Tag: book reviews

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The Hygge Holiday

I love the concept of hygge, which is a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture). I was first introduced to it by a creator I used to follow on YouTube and loved the idea.  I incorporate touches of it into my life wherever I can.

In The Hygge Holiday by Rosie Blake, we meet Clara, a young Danish woman who has just arrived in the small village of Yulethorpe. She is intrigued by the town and arranges to house and pet sit for Louisa, who has decided to close her toy shop and jaunt off to warmer climes. As Clara wields her hygge magic on Louisa’s flat and shop, she slowly becomes a part of the local community. 

Not everyone is happy she is there, however.  Louisa’s son Joe is suspicious of her motives and starts coming down from the big city to check on her.  And Roz, a local who is contemptuous of both Louisa and Clara, makes her objections known very loudly.

I found this book charming.  I liked the dual POV with Clara and Joe, which is interspersed with the emails Louisa is sending to Gavin, the owner of the local pub.  I also appreciated how relatable all of the characters were (well, maybe except for Roz, who is completely unlikable). There is some humor (can you say unfiltered parrot), some romance, and a lot of the promised hygge.

This is the first novel I have read by Rosie Blake, but it certainly won’t be the last!

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The Book Swap

I love books about books, and The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers more than delivers on that front. After quitting her job, Erin Connolly decides she needs a fresh start and begins by decluttering her bedroom. Unfortunately, one of the items she accidentally gets rid of is her heavily annotated copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, when she drops off a bunch of books at a local community library. But then the book turns up back in the library a week later with new notes in the margins and an invitation to meet her new friend in Great Expectations.

Thus begins a conversation between Erin and her Mystery Man. As they share their favorite novels with each other, their friendship deepens and leads them both to hope for something more. Unbeknownst to them, however, they already know each other in real life, and their history is not good.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the relationship that develops through the book exchanges and the conflict that arises whenever the two meet in real life.  The POV switches back and forth between Erin and James throughout the book, so we are privy to both sides as the story unfolds as to what happened in their past.  Bickers does a great job with the second chance storyline, but the book encompasses a lot more than that as it also deals with grief, family relationships, and coming into your own as an adult.

There were a lot of great classic works highlighted in this book, and I was especially intrigued by the book the main characters had shared an interest in when they were in school together, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.  Somehow, I have never read it, and I am hoping to get to it this year.

All in all, I can’t recommend this book enough.

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The Reading List

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams is a debut novel that ticks a lot of boxes for me, most especially that it centers around the power of books to affect our lives. The two main characters are the Widower Mukesh and Aleisha Thomas.  Aleisha is a teenager working a summer job in the local library when Mukesh comes in to try to find something to read.  Neither of them is much of a reader at the start of the book, but then Aleisha finds a list of book recommendations and decides to start reading them and also to suggest the first book on the list to Mukesh.

As both of them embark on a reading journey, they also develop an improbable friendship which slowly deepens as time progresses.  Each of them has challenges in their families, as Mukesh navigates life after the death of his wife and Aleisha juggles her need to become her own individual with the needs of her mother and brother.  The lessons they learn from the books on the list help them find ways to handle their personal struggles and develop in new ways.

I loved how Adams weaves the books they are reading around the events happening in their lives in a compelling way. This story also shows us the power of community and how that can happen in a place like the library.

Highly recommended!

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Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

In this 2015 memoir, the late Rachel Held Evans shared her journey with church – how she got to the point of leaving the church she had loved and how she struggled with where she belonged after that.  The book is structured around the seven sacraments of the Catholic church: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Each section has several chapters where her personal story is woven in with a discussion of the theme.

I really appreciated how Evans shared both the positive and the negative of her experience with church.  She did not paint the conservative church she grew up in as all bad by any means, but she also didn’t shy away from the problems she came to have with some of the beliefs and behaviors she encountered.

After spending some time away from church entirely, she found herself longing for community and began searching for a church where she could experience that alongside people who were also willing to question and examine what they believed.  This quote seems to sum up what she was looking for:

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.  Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth.  We might just create sanctuary.

I can relate to her struggle with finding yourself in a place that does not align with your beliefs, but then feeling a sense of loneliness and disconnection when no longer inhabiting that space.  I am thankful that I have been able to find a community of faith that allows me to be myself while also challenging me to grow even more.

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6 Memoirs to Check Out

I don’t read a lot of memoirs, so these go back quite a few years, but I highly recommend all of them.

House Lessons: Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister – I have greatly enjoyed her novels and equally loved this memoir of her time renovating a house and starting her writing career.  Both topics were equally fascinating.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb – I finished this in one day, it was so good!  She shares about her experiences with therapy, both as a therapist and as a client, and it was captivating.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events – the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t by Jennifer Gilbert – While Jennifer’s story centers around a painful experience, her writing is filled with the determination and hopefulness that she has fought to recover in her life. In addition to her insights about her personal journey and close relationships, we also see how she brings the lessons she has learned to her professional life as an event planner.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber – A journey from agnosticism to Christianity. The story takes place over the course of a year and is set against the backdrop of time spent in graduate study at Oxford University in England, far from her home in Canada.  Highly recommend the book as well as the movie that followed.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Riechl – So well written and such an intriguing account of how a food critic lives.  I loved hearing about the food she encountered but also the disguises she created in order to get regular treatment when she went out to eat for a review.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of the Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure – I found this memoir to be extremely enjoyable and fascinating. I greatly appreciated the writing style as much as the content and laughed out loud at least a dozen times during the course of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to any and all Little House book fans.

Do you read memoirs? Are there any you recommend?

