Some unsolicited thoughts and opinions from a mother and daughter who love reading and talking about books!

Afterlife is a beautifully written, sensitive and realistic exploration of one woman’s struggle to come to terms with her husband’s sudden and unexpected death. The novel begins one year after Sam’s death and Antonia is still fixated on her final days with her husband. She has conversations with him in her mind as a means of keeping him alive. Antonia is grappling as well with how and when she’ll feel able to interact with her three sisters again. They have always been very close, but she’s found them barely tolerable since becoming a widow.

If magic, love stories and dramaturgy (the theory and practice of dramatic composition) excite you as much as they do me, this is the book for you. I had no idea what I was in for with this one, and I really loved it—a perfect escape book!

I’ve been reading a lot of books since the COVID-19 quarantine began and There There is by far the most memorable. Orange artfully constructs the book around 12 characters, each of whom has different feelings about his or her Native American roots. The setting is modern day Oakland, California. The characters are at once exotic in their differences and empathetic in their humanity.

In recommending The Starless Sea, I struggled to name the genre of the book. I’ve decided it is fantasy – along the lines of Harry Potter but written for adults. The Starless Sea tells the story of Zachary Ezra Rollins who attends a small Vermont college, majors in Computer Games and keeps mostly to himself. One day, Ezra happens upon an old book in the library which, upon reading, he realizes tells the story of his life exactly up to that moment.

I’m always up for a good Jodi Picoult book when I need something easy to read on vacation, or after reading something challenging. (This time it was Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow). Although this one fit the bill in terms of a gripping story told with her trademark flair, the subject matter made it much harder to digest than Picoult’s usual fare. (Which, by the way, is called “child peril lit.”)

Ann Patchett has done it again – written a fabulous novel from beginning to end. I am amazed at how reliably she produces books that I absolutely love. The Dutch House tells the story of a brother and sister, Danny and Maeve, who were abandoned by their mother at a young age. When their father remarries and soon thereafter dies, their stepmother throws them out of their magnificent family home in the Philadelphia suburbs.

I love starting a book when I know that at the very least, it will be well-written and engaging, and with Ian McEwan, that is always a safe bet. The Children Act was no exception in his superb, always inventive and psychologically investigative collection of novels.

When you read a Julian Barnes book, you know that it’s probably not going to be a happy tale. But it will be exquisitely written – almost poetic. The Only Story is indeed not happy. As the Globe and Mail said, “Julian Barnes’s latest novel is for the person who likes to listen to sad songs after a breakup. The Only Story hurts while it comforts.”

I could not have given this book a better title if I worked on it for the rest of my life. Never have I loved a book so much on the one hand and then completely lost interest on the other. The title, and my issues, stem from the structure of the book, which is essentially two short stories put together with a brief final chapter that sort of ties them together (sort of!).