Late post on a busy weekend...

It’s after 5pm on Sunday afternoon and I’m just starting this post, so I’ll be a day late once this gets sent to email subscribers.  My excuse is that it has been an unexpectedly busy (and FUN!!) weekend, so please bear with me. I don’t actually like writing late in the day, as I’m more in the “posting” mood when the house is quiet and the morning light, sights and sounds accompany my typing, not to mention my delicious thermos of chai!  But here goes…

I read a Young Adult book this past week by Toronto teacher-librarian and first-time author Susan Marshall, NemeSIS.  I received a copy of this book, signed by the author, at the big library superconference I went to this past February, and I finally had a chance to read it.  This novel tells the story of Nadine, a grade 10 student who, after a lonesome first year at high school, is anticipating more of the same, including eating her lunch surreptitiously at a library study carrel, unless she makes a plan to change her habits.  The inspiration for this change comes in the form of an "AA" pamphlet, which outlines the 12-step program, and Nadine decides to create her own 12 (or more) steps to change her life. These steps include such things as taking part in school life, making friends, living, not just surviving, and getting a boyfriend.  Nadine’s world has changed significantly in the past year, when her Dad moved away, making more permanent her parents’ separation. This move has also emotionally affected Nadine’s older sister Rachel, whose already erratic mood swings have intensified. And mom has thrown herself into work, spending less and less time at home, giving Rachel more time to torment Nadine and their mom less opportunities to intervene.  All in all, Nadine's life threatens to spiral out of control, and she is clearly perceptive enough to realize that she alone is responsible for changing her situation… which she manages to do, literally one “step” at a time. In the interest of allowing the details of these changes to unfold at the author’s, and Nadine's, own pace, I won’t give any more information than this, but I will say that this novel kept me interested right to the end.  Marshall’s book tackles many of the significant issues facing teens today, domestic drama, sibling rivalry, mental health, bullying, challenges transitioning to high school, and of course first relationship stresses. All of these she manages to address fully and completely without sounding like she is lecturing. In fact, the whole book, told from Nadine’s point of view, has a realistic tone that made this reader wonder whether the character is based on someone in Marshall’s life. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book is one of the nominees for next year’s OLA Forest of Reading White Pine Award. I would highly recommend it to young adults in grades 9 or 10 - I think some of the content is too mature for my elementary-aged students, but I plan to offer this book to the high school librarians when the new school year starts. I dare you to read it and not develop an emotional attachment to the main character that has you hoping for the best to the very last page.

That’s all for today.  Stay cool and keep reading!

Bye for now…
Julie

"O, Canada" post on a sunny summer Sunday...

I know my summer vacation has started when I’m able to read two books in one week, and that is just what happened!  HURRAY! I also finished an audiobook that I will tell you about, so bear with me if this is also a long-ish post.

I read a book that was passed on to me by one of my book club members, The Deserters by Canadian author Pamela Mulloy.  This short novel, her debut, tells the story of Eugenie, a middle-aged woman living on a farm in New Brunswick, Dean, a man who fled the US to evade a call for another tour of duty in Iraq and is hiding out in the woods near the farm, and Eugenie’s husband, (I think his name is Sam), who is away in Spain working as a carpentry apprentice.  Eugenie is trying to restore the farmhouse and the land, which she inherited from her grandmother, but it is almost more than she can manage alone. When Dean offers to help out, she readily accepts, and the two form a bond that only shared hard work and private contemplation can bring about. Eugenie is worried that Sam will not want to come back to Canada, and she fears her marriage is over. Well, she fears it, but may also welcome it.  Sam has his own issues to work out, which the time spent alone in Spain is allowing. And Dean is suffering PTSD after his first tour in Iraq, his sections peppered with flashbacks to his time there as he struggles to piece together his memories from that time. When Eugenie’s sister arrives from Montreal, things get complicated, then Sam returns, and we the readers know that things can’t possibly turn out happily for everyone.  Local author Mulloy did an amazing job with this slim literary novel that feels much longer than its 240 pages. While I could have kept reading and finished it in a day or two, the writing style almost demanded a slow, mindful reading experience that allows the reader to take in every word and consider the mounting complications, the emotional turmoil for the characters, that each shift in their seemingly isolated situation creates. It was a wonderful book, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough.  I’m adding it to my book club selection list for next year, and am planning to invite the author to come and speak to our group, our first ever author visit!

