Tag: contemporary fiction

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Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Do you ever read a book and keep having the vague sense of having read it before? That was my experience with Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick. Even though there were some parts I didn’t remember, there was enough that was familiar to convince me I must have read this book before. I wouldn’t hold that against the book, though; I am notoriously bad at remembering the plots of books I have read.

Benedict Stone is a jeweler in a small village whose business is almost non-existent and whose wife has recently left him. Then one day his teenage niece surprises him by showing up at his door for a visit. She is reckless and stubborn and turns his life upside down, and he must decide whether to accept the chance to change the way he looks at life.

There is a lot to like about this book. I enjoyed the colorful characters and the great setting. It was very satisfying to see how Benedict took steps toward a better, richer life for himself. Definitely would recommend!

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The Door-to-Door Bookstore

⭐⭐⭐💫/5

The Door-to-Door Bookstore is a novel written by German author Carsten Henn and translated by Melody Shaw. It is the story of Carl Christian Kollhoff and how his friendship with a young girl who goes by the name of Schascha changed his life.

I was initially drawn to this book because it is about a bookseller, but I quickly felt connected to Carl and wanted to get to know him better. He has a daily routine that includes delivering books each evening to the customers that have ordered from the bookstore he works at. One evening he is joined by a nine-year old girl named Schascha who has decided she wants to be his friend.

We follow along as Carl and Scascha become friends, get to know his customers better, and deal with Carl losing his beloved job at the bookstore. I found the overall tone of this book to be very melancholy, but I am glad that I read it.

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Young Jane Young

Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin is the story of five women and the scandal that binds them together. The book is divided into five parts, one for each of the women. 

The writing is sharp and funny. I was a little thrown at first by the choose your own adventure device in part five, but enjoyed it once I got used to it. I appreciated the focus on women’s issues, especially the double standard that exists for men and women when it comes to sex.

Love this quote from the author’s note:

Jane’s favorite line is from the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Roughly, it translates, “Humans are not born forever on the day their mothers have them; life necessitates giving birth to themselves over and over again.”

I am a big Zevin fan, and this book definitely delivered!

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The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up

The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson is a wonderful book which I devoured in one sitting. I loved the process of watching Shelley recover her memories gradually after waking up in the hospital from a coma. By alternating the timeline between then and now, Pearson allows the reader to slowly get more and more of Shelley’s story.

The book does have a focus on generational domestic violence, so it could be hard to read for some people. I do think it was handled very well, but you may want to avoid this book if that is triggering for you. The characters were well developed and the pace was steady.

The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is one small plot point at the very end which was totally unrealistic.  I won’t give more details so as to avoid spoilers.  Despite that, I still think this is a great book and plan to read more from this author.

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Ordinary Life: Stories

Ordinary Life: Stories is a collection of fourteen stories, each of which focuses on a woman at a pivotal moment in her life.  Elizabeth Berg has long been a favorite writer of mine, and this book reminded me why I like her so much.

All of the stories show us ordinary women living ordinary lives but with a glimpse of the thoughts and feelings that are usually hidden beneath the surface and sometimes percolate up to the surface.  Berg writes about relationships and the inner lives of women in a way that is so relatable and insightful. 

For example, in the first story, “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together.  She isn’t contemplating divorce; she just needs some time to think, take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

Berg’s writing is beautifully descriptive as well. This quote from the story “What Stays” evokes my memories of growing up with two brothers and the way it was often two against one but with constant changing of who was on which side:

“We kids kept one another company, raised ourselves, excused the obvious problems of our mother. We had no outside friends. That didn’t seem to matter too much, though. We made allies and enemies of one another in kaleidoscopic ways. We weren’t bored.”

These stories are so compelling that I found myself wanting to take my time with each one and not rush through just to finish the whole book.

Highly recommended!

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The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper was Phaedra Patrick’s debut novel, published in 2016. I have read several of her more recent books and was interested to go back and read the ones I had missed. I’m glad I started with this one because it was quite enjoyable.

Arthur Pepper’s wife passed away a year ago, and he has continued living with the same mundane routines he always had. On the anniversary of her death, however, he finds a mysterious gold charm bracelet among her things and embarks on a quest to find out where each of these charms came from.

As he follows the clues he uncovers, he learns a lot about the woman his wife was before they met and is himself taken on a journey of hope, healing, and self-discovery.

I found this to be a sweet and engaging story. I sympathized with Arthur as he stepped way out of his comfort zone, and I enjoyed meeting all of the quirky characters along the way. Some of them were quite ridiculous, but Patrick somehow makes them work. I also liked how Arthur’s relationship with his children changed and grew throughout the book. 

I highly recommend this book, and this author. I still have a few books of hers to catch up on, and I am very much looking forward to them.

