Tag: contemporary fiction

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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.

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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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Top 10 Books of 2024

2024 was a great year for reading for me.  I set a goal of 52 books and blew past it, finishing at a total of 99 books. Also, in the last few years I have not read much nonfiction, but in 2024 I finished 13, up from 4 the previous year. 

Without further ado, here are my top 10 reads from 2024:

  • No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister
  • The Sister Effect by Susan Mallery
  • Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle
  • The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
  • Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookstore by Bo-Reum Hwang
  • Open House by Elizabeth Berg
  • The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams
  • The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick
  • Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
  • The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers

What were your favorites this year?

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What I’m Reading – January 2025

A brand new year – so exciting! It’s fun to look back on the year that we have just finished as well as to look forward to the next twelve months.

What I’m Reading Now

I currently have three books out from the library, so I am listing them all under this section. Hopefully I will finish them all before the due dates!

  • The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah
  • Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society by Darien Gee

What I Recently Finished

Fiction:

  • The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg
  • The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick
  • Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
  • The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers
  • The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg
  • The Healer’s Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson
  • Return to Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
  • Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes Lackey

Nonfiction:

  • Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans
  • UnClobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality by Colby Martin

Short Stories:

  • When We Were Friends by Jane Green
  • The Answer Is No by Fredrick Backman
  • Cruel Winter with You by Ali Hazelwood
  • Merry After Ever by Tessa Bailey
  • All by My Elf by Olivia Dade
  • Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria Bellefleur
  • Only Santas in the Building by Alexis Daria

What I Added to my TBR

  • Happy After All by Maisey Yates
  • The Autumn of Ruth Winters by Marshall Fine
  • One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery
  • Wedding at Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
  • My Friends by Fredrik Backman
  • Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
  • We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes
  • Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry by Beth Allison Barr
  • Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table by Brandan Robertson
  • The Year of What If by Phaedra Patrick
  • The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance by Jemar Tisby
  • What Happened to the McCrays? by Tracey Lange
  • Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir by Alba Donati
  • Never Meant to Stay by Trisha Das
  • Christmas at the Little Paris Hotel by Rebecca Raisin
  • A Bookshop Christmas by Rachel Burton
  • The Second Chance Year by Melissa Wiesner
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  • Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory
  • The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
  • How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
  • Plymouth Undercover by Pamela M. Kelley

TBR Stats

  • I currently have 120 books on my TBR
  • Of those, 20 are nonfiction and 100 are fiction
  • All of the books were added in 2024

One of my goals for 2025 is to read 2 nonfiction books each month. I usually set an overall goal on the Goodreads Reading Challenge as well. Last year, I put down 52 and I ended up finishing 99 books. This year, I may be a bit more ambitious and put down 75.

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

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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!