And I read another book by Canadian author and former Lieutenant Governor James Bartleman, A Matter of Conscience.  Don’t let appearances deceive you - this is both a short novel and a sampling of the documentation pertaining to and stories about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada over the past several decades, as well as the “Sixties Scoop”, a time when government officials, along with Children’s Aid Society staff, visited Indian reservations and unceremoniously removed babies and young children from their biological parents and placed them up for adoption by non-Native couples in both Canada and the US, effectively wiping out their language, culture and heritage in one fell swoop.  The novel part of the book tells the story of Brenda, a young Indian girl who was one of the babies scooped from her parents and adopted by a white family in Orillia, Ontario, where she grew up loved and cared for… well, mostly loved (not all seized babies were so lucky). She had no idea about her heritage and suffered feelings of displacement throughout her years growing up. Greg is a young man who, just before he goes off to university, travels to Manitoba to work in the mines to earn his tuition money. There he becomes involved in the murder of a young student from a nearby residential school.  This act and the ensuing guilt shape the rest of his life, and when he meets Brenda, he believes that she will be his ticket to easing his conscience. Their tempestuous tale of love, passion and betrayal make up the first half of this book. The second half is filled with “Background Readings”, mostly government documents pertaining to the Indian Act, stories of Indigenous women who were part of the “Sixties Scoop” , who were abused, or who know an Indigenous woman who is either missing or murdered.  It also provides information on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.  I have enjoyed an earlier novel by this author, Exceptional Circumstances, a political thriller set in Quebec in 1970, about the abduction of a foreign diplomat and cabinet minister by separatists, which was so good I bought a copy and paid full price for it!  So I was quite excited to get a copy of this book from the library, as it is so very important for us Canadians to try to understand as much as possible about the situations Indigenous peoples in our country have faced for decades, situations created by our government which formed the root of many systemic problems for which our country will probably spend many more decades atoning.  I didn’t love the novel part of the book. It offered a fairly surface treatment of Greg and Brenda’s relationship, and while it did bring up many of the issues facing Indigenous women today, it was too short to offer much more than a snapshot. In my opinion, Bartleman wrote the fictional part of the book to garner a wider readership, that this was just a vehicle to get people to read the documentation and stories at the back of the book.  And it worked! I would never have checked this book out if I knew it was non-fiction, but when presented as fiction, I was all over it! Then, when I realized that it was only 130 pages long, I felt obligated to at least skim the rest of the book, the “Background Readings”, which were very interesting and informative and quite heart-wrenching. Whether the publisher’s idea or Bartleman’s, it was brilliant packaging these two components together.  I think I can recommend this to anyone who is interested in finding out more about the issues facing Indigenous peoples in Canada today and throughout recent history, and would recommend reading both the fiction and the non-fiction sections of the book. (Note: these two Canadian novels were anything but uplifting, so if you need a light summer read, these are probably not for you!)

And I finished a so-so audiobook yesterday, The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain.  This domestic novel opens with 25-year-old Riley MacPherson going back to her hometown to clean out her childhood home after her father's death a month earlier.  She is on summer holidays from her job as a school counselor, so time is not really an issue for her. She reconnects with her older brother Danny, a recluse living in a trailer in their father’s RV Park, a bitter young man suffering from PTSD who feels that life has treated him poorly.  While going through some photos, Riley comes across a group shot of Danny, herself, and her older sister, Lisa, who killed herself at seventeen, when Riley was only two years old. Unable to stop herself, Riley digs into her family history and uncovers secrets that have been hidden for decades. As revelation follows revelation, Riley becomes more embroiled in the lies and secrets until it seems impossible to sort it all out and discover the truth, a discovery she is determined to make, but at what cost, and to whom?  It sounds like the kind of book I would like, and it was actually a fairly interesting story, but I couldn’t stand the sections narrated by Riley, and most of the book is from her point of view. She was such a self-centred character, seemingly only interested in how all of this affects her, that I nearly stopped listening to this 12+ hour book. I mean, the ending was fairly predictable and I could guess what was likely to happen to everyone. Riley whined and complained throughout, never considering the emotional states of others,  despite the best intentions of those around her, both family and friends. I did not love this audiobook, and was thrilled to finally reach the end yesterday afternoon. Chamberlain is a bestselling author, though, so clearly others enjoy her novels, so don’t be discouraged because of this post. And the narrator did a good job of bringing the story to life, too, so if you are in the mood for a domestic fiction audiobook that has a complex plot involving family secrets, you could probably do worse than this.

