Nineteen of us (including the two librarians) met yesterday at the Canal Winchester Branch Library to talk about our reading for November. They have some interesting picks for our December book tasting. I’ve already read two of the books, loved one and didn’t like the other. Do any of these appeal to you?
Strangers; A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden. It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
The Spirits by Bonnie Jo Campbell. This is the one I’m going to read. Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural American fiction, brings us a hair-raising winter tale to warm us by the fireside. In this contemporary Christmas Carol, Campbell has created a gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartening holiday story that unfolds in an isolated farmhouse. It is the night before Christmas in a small town in Michigan, and a young woman is haunted by her father’s death. She has been silently penitent for nine years, but her guilt and grief have estranged her from her community and her family. She has taken refuge in the natural world of the plants and trees she tends, but on this anniversary of the tragedy, the supernatural landscape is rattling its chains. When a surprise guest appears at the (dreaded) Christmas Eve dinner, the family begins to open up and reveal dangerous secrets and crimes nobody is willing to face. Within this darkest chaos, a sliver of light appears, showing a way to reclaim communion and even a sense of humor. While redemption is never easy or wholesale, the story that a family creates together can heal wounds.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I loved this book. Keegan is a beautiful writer who makes a reader think. It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Once and Again by Rebecca Serle. This is the one I didn’t care for, and neither did most of you who commented on it. Lauren has spent a lot of her life waiting. She spent her childhood on her surfboard, waiting to catch the perfect wave. She waited a long time for her husband Leo. Now she and Leo are together waiting for those two lines on a pregnancy test that will tell Lauren she’s finally pregnant. But many women wait for those things. Lauren has also spent her life waiting to use the gift that only the women in her family have: the opportunity, just once, to turn back time and reverse a bad decision, or a moment of catastrophic luck. When Lauren was fifteen, her mother Marcella reversed the car crash that killed Lauren’s father, and ever since then, both Marcella and Lauren have been extra cautious around Dave, and perhaps extra brittle with each other. Even though Dave is alive and healthy, and out on the Malibu waves every day.
And, for all of us who love a book list, here are the books the readers in the group talked about in October.
Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty – Mystery – A community of seemingly affluent parents whose petty schoolyard rivalries and hidden personal traumas spiral into a fatal night at an elementary school trivia fundraiser.
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife – Anna Johnston – Contemporary Fiction – An 82-year-old broke and grieving widower accidentally assumes the identity of a missing nursing home resident.
Breakroom – Miye Lee – Psychological Thriller – Eight office workers voted “villains” by their coworkers are invited to a high-stakes reality TV game show where they must uncover a planted mole while confronting their own flaws.
Hollow Bones – Jodi Picoult – Contemporary Fiction – Centers on the emotional aftermath of 9/11 and a shocking family secret.
Judge Stone – Viola Davis & James Patterson – Thriller – Small town Alabama judge presiding over a high-stakes, politically explosive abortion trial.
Midnight Train– Matt Haig – Fantasy – About a man on a magical train that helps him revisit key moments of his life.
Murder on 34th Street – Mariah Fredericks – Historical Fiction – A fictional murder mystery at the iconic Macy’s parade.
West with Giraffes – Lynda Rutledge – Historical Fiction – Inspired by the true 1938 story of two Atlantic-crossing giraffes that survived a hurricane and traveled cross-country by truck to the San Diego Zoo.
World News from Waverly High – Linda Kass – Historical Fiction – Follows Lena Rosen, a Jewish high school junior and associate editor of her school newspaper, as she navigates adolescent identity against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil rights unrest, and social change.
Where the Wildflowers Grow – Terah Shelton Harris – Literary Fiction – After surviving a prison transport bus crash, a traumatized woman named Leigh assumes a new identity and finds unexpected healing through a family while working on a rural Alabama flower farm.
The Witch – Frieda McFadden – Psychological thriller – After losing her job and apartment, Julia Barlow moves into her family’s historic 17th-century Massachusetts estate to care for her grandmother, only to find the hosue haunted by unsettling phenomena, dark family lies, and a 1692 witchcraft trial.
Anything on the list that you liked or want to read?