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The Little Italian Hotel

The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick is a charming take on what to do when faced with sudden divorce.  When Ginny Splinter’s husband tells her he wants a divorce, she impulsively invites four of her radio show listeners to join her on a trip to Italy that was originally planned as a trip for her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  Each of her fellow travelers is facing their own heartbreak, which we learn more about as the novel unfolds.

The group meets up in a quaint hotel called Splendido and gets to know the owner and his daughter while they enjoy the beautiful surroundings.  They take several day trips to scenic and historical spots around Italy as well as engage in various activities suggested by each of the members.  As they begin to share their stories with each other, they form friendships and offer each other support and understanding that helps them start to move forward through their grief.

I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of the Italian culture and countryside, and I appreciated how much Ginny grew in her understanding of her marriage and herself throughout the trip.  The ending was especially good, in my opinion, but I won’t say more than that because of spoilers!

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Close Knit

I found Close Knit by Jenny Colgan to be quirky and enjoyable.  Gertie lives on a small island in the north of Scotland, where she spends most of her time working, knitting, and daydreaming.  When she develops a crush on the owner of the small local airline, she takes a job as an air stewardess despite never having been on a plane.

My favorite part of the book was the myriad of interesting characters.  I especially enjoyed the storyline about Struhan, a local elementary school teacher and musician who was Gertie’s high school crush.  Some of them, like Morag, appeared in an earlier book, The Summer Skies.  I prefer to read books in order, but this one does stand alone if you haven’t read it.

One thing I liked about Gertie is that, even though she lacks confidence in some areas, she is willing to step out and be herself.  For example, she knits using muted colors because that’s what she loves, even though the other women in the knitting circle keep pushing her to use bolder colors.  She also makes the decision to move out of her mother’s house and become a bit more independent.

By my count, this is the twenty-fourth book I have read by Colgan, so I am definitely a fan!  I highly recommend giving her a try.

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The Cookbook Club

The Cookbook Club by Beth Harbison is a feel-good chick-lit novel based around food, perfect for a cozy afternoon of reading. I was immediately intrigued by a book club that is centered on cookbooks – the women in the club pick a different cookbook each month and make dishes from that cookbook to share with each other at their meeting.  That sounds like a lot of fun!

In the club, we have three women who are all at a crossroads in their lives.  Margo’s husband has just left her and asked for a divorce (and left her a run-down farmhouse to boot), Trista has been fired from her law firm and bought a bar/restaurant to run, and Aja is pregnant and in an unhealthy relationship.

The book follows each of the women as they get to know each other through sharing food together.  There are a lot of mouthwatering recipe descriptions, including a monthly wrap up of each cookbook club meeting. I do wish there was more description of the actual club meetings, however; I think that would have been a better way to carry the story.  Instead, we get a couple of meetings and then it focuses more on the individual women’s lives, although they do interact with each other outside of the meetings at times.

This book has a bit of everything in the way of chick-lit tropes – a failed marriage with a farmhouse to fix up with an old crush, a lost job fueling a new business opportunity, and a pregnancy forcing a young woman to evaluate her relationship with the father.  Because of everything going on, it does jump around a bit, but I still found it an enjoyable light read.

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Faith Unraveled

Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

In this 2010 book by the late Rachel Held Evans, we are taken on a journey of faith.  Evans describes her upbringing in a conservative Christian environment and how she learned to defend the faith she had been taught.  I resonated with a lot of her experiences, including going to a conservative, evangelical church and then college.

Along the way, she began to question some of the things she had been taught and some of the things she read in the Bible.  Her questions were not well received by those around her, but she continued pursuing answers.  Eventually she determines that she does not need to leave her faith in God to find answers but just the limited beliefs about what it means to be a Christian and follow God that she had been taught.

This was such a good book. It really affirmed what I have been experiencing in my faith journey the last few years. Evans compares the process of questioning your beliefs to evolution, as the town she lived in was the location for the Snopes trial in the early 1900s, which was about teaching evolution in schools.  My favorite line in the book is, “Faith must adapt in order to survive.”

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What I’m Reading – December 2024

What I’m Reading Now

The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg – I am almost done with this book, and it is really good!

UnClobber by Colby Martin – This book addresses the “clobber passages” from the Bible that are often used to condemn homosexuality and also tells Martin’s own story of how his views on the subject changed and how it has affected his life. It is very easy to read and I am enjoying it.

What I Recently Finished

The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley by Mercedes Lackey – This is #16 in the Elemental Masters series and was very enjoyable, as all of them have been.

Holiday Hideaway by Mary Kay Andrews – This was a Christmas-themed short story and was a cute romance.

Gryphon in Light by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon – This is #1 in Kelvren’s Saga and who knows what book in the entire Valdemar series. It took me a little while to get into the story, but I ended up liking it by the end.

The Christmas Inn by Pamela M. Kelley – This is a heartwarming holiday romance. I couldn’t put it down – very sweet!

Nantucket Summer House by Pamela M. Kelley – This is #9 in the Nantucket Beach Plum Cove series. It wasn’t my favorite in the series but I did still enjoy it.

Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions by Rachel Held Evans – I loved this book. I will share a more detailed review in a few days.

The Cookbook Club: A Novel of Food and Friendship by Beth Harbison – This was a fun book about three women who start a book club based on cookbooks. It was charming and I really enjoyed it.

Close Knit by Jenny Colgan – I have read a lot of Colgan’s books and I still like them, although not as much as I used to like her older books.

What I Added to my TBR

  • Nobody’s Perfect by Sally Kilpatrick
  • The Answer is No by Fredrick Backman
  • Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith by April Ajoy
  • Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison
  • Hope in a Jar by Beth Harbison

TBR Stats

  • I currently have 111 books on my TBR
  • Of those, 17 are non-fiction and 94 are fiction
  • All but 1 of the books were added in 2024. I plan to read the last book added in 2023 this month

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!