That really was a long post.  I’ll close now, as it’s a perfect summer day and I want to get out and enjoy it.   Bye for now…

Julie

PS My book club ladies met yesterday and they LOVED, LOVED, LOVED A Man Called Ove! They loved the characters, they loved the story, which resonated with so many of them, it made them laugh, it made them cry (both tears of happiness and sadness), and they thanked me profusely for choosing this book. That is the kind of response I'm always thrilled to receive!

Long post on a long weekend...

It’s the first long weekend of the summer, and since I’m on summer vacation now, I thought it would be fitting to celebrate my newfound free time by writing an extra long post!  (I don’t know if it’ll be “extra long”, but I will tell you about both the book I read and the audiobook I finished, which I don’t always have the time or energy to do).

I get e-newsletters from Kirkus, an American book review magazine, that offer weekly reviews of new books as well as lists of themed books that include some new and some backlist titles.  Kirkus is very hard to impress, so when they give a good review, you can bet it’s usually a pretty good book.  I recently received a list of “the 13 scariest books ever written”, a list that includes We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Simple Plan and The Shining  (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/lists/13-scariest-books-ever-written/ring/).  On this list was a book by thriller writer Megan Abbott, whose books I am familiar with but have never read.  You Will Know Me, published in 2016, tells the story of the Knox family, Eric and Katie, their insightful, quirky son Drew and their focused, driven, possibly obsessive daughter Devon.  Devon is their star, a girl on the cusp of training to be an Olympic gold medallist, and the hopes and dreams of the family, as well as the whole gym community, rest on her strong shoulders.  All seems to be going well until a tragic accident takes the life of young, handsome Ryan, boyfriend of the coach’s niece, Hailey. It seems like a random hit-and-run, but when rumours and suspicions begin to fly, the structure of the gym community begins to crumble, leaving each member to ponder to what lengths the others would go to ensure the success of the whole.  OK, I enjoy watching Olympic gymnastics, but I will never be able to watch again without considering the torturous conditions those poor girls endure to train for it. That was the thing I took most from this domestic thriller, the punishment these girls put their bodies through every day, all the time, and the focus and intensity with which they must necessarily view their path.  How any parent can endure watching this is beyond me, but having never been a parent, I’m sure there are many things I would be incapable of understanding unless it was my own child (or so they tell me!). I didn’t find it overly “scary”, although it was somewhat suspenseful, in the way that Defending Jacob by William Landay was, but it was nothing like We Need to Talk About Kevin, whose author managed to make it a thriller while also being extremely literary.  I felt that this is what Megan Abbott was trying to do with this book, to make it seem like more of a Lee Valley book than what it really was, which is a Canadian Tire book.  There’s nothing wrong with Canadian Tire books, but to move from one level to another takes great skill and immense talent, and unfortunately Abbott falls far short of reaching this goal.  I think her efforts actually detract from the flow of the story; it’s as if she has fixated on a couple of techniques that she thinks will raise the bar and just keeps repeating them over and over, making the text not more literary but rather, at least for this reader, more tedious.  I found the suspense part pretty standard, but what was most intriguing for me was the relationship between Devon and Katie, and I would have been so much more interested in this novel if it had focused more on the domestic drama, with full character backstories, including the dynamics between the gym community members, than on the hit-and-run and subsequent investigation and speculation.  It was an OK book, but not one that makes me want to rush out and read other books by this author.

