Thirty-five years after writing her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has given us the ultimate gift of an absolutely fabulous sequel in The Testaments. Although I read The Handmaid’s Tale many years ago, I was able to jump right into The Testaments because I’ve been following the Hulu television series of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Every once in a while you begin a book and right away you know you are in for something special. Ice Cream Star is one of those books and delivers on its early promise right through the entire, epic story.
n recommending this book, which I do highly, I had to reflect on the many different aspects of a book that I believe make it a “must read.” Catch and Kill will punch you in the stomach and leave you breathless with the story Farrow tells. I knew the book was about Harvey Weinstein – his predatory behavior and how he got away with it for so long because he was a rich and powerful influence in the film industry. What I hadn’t anticipated was Farrow’s strong evidence that for years, many other powerful men knew of Weinstein's behavior.
The subtitle for Simplicity Parenting is “Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Nurture Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kids,” and that is exactly what it delivers. Payne provides a toolbox of ideas, anecdotes and observations about why so many kids today are experiencing such high stress and anxiety, and how we might go about fixing it.
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’m going to be upfront here: this book took a long time to grab my interest, and even after finishing it, there are huge sections that never really interested me. But it’s a sneaky one, and since finishing it, I have found myself remembering the characters as though they were people I knew. And it certainly taught me a great deal of Newfoundland's history, about which I knew absolutely nothing.
Sometimes when I’m choosing what to read next, I just want a really good story, a book that’s fun to read. Elin Hilderbrand is one of my go-to authors for that kind of book. She has written 19 books set on Nantucket in the summertime, each of them chock full of memorable characters and stories of family, romance and drama.
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.”
It was exactly one year ago that I had my breakthrough and realized that there are well-written, non-fiction books about history that even I could enjoy reading. It was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals that opened my eyes. After Goodwin, I solicited ideas from friends and tried Jill Lepore’s These Truths and realized that not all popular history books would be to my liking. Therefore, when I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I was thrilled to find it so accessible and entertaining.
This is not the kind of book I would normally pick out for myself, but my husband Dan saw Hadfield speak and brought his memoir home. His high praise of the man’s message and the book itself put it at the top of my list, and I wasn’t disappointed.
My co-editor and I so enjoy receiving book recommendations from our readers that we both read Born A Crime this month after our friend Jane Amara endorsed it. I was aware of the book, but unsure of its appeal. Thanks to Jane, I read it and recommend it highly.
I could not put this book down once I started reading it. At the same time, I didn’t want to read too much at one sitting because I wanted to absorb what I’d read and I didn’t want the book to end.
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!).
Confession: I definitely chose this book for its cover. I was intrigued and almost bought it several times before finally getting it from the library after a long wait. But whatever I thought it would be about, The Birth House sucked me into a world and story that I never dreamed existed, and taught me some Canadian History at the same time.
The Blue Notebook is brutal to read, and yet I am grateful for the window it gave me into a world I knew nothing about. Levine has spent his life working with NGOs and non-profits all over the world to study and help children in extreme poverty. This is his first novel inspired by one moment in his travels.
I don’t know why WWII stories keep showing up so often on my reading list, but immediately after reading The Alice Network, I picked up this book with no expectations at all. Beneath A Scarlet Sky is the novelized true story of Pino Lella, who as a teenager helped Jews escape Italy, worked as a spy within the Nazi organization in Milan and assisted the Americans in removing the partisans once the war ended. It is an unbelievable tale, made all the more thrilling by the fact that it is true.
I confess, I had never heard of Richard Powers before my friend Jane recommended that I read The Overstory -- because it was good and because it had won the Pulitzer Prize. I’m not sure how I missed Powers, who has published 11 books prior to The Overstory. But now that I’ve read the book, I can understand why it won the prestigious prize.
Thank goodness for the twice-yearly “Authors on Stage” program at Wellesley College, which I’ve happily attended for years with my friend, Pam. If not for this wonderful series, which each time features three authors talking about their new books, I may never have found The Food Explorer. As the title suggests, the book tells the remarkable story of David Fairchild, an American botanist, who from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, devoted his life to traveling the world in search of new plants and foods that he could bring back to America. He added a vast quantity of foods to Americans’ diets and increased by a huge amount the diversity of what farmers grow.
Although I have never reviewed Caleb Carr’s earlier book, The Alienist, I find myself recommending it all the time to people who want an engrossing, fast-paced and smart book. Its wide appeal is, I’m sure, why Amazon Prime made a series out of it. It took me a few years to read the sequel, The Angel of Darkness, but I was not disappointed.
