Summer Blockbuster

You’re going to want to put this on your TBR, your library holds list, pre-order it from your favorite indie bookstore. This doorstop of a novel coming out 5/4/21 has something for everyone – even its 600 pages didn’t slow me down, I swallowed this story in a matter of days. Great Circle is the story of Marian Graves. The whole story of her – starting with her birth and ending with her death – and by the end you will have experienced and loved every bit of it. You’ll come to love her twin brother Jamie, their childhood friend Caleb. You’ll hate a few characters and root for some others – long story short it follows Marian as she tries to make her dream of being an airplane pilot come true. Interrupting long chunks of her story is a modern-day narrative from the POV of the young actress who is slated to play Marian in a film. Initially I thought this story line was nothing but a distraction to the real story – but by the end you’ll see why we needed Hadley Baxter, as annoying as she may be. 5 stars!

Spring Fever part two

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These were all four star reads for me – if I had to rank them they’d go like this:

Zorrie – quiet story of a young woman’s life in rural America. Short, well-written.

The Four Winds – if you like Kristin Hannah this is an obvious read, if you like good historical fiction you might be interested in this one too. Story of a woman and her family during the dustbowl.

Still Life – old, old mystery that is the first in a series of 17. If you like murder in sleepy little towns, if you loved Murder, She Wrote or if you like “cozy” mysteries, you will LOVE this series if you haven’t read them all ready. Very popular series with die hard fans.

The Nature of Fragile Things – the first half of this novel was AMAZING, but then it lost a lot of steam. About a mail-order bride who moves from NYC to San Fran just before the giant earthquakes in 1916. She starts to suspect her new/stranger husband is not who he claims to be. 5 star first half, 3 star second half = four star average.

We Run the Tides is a coming-of-age story that is uncomfortable in the way that coming of age is uncomfortable.

Sorrow and Bliss is the story of a woman dealing with her depression (and maybe something else). It was depressing! but good.

Spring Fever (part one)

All of the sudden three months have passed since my last blog post! I had to split this one up in to two parts, I have a lot of pages to cover!

I’ve read three books so far this year that I’m sure will be on my end-of-year top ten list – and two of them are in this post! Neither of them are available yet, so get your library app open and get ready to request. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead comes out on May 4th, and it’s going to make a splash. Partly because of its epic story and partly because of its epic size (it’s a big one). I really loved this sweeping* novel about Marian Graves – aviatrix, sister, lover…I really feel like I know every aspect of her life. Halfway through WWII I found myself wishing the book had ended before that. But I kept reading and found that the long sections about the war are important later. I also found myself thinking that the story line involving Hadley – Hollywood A-lister who sleeps with everyone she meets – was unnecessary and slightly annoying but really I can overlook that for the importance of her in the end. Long, lovely, truly an epic story. I’ll be thinking about Marian (and Caleb, tbh) for a long time.

The other one in this group that I so loved was Damnation Spring. It’s also an epic – close to the same number of pages but a much shorter timespan. I couldn’t even tell you why I picked this from the long queue on my kindle. Maybe the title? When I saw how long it was I thought I’d just give it a chapter or two and see. And now only two days later I’m a sniffly mess over the end of it. Colleen and Rich are two of the most heartbreakingly real characters I’ve read in a long time, and following them through their troubles in the 70s with the logging companies, the preservation “hippies,” the hopes and stresses of growing a family…man. This one really hit me. I will say that the logging business and the technicalities of who owns the tress vs who owns the land vs the structure of logging outfits was confusing and over my head. FIVE stars, for sure.

Who is Maud Dixon? is a great novel-turned-thriller if you’re looking for something fast and twisty – a young woman takes a job as an assistant to a reclusive author…things get wild. 4 stars

Brood follows a nameless narrator as she tries to keep 4 chickens alive – and also deal with some grief that has been lingering in her life. I have a complicated history with chickens (we’ve had a lot, and lost a lot to predators) but this made me want to try again. Four stars

The Liar’s Dictionary has been on my list for a long time and it just came out/came in at the library. The wordplay is super fun but I thought the story was a little lackluster – a woman takes a job trying to find all the mountweazels in a smaller company’s dictionary (bogus entries). We get her storyline plus the storyline of the guy years ago who snuck so many bogus entries in. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Didn’t live up to my internal hype. 3.5 stars

Animal Spirits is a short story collection by Francesca Marciano who wrote one of my all time favorite collections a few years ago (The Other Language). Each story in this collection deals with some sort of – you guessed it – animal. The most memorable for me was about a young woman who takes a job working at a traveling circus as the woman who gets smothered by snakes. If you need a short story collection, go get her first! 3 stars

This last one, The Choice, has come up in conversation a handful of times recently so I decided to give it a read. Great holocaust memoir – the first part is her story of surviving the war, followed by a section about life after the war (finding a home, a career) and then she talks about dealing with trauma. ALL trauma, not just war trauma. Self-help-y in a really inspiring way. 4 stars