their late 1970s childhood when Silas lived with his mother in a cabin on land owned by Larry's father. At school they could barely acknowledge one another, Silas being black and Larry white, but they secretly formed a bond hunting, fishing, and just being boys in the woods. When a girl goes missing after going on a date with Larry, he is permanently marked as dangerous, despite the lack of evidence linking him to her disappearance, and the two boys go their separate ways. Twenty-five years later, Silas is the local constable, and when another girl disappears, Larry, an auto mechanic with few customers and fewer friends, is once again a person of interest. The Southern atmosphere is rich, and I love the languid shifting from present to past. I don't typically enjoy crime-dramas but, this one has my attention. It is an easy read that has drawn me in from the beginning pages unfolding Larry's quiet simple life on the farm and how he made a portable pen so he could move all his chickens to a different patch of the farm every day to eat bugs. I love how it captures the South and the character development.
Mistry masterfully portrays a family being torn apart by lies, love, and its unresolved demons of the past. Nariman Vakeel is an aging patriarch whose advancing Parkinson's disease and its related complications threaten to destroy his large Parsi family. When Nariman breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden, his two stepchildren turn his care over to their half-sister, Roxanne, who lives in a two-room flat with her husband and two sons. What follows is each character's reaction to this situation, from Roxanne's husband's struggle to provide for his family without neglecting his conscience to their sons' coming of age in an era of uncertainty. Interspersed between these dilemmas are Nariman's tortured remembrances of a forbidden love and its inescapable consequences
New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. This time-hopping narrative is extremely entertaining. The story skips back and forth in time and place. The voice moves from first person to third person and even to second. In the hands of a less skilled author, this story would not work. This does have a 'short story' feel to it which I don't care for but, overall, I really enjoyed this book and the creative writing style.
Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life. I learned a lot about Cleopatra, that although her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties.
This is told in the form of the voice of a working-class woman with remarkable persuasiveness—through a letter from an enraged mother to Osama bin Laden. Cleave has an eye for detail and political commentary and throws in the perfect mix of a little parody and a little sex.
Two cousins reunite twenty years after a childhood prank gone wrong changed their lives and sent them on their separate ways. "Cousin Howie," the formerly uncool, strange, and pasty ("he looked like a guy the sun wouldn't touch") cousin has become a blond, tan, and married millionaire with a generous spirit. He invites his cousin Danny (who as an insecure teenager left him hurt and helpless in a cave for three days) to help him renovate an old castle in Germany. 