And I finished listening to an audiobook last week, one in the “Andy Carpenter” series by David Rosenfelt that I was delighted to discover I hadn’t already listened to before.  Sudden Death begins with Andy Carpenter and Willie Miller arriving in Los Angeles to discuss film options for Willie’s personal story of wrongful imprisonment and Andy’s success in handling his case.  When they arrive back in Paterson, New Jersey, Andy is whisked from the airport and delivered to the home of football star Kenny Schilling. He has been brought in to talk to Schilling after shots were fired when the police surrounded his house.  What Andy finds is a body folded up in Schilling’s closet, surrounded by a pool of blood from the bullet wound in the chest. The victim is Tony Preston, Kenny’s friend and fellow football player, and the evidence is compelling for a murder charge.  Andy reluctantly agrees to take the case, putting his team to work to find anything that could prove his client’s innocence. Could there be someone else who wanted Preston dead? Are his drug-related activities to blame for this? Or is Schilling being framed for some reason? Andy, of course, is able to see beyond what most lawyers and investigators accept as evidence, and the resulting investigation is nothing short of riveting, demonstrating that Carpenter is as sharp in the courtroom as he is insecure in his personal relationships.  I loved this book, and hope to have the opportunity to listen to all the books in the series, as I love the narrator, Grover Gardner, who really brings the “Andy Carpenter” books to life. Note: I’ve never read any of these books, only listened to them as audiobooks, so as an experiment, I should try reading one of the books to see if I read the words on the page with Gardner’s voice in my head. Hmmm… if I do this, I’ll let you know the results.

That’s all for today (but that was pretty long, eh?!).  Hope you had a Happy Canada Day, and if you are off today, enjoy the rest of the long weekend!

Bye for now…
Julie

"A Man Called Ove" and a Sunday morning post...

It’s a rainy, cool yet muggy morning as I enjoy my delicious Date Bar from City Cafe.  I had tea earlier, so there is no steaming cup before me now, just a finished book, a date bar and a stack of potential “next reads”.

My volunteer book club will meet in two weeks to discuss A Man Called Ove (I think it rhymes with “move” but with an eh sound at the end), bestselling debut novel by Swedish author Fredrik Backman.  I have been reluctant to read this, mostly based on the fact that it continues to be a bestseller even though it was published more than five years ago, but also because it has been described as a “feel-good”, heartwarming book, and as you have probably guessed from my previous posts, I don’t read “feel-good” books very often because I don’t usually enjoy them.  But I put this one on my book club list because I try to have a “light, easy” read in the summer, and one of the members of my Friends’ book club has been wanting to have this as a selection for quite some time. The only deterrent is that it is still difficult to get hold of a library copy, but I’m confident my group members will face this challenge with success.  This novel tells the story of Ove, a fifty-nine-year-old man whose life has been anything but easy. At the time of the story, his wife has been dead for six months and he’s just been made redundant at work, losing a job he’s held for more than a third of his life. How is he to fill the time and find a purpose in the face of his current circumstances? This reclusive man can fairly be called curmudgeonly, so when his new neighbours move in, he doesn’t welcome them with open arms.  Heavily pregnant Parvaneh, husband Patrick and their two daughters, however, do not seem able to appreciate Ove’s desire to remain alone, and manage to wheedle their way into his life even as he makes many half-hearted attempts to end it. Among his new “friends” is a mangy tomcat who, like Parvaneh, just assumes welcome into Ove’s life, taking over as if invited. Over the course of the book, a myriad cast of characters appear, and by the end, we take away the message that we never really know the extent or ways in which we touch the lives of others.  It was a heartwarming book, all right, but it started out kind of boring and repetitive, and I was all set to not enjoy it at all. But somewhere along the way, maybe after the first third of the book, the story really took off and I found myself looking forward to silent reading time, despite the always-chaotic end of the school year - it felt to me as if the writing got better as it went along, steamrolling ahead to a satisfying conclusion. I finished it this morning, and determined that it was a priceless book that would appeal to everyone, and would make a wonderful selection for any book club. Unlike Ove, I will admit that my initial thoughts about this book were wrong, and I’m so thankful to my friend from the other book club for recommending this book so often and so passionately.

That’s all for today.  Stay dry and keep reading!

Bye for now…

Julie

Short post on a hot afternoon...

It’s late afternoon, and I’m writing my blog post in the comfort of my air-conditioned living room.  I was up extra early this morning, got out for a walk, got all my cooking and gardening done before it got too humid, and now I’m trying to get into a blogging mood, which is actually much more difficult than I thought it would be.  So please bear with me if my post sounds disjointed and less-than-inspired.