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The Banned Books Club

The Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak

Summary:

Despite their strained relationship, when Gia Rossi’s sister, Margot, begs her to come home to Wakefield, Iowa, to help with their ailing mother, Gia knows she has no choice. After her rebellious and at-times-tumultuous teen years, Gia left town with little reason to look back. But she knows Margot’s borne the brunt of their mother’s care and now it’s Gia’s turn to help, even if it means opening old wounds.

As expected, Gia’s homecoming is far from welcome. There’s the Banned Books Club she started after the PTA overzealously slashed the high school reading list, which is right where she left it. But there is also Mr. Hart, her former favorite teacher. The one who was fired after Gia publicly and painfully accused him of sexual misconduct. The one who prompted Gia to leave behind a very conflicted town the minute she turned eighteen. The one person she hoped never to see again.

When Margot leaves town without explanation, Gia sees the cracks in her sister’s “perfect” life for the first time and plans to offer support. But as the town, including members of the book club, takes sides between Gia and Mr. Hart, everything gets harder. Fortunately, she learns that there are people she can depend on. And by standing up for the truth, she finds love and a future in the town she thought had rejected her.

My Thoughts:

I have to admit I picked up this book primarily because of the title and didn’t read too much about it ahead of time.  I love books about books and assumed that’s what this was.  As I was reading the book, I kept waiting for more about the banned books or the book club, but those didn’t show up very much at all.

The themes of this book actually include some topics I usually avoid when picking something to read, namely sexual assault and domestic verbal abuse. I did feel that the story was building for a long time before much happened to move things along, but I liked the main character enough to want to know how things would work out for her.

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The Taste of Ginger

I have read a few reviews of The Taste of Ginger, and they vary wildly in their response to the book.  I am on the positive side of the question, giving this debut novel by Mansi Shah 5 stars.

What I most appreciated about this book was following Preeti on her journey to understand more about herself and where she came from so that she can figure out who she wants to be. She is a first-generation immigrant to America from India, having been brought over by her parents as a child.

When the story begins, she is a thirty-year old lawyer just out of a failed relationship with a white American man.  She has a troubled relationship with her parents, especially her mother, but then a family emergency calls her to India and forces her to examine her beliefs and feelings about her family and the different cultures they have lived in.

As she sits on the plane taking her to India and thinks back over her life in America, she realizes, “Fitting in meant letting go of who I was and becoming someone new.” I can relate to that so much as an autistic woman.  I am always watching the behaviors and customs of those around me so that I can attempt to fit into different environments.

About halfway through, after Preeti learns something she didn’t know about her mother, we hear the sentence that contains the title of the book.  Her auntie tells her, “A monkey does not know the taste of ginger,” which is explained to mean, “you cannot appreciate that which you do not know.” She goes on to say, “One thing is certain; you don’t understand her life, and she doesn’t understand yours. Until you both start trying the ginger, you never will.”

I won’t say more about what happens other than to say this a turning point for Preeti. I can attest that, in my own life, gaining an understanding of my mother made a big difference in my relationship with her and in how I felt about myself as a person.

As you can tell, this was a very personal book for me. I focused here on Preeti’s relationship with her mother, but there are several other significant topics covered in this book, and I really enjoyed many of the characters as well as the detailed descriptions of places and events.  Highly recommend!

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8 “How To” Books

No, these aren’t recommendations for books on fixing your toilet or creating your own website. Check out these “how to” novels for your next great read.

  • How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O’Neal
  • How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry
  • How to Get a (Love) Life by Rosie Blake
  • How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes
  • How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
  • How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
  • How to Stuff Up Christmas by Rosie Blake
  • How to Walk Away by Katherine Center

Have you read any of these? If not, which one looks the most interesting?

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Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

Being a big fan of Jane Austen and always willing to give an adaptation of her work a try, I was excited to come across The Rajes series by Sonali Dev.  There are currently four books in the series, which conveniently cover the four Austen books I am most fond of.  I was able to get the first one from the library recently and read it over the last week of last year.  I have to say this was one of the best adaptations of Pride and Prejudice I have ever read.

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors tells the story of Dr. Trisha Raje, a San Francisco neurosurgeon from a successful Indian American family.  She is at the top of her game professionally but has had a strained relationship with certain members of her family following something that happened while she was in college.  At a dinner for her brother, who has political aspirations, she meets DJ Caine, an up-and-coming chef who has left a position at a top restaurant to help his sister Emma, who is in San Francisco for surgery with none other than Dr. Raje.

Their first meeting does not go well, of course.  The rest of the book is a masterful exposition of how their relationship develops, despite their continued clashes and misunderstandings, against the backdrop of high-stakes medicine and sumptuous food.  We also get an intimate view of the dynamics in both families.

I enjoyed this book greatly and am looking forward to the next one in the series, Recipe for Persuasion.