I recently started listening on Audible to Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and discovered the salt water marshes along the North Carolina coast. So far, this is an entrancing listen, and the wonderful descriptions of the marshes make me wish I had a hard copy of the book so I could share some […]
I really enjoyed the music references in this book–and I got a kick out of the main character, Shoe, having an Uncle Albert, given all the Paul McCartney references. Plus, I’m reading it after having watched the movie Yesterday, so I’m getting a double dose of McCartney nostalgia. But the book really shone a light […]
Wow! This is going to be a difficult one for me. It was fairly plain from the publisher’s blurb that “what happened” to Marianne Mulvaney was some type of sexual assault. But I want to warn potential readers that if you are easily triggered by rape and sexual assault, you will probably want to avoid […]
I’ve been putting off New York for a while now, but as I finished Hawaii, I decided to come back to the opposite end of the country–and to my roots. I was born and raised in a small town in upstate New York. I have family in the urban areas of upstate–Binghamton, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, […]
Wow! This book has it all when it comes to setting and our reading challenge–geography, history, all the different people who make up Hawaii–and the setting is so integral to the story! So many aspects of the story are uniquely Hawaiian, there’s nowhere else it could be set. I am reading my way across the […]
Ugh! I know this book is highly acclaimed and has won awards. All I can say is that either those people geeked over the loveliness of the prose and ignored that it made no sense, or I’m a lot more stupid than I thought. I don’t claim to be a genius, and I actually don’t […]
Wow! We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge was a really interesting book! The commentary on race and racism were enlightening, and the commentary on families, sisterhood and motherhood were, at times, heart-wrenching. Overall, I’m glad I read it. However, despite a few lovely descriptions of western Massachusetts and less lovely ones of Dorchester, […]
Between, Georgia has the most Southern stereotypes of any of the Georgia books we’ve read so far. It is also the only Southern Gothic book we’ve read so far. (Though A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields fits that category as well.) I am reading my way across the USA–5 or so books set in each […]
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones was a great addition to my challenge reading list for Georgia… or Louisiana. The story was split–Roy’s family lives in Louisiana, and that’s where he is wrongfully convicted and serves five years in prison. Celestial grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and she received her childhood home as a wedding […]
While I was investigating young adult and young reader choices for California, I stumbled across Ana of California by Andi Teran (2015), which is meant to be a modern take on Anne of Green Gables, the much loved classic book by Lucy Maud Montgomery from 1908. While the original took place in Canada, Ana of […]