It’s a shame that I’m lacking my usual blogging enthusiasm, because the book I read last week was truly amazing.  Home Fires by Kamila Shamsie, winner of the 2018 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, explores how the lure of terrorism is affecting Britain’s Muslim youth.  At the age of 28, Isma is finally free to pursue her dreams, after years of raising her twin brother and sister following the death of their grandmother and mother seven years before.  Isma is significantly older than the twins, and with a jihadist father whose life with the children was brief and sketchy at best and who died in uncertain circumstances on his way to Guantanamo many years earlier, Isma has shouldered the role of parent, supported by her extended family, Aunty Naseem and the cousins.  But now she is off to Amherst Massachusetts to resume her PhD studies, where she meets Eamonn, son of the UK Home Secretary, Karamat Lone. She is clearly smitten with him, but he, unfortunately, only has eyes for her younger sister, Aneeka, with whom he takes up a relationship upon his return to London. Aneeka sees Eamonn as a conduit to reaching the Home Secretary in an effort to bring her brother back home.  Parvaiz has been lured by the recruitment arm of ISIS after learning more about his father’s life and mission before his death, and works for the media arm of the terrorist group in Syria, but he becomes disillusioned and wishes to return home to his family and his “real” life. As a member of ISIS, however, this is nearly impossible, and Aneeka does everything in her power to help, including manipulating Eamonn into approaching his father.  What follows is the heartwrenching story of the effects of distorted religious faith in the hands of one family, and the far-reaching consequences and difficult decisions so many people are faced with because of the actions of one misguided youth. I read that this was a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ play Antigone, about a teenage girl who must choose between obeying the law of the land, as represented by her family, and religious law.  I know nothing about this play, but when reading this short novel, it had the feeling of a play retold, although I didn’t know this for a fact until much later.  I sometimes find novels told from various points of view to be either confusing or repetitive, but this one, told from the points of view of Isma, Aneeka, Eamonn, Parvais and Karamat, was none of these things.  Rather, it flowed as though it was one story told by a succession of storytellers, each patiently waiting for their turn to share the next section of the tale. It was short, barely 275 pages, but Shamsie never made the narrative seem skimped or incomplete, but rather it was told sparingly yet fully, with sufficient detail that I as the reader felt fully engaged.  She may have been able to achieve this because the story is so very timely, and even the most politically illiterate of us (like me!) understands what is going on. This novel had depth and emotional pull, and had me racing to the last page, which offered a satisfying, albeit tragic, conclusion. I would highly recommend this novel and will seek out others by this author (I think this is her seventh book).

That's all for today. Stay cool and keep reading!

Bye for now…
Julie

A bit of everything on a perfect laundry day...

I’m enjoying a steaming cup of chai tea and the first local strawberries of the season, along with a slice of freshly baked Date Bread on this perfect spring morning.  It is so breezy that the sheets I hung outside about a half-hour ago are nearly dry, and I’ve got another load of sheets from last weekend’s company nearly ready to go.  There’s nothing better than the smell of freshly laundered sheets that have been hung outside to dry, one of the best things about this season.

I didn’t read anything last week, just finished up two books I hadn’t quite completed the week before.  Then I was at odds as to what to read next. I was planning to go and see the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach yesterday, which made me want to reread this short novel again.  But I was too tired out to make it to the movie, and I didn’t read the book, either.  But I did pick up something I had on hold at the library, this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction winner, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie.  I have enjoyed reading some of the winners of this prize in the past, including We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and Property by Valerie Martin, and this one was immediately engaging when I started reading it yesterday afternoon.  I hope to write about it more next week once I’ve finished, but it seems to be about a young woman, Isma, who has spent years raising her twin siblings and is now finally free to pursue her own dream.  She has moved from London, England to Amherst, Massachusetts to take up her PhD studies, but worries about her younger sister, Aneeka, back home and her younger brother, Parvaiz, who has disappeared to follow his own pursuit.  Then Eamonn, the son of a Muslim politician in London, turns up in Isma’s life and seems to offer her a sense of home comfort while she is away. I’m not sure what will happen next, as I’m only 35 pages into this 275 page novel, but so far it seems like a good choice.  I don’t always enjoy literary award winners (remember the recent French literary prize winner, The Perfect Nanny?!), but I can usually count on the Baileys Prize.  

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the glorious spring day! But don't try reading outside - it's too windy!

