Here are my goodreads reviews. If you’re on goodreads, add me as a friend so I can see your books too! I also have an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
Yes to Life (4 stars): I love Viktor Frankl’s writing. I love the way he thinks, I love the way he can break things down to their essential parts and help me remember what’s at the crux of my life. He’s one of the handful of names that’s on my list to read relatively regularly so I can continue to have perspective.
The Imperfects (4 stars): I really enjoyed my time with this family story. It has all the elements of a family saga, historical fiction as well as a little mystery. I liked the characters and the story moves slowly but managed to hold my interest the whole way. It has a lot of characters which are sometimes hard to keep track of. It also has a handful of twists along the way. But at its heart this is a story about family.
Writers & Lovers (3.5 stars): This story was interesting in parts, well written and thought provoking but then it also was navel gazing at parts. The writing was so strong that you could feel the anxiety of the main character through the book itself. The grief of losing her mother. The uncertainty of life. A writer writing about a writer is always interesting to read and this well-written book was no exception.
Pew (4 stars): “Since I had woken up on that pew, the meals had been endless and I wishes I could have reaced back and given one of them to those days of hunger in the past, or that I could have moved this plate to a place – there must have been such a place where someone else was hungry.”
This was such an interesting and unusual book. The main character is a person who wakes up in the pew of a church one morning and one of the church members takes the person into their home. We don’t know the gender or the race of the person as each of the characters in the book tries to figure it out desperately. They name the person Pew for where the person was found because Pew won’t talk to anyone and won’t tell them anything.
The writer does an excellent job of showing how the discomfort of being in the presence of someone who doesn’t talk can overtake other people with their need to fill the void. I also liked the Shirley Jackson-esque Festival towards the end. The unsettling, eerie tone accompanies the whole novel and crescendos in the release that is the festival.
No revelations, no twists, no surprises, this is merely a thought-provoking well-written novel.
Thank you to netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Big Summer (3 stars): I have mixed feelings about this story. Jennifer Weiner usually writes about friendship and her stories are often deeper than they look like they would be and there’s often some element of someone with a weight issue. All of those elements exist in this story, too. There’s also some unexpected mystery which I found to be weird and odd and out of character. I didn’t dislike it but it detracted from the story, in my opinion and took away from the depth usually present in her stories. Still enjoyed my time with it.
American Dirt (3 stars): I kept putting off reading this book because there was so much controversy over it and I didn’t want to promote or encourage false representation. I finally read it for my book club and maybe because I’d already heard so much about it, it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.
And there we go, grateful to be reading.
Books I Read this Week 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. I am also tracking my books in real time on Good Reads here. If you’re on Good Reads add me so I can follow you, too! I’ve also started an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
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