{Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for my gifted copy}
What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Continue reading “What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster | Grand Central Publishing {Book Review}”
Tag: family saga
What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz | Atria Books {Book Review}
{Thank you to Atria Books for my gifted copy}
What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Continue reading “What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz | Atria Books {Book Review}”
Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland | Simon & Schuster {Book Review}
Stay Home & Read More Books! {40+ Highly Recommended Book Suggestions}
Seeing The Positive
While this is unchartered territory for so many of us, I am happy to hear that people are wanting to read! I have had a few emails from readers requesting book suggestions for authors and titles that are completely engrossing.
I don’t know about you but when I am worried, I need things that are totally engaging and distracting. These books are ones that completely took me in and I couldn’t think about anything else, which is exactly what you might need right now too. I hope this inspires your current reading list!
Continue reading “Stay Home & Read More Books! {40+ Highly Recommended Book Suggestions}”
All This Could be Yours by Jami Attenberg | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt {Book Review}
All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg
Book Summary:
“‘If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,’ says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister–feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra.
As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile, Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.
ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can tangle a family for generations and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free. With her signature “sparkling prose” (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.”
Publication Date:
October 22nd, 2019
Genre:
Family Saga Fiction
My Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
My Review:
All This Could Be Yours was one of my most highly anticipated fall 2019 book releases. I have been on a family saga kick and after hearing some great reviews I couldn’t way to start it. I absolutely loved Jami Attenberg’s approach to the complexities and intricacies of family life, especially when it is dysfunctional.
We meet a family who’s toxic patriarch, Victor, is on his deathbed. Attenberg gave an intricate look at dealing with the complexities of grief and loss when the relationship you had with the person was deeply troubling at times. The desires we wish for with others (closure, forgiveness, and answers) are often up against the reality that sometimes we have to find this within ourselves.
The novel has flashbacks that help us see the history of this family which totally worked for me as I always enjoy knowing the who and why of this family drama genre. We learn family secrets and the emotional and physical damages Victor caused to his family members. Even when all of the characters were not super likable, I felt like I understood them because of Attenberg’s ability to create such multi-faceted personas. This was completely engaging to read while also being super thought-provoking which would make it a fantastic book club discussion.
Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advanced copy.
Disclosure: Some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click through and make a purchase, it helps support this blog at no cost to you. Thank you!
The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall |Simon & Schuster {Book Review}
The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
Book Summary:
Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences, however, threaten to tear them apart.
Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not?
James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life.
In The Dearly Beloved, we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, these four forge improbable paths through their evolving relationships, each struggling with uncertainty, heartbreak, and joy. A poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives, Cara Wall’s The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.
Publication Date:
August 13th, 2019
Genre:
Family Saga Fiction
My Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
My Review:
I wasn’t sure what book should follow The Most Fun We Ever Had (you can read my full review HERE) but I knew I wanted to read another family saga. The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall fit into this category so I decided to give it a go.
Wall introduces us to two couples, Charles and Lily and James and Nan. The beginning of the book gives us a rich background for each character starting from their childhoods through early adulthood. These couples lives then become intertwined when Charles and James become pastors at a New York City Presbyterian church. Over the years we see them struggle with their faith, beliefs, marriage, parenthood, and friendships.
This book is a deep dive into these four characters, who navigate many joys and heartaches over the decades we follow along with them. I loved seeing their evolving relationships with both themselves and one another and having the rich backstory to these multi-dimensional characters made this storyline even more rewarding.
While there are religious themes in The Dearly Beloved, Wall presents them without judgment or bias toward any belief system and the writing never feels preachy. I appreciated that it showed the struggles of all four characters at some point within their own belief systems. I highly recommend this one and it definitely makes my favorites of 2019 list!
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo | Doubleday Books {Book Review}
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Book Summary:
“A dazzling, multigenerational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple–still madly in love after forty years–recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they’ve built.
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that’s to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety, and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents’.
As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt–given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before–we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorenson’s past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the quintessential American backdrop of Chicago and its prospering suburbs, Lombardo’s debut explores the triumphs and burdens of love, the fraught tethers of parenthood and sisterhood, and the baffling mixture of affection, abhorrence, resistance, and submission we feel for those closest to us. In painting this luminous portrait of a family’s becoming, Lombardo joins the ranks of writers such as Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen as visionary chroniclers of our modern lives.”
Publication Date:
June 25, 2019
Genre:
Family Life Fiction
My Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
My Review:
I have read a lot of books this summer but none that really blew me away. A memorable book for me is one that keeps me thinking about it long after finishing it. Many of my book choices during this time of the year are easy and engaging but not always ones that stick with me forever. There is definitely a time and place for both of these types of reading and they each fill my reading bucket in very different ways.
I kept seeing The Most Fun We Ever Had on Bookstagram and I put it on my TBR list but I wasn’t sure if summer was the time to read it. I was a little nervous about the length and I didn’t know if I was in the mood for a family saga piece of writing during this more hectic time of the year. After seeing yet another raving review I decided to read it on a whim and boy was I wrong!
When you are reading a 500+ page book it is a real commitment. Your reading experience is more like a marathon and just not a sprint to the finish. Author Claire Lombardo pulled me right into the lives of the members of the Sorrenson family and I had a hard time putting this one down. The writing was both captivating and completely absorbing. I ended up going back and forth between both reading the hard copy and listening to this on Audible. This made it an absolutely amazing and engrossing reading experience and was perfect for this style of writing.
While there were a lot of well-developed characters and the narration jumps back and forth from present (2016) to the past I never felt confused or that it was hard to keep track of it all. This is all such a testament to Lombardo’s skilled writing ability.
The story was compelling and the characters were both raw and relatable. I loved that their relationships with each other and themselves showed the intricacies of both families and just being human. The nuanced history and complexities of relationships that have spanned decades were presented in such a completely compelling manner. There were humorous parts and so many memorable quotes that I will never forget.
When I wasn’t reading or listening to this book I was thinking about it. It was difficult to leave this fictional family at the end of my reading journey, which for me, makes this truly a remarkable read. I highly recommend this debut(!!) novel and I can’t wait to read what Lombardo shares next.