Bye for now…
Julie

Short post in a hurry...

My brother-in-law and his family have just left our place after spending the night, and friends will be arriving from Toronto soon to go the the Maker Expo, so I really only have a few minutes to write up a post for this week.  

My book club met yesterday morning to discuss The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, a book that I had read a couple of years ago.  Here is what I said about it at that time:

“I was up early this morning and had time to finish The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.  I don’t normally read historical fiction, and this book was recently voted Best Historical Fiction title on GoodReads (which I almost never check, but I still get their email updates).  Nor am I a huge fan of domestic fiction of the sort Hannah writes. But somehow during a conversation about books with a teacher at one of my schools, this title came up, and next thing I knew, she brought it in for me to read.  I brought this 400+ page novel home and fully expected not to enjoy it, but it totally sucked me in and I had a hard time putting it down. This novel tells the story of two sisters in France during WWII. They are estranged both from their father and from each other, partly due to their age difference (Vianne is 10 years older than Isabelle) and partly due to their personalities.  Vianne is the mild, responsible one who always follows rules and lives a quiet life in a small French village with her husband and daughter, Sophie. Isabelle, on the other hand, gets thrown out of one boarding school after another for a variety of reasons, mostly for not following the rules. She craves the love and acceptance of her father, but he continually shuts her out or sends her away, as he has done with both children since their mother died.  When Germany invades France and occupies parts of the country, Vianne follows all the rules while Isabelle tries to find ways to break them and resist the Nazis. As the seasons pass, the order in Vianne’s world begins to crumble as the Nazi occupiers change the rules daily, threatening to destroy the livelihoods of everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike. Family members are imprisoned, friends are taken away or killed, and no one really knows what is going on.  But still Vianne does her best to follow the rules, hoping that things will get better. Meanwhile, Isabelle joins the resistance movement and is integral in setting up the Nightingale project, a program to help downed airmen in France return to safety. When the situation in the village becomes unbearable, Vianne is forced to break the rules and do what is right for those she loves, and she must learn to live with the consequences. This book has a bit of everything in it:  It is a domestic story of two sisters who must learn to overcome their differences and love one another despite their past experiences. These sisters must also learn to accept their father for who and what he is. It is a love story, well, actually two love stories. It is also a story of war, offering detailed descriptions of the brutal conditions and cruel treatment people were forced to endure at the hands of the Nazis, but told from the point of view of two very different women who made a difference in their own very different ways, and the difficult choices they had to make on an almost daily basis.  It was also a bit of a mystery, as it is told in the form of an extended flashback, and the reader does not discover until the very end who the main character really is. This well-written, gripping novel is sure to appeal to readers on so many different levels, and Hannah does a great job of portraying the lives of these French sisters despite being an American writer. It reminded me of the excellent novel we recently read for my book group, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, although they are very different novels.  While I would never normally have read this title, I’m glad my colleague left it on my desk.  I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction or domestic fiction.”

I still feel the same way about this book upon a second reading, and my book club ladies loved it!  We talked about the psychological challenges of the women in this book at that time, and how they had to make on-the-spot decisions on a regular basis that could significantly affect what happened to them and their families.  We appreciated the many sections where food was discussed, the feeding of the families with so little, the hoarding of food by the Germans, and how Hitler used France as a breadbasket to feed the German army. We compared Beck and Von Richer, and discussed what dilemmas Beck, too, faced on a regular basis, when he really believed in what he was doing at the beginning of the war, and how ashamed he was as the war progressed and turned cold-blooded and cruel.  One member mentioned that she wasn’t aware of the use of an escape route over the mountains, another felt that Isabelle’s beauty was an asset as well as a detriment. We talked about the climate at the time, that no one trusted anyone, and individuals had to guess who and what to believe, and how this changed from day to day. One member just said it was a heartbreaking book, all the death and despair, and how, as she was reading it, she kept thinking that she “didn’t want to know”, but at the same time that it was “good to know”.  Her favourite quotation from the book is when Vianne says, “ ‘Men tell stories. Women just get on with it’ “, which led to a discussion about whether it is better to remember or to forget. We had a great discussion, and I would highly recommend this book to any book club.

That’s all for today!  Stay dry and keep reading!

Bye for now…
Julie