I attended a funeral last week. The preacher made a comment that there are three characteristics that will destroy us. One is pride and another is anger. I don’t remember the third one because I was so stuck on pride and wrestling with my own shortcomings. The preacher’s comments made me check myself. What is pride? The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a feeling of deep satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired. This is the obvious definition. This is pride with a cap ..read more

I love wine. I love drinking it, I love pairing it with meals, and I love sharing it with my friends and family. What I do not love is the commercialization of the wine industry. I prefer to support growers who farm organically and sustainably. When wine is made the way nature intended, it tastes pure and clean, without the bad side effects like feeling awful the next day. I’m going to be transparent: with all this Covonavirus madness and trying to work remotely while homeschooling my Kindergartener and second grader, I’ve been drinking a “LITTLE” more wine than usual. Okay, a lot. But here’s ..read more

From the New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, is Ann Patchett’s story that illustrates the bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a haunting past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves, and of who we really are. At the end of the WWII, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin a real estate empire, propelling his family from rags to r ..read more

If you like murder mysteries and ghost stories, this is your book. I give it four stars. Simone St. James‘ “The Sun Down Motel” was a Book of the Month club selection and I, judging a book by the cover, totally wanted to read it because of the cover. (I love old Americana 1960s-style motels- not staying in them, just looking at them.) The story is about a woman, the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in a remote city in upstate New York, who goes missing without a trace in 1982. Thirty five years later, her niece goes looking for her. She accepts a night clerk position at the Sun Down Motel, a ..read more

I finished this book in 24 hours. I typically avoid Holocaust genres because the topic is horrifyingly disturbing and I see enough sad things every day at work. But this got so many great reviews and many of my readers (YOU) raved about it, so I had to try. It was wonderful. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a true story about the love between Lale Sokolov and Gita Furman, two Jewish prisoners sent to Auschwitz and the neighboring camp, Birkenau, during WWII. When Lale is tasked with tattooing identification numbers on his fellow prisoners, he reluctantly takes the position, mainly because it has ..read more

I recommend this book. Five stars! The Giver of Stars, a historical fiction set in in Depression-era America, chronicles the lives of female librarians in a small town in Kentucky’s Appalachian mountains. The real-life WPA Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky program, part of the New Deal and a project spotlighted by Eleanor Roosevelt as beneficial to women and children, lasted from 1935-1943, delivering books via horseback to rural inhabitants of Kentucky to promote literacy to the country’s poorest and often forgotten. The women face the adversity of a town hellbent on determining what women ca ..read more

I give Sing, Unburied Sing a 4 stars out of 5. This is a gut-wrenching story about a biracial thirteen year-old boy, JoJo, set in modern-day Mississippi. His black mother is a junkie. His white father is in prison. His paternal grandparents will not acknowledge him because he is black. His maternal grandmother is dying of cancer while his grandfather- the only constant in his life- is barely scraping by to make ends meet. The family is impoverished and JoJo must grow up quickly to care for his three year-old sister, Kayla. When JoJo’s father is scheduled to be released from prison, his mother ..read more

This is a great read- I give it 4 out of 5 stars. The Paris Wife is a historical fiction about the marriage between Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway. Hadley was Ernest’s first wife out of four. It is a well-researched book about how they met, their marriage, and the life they created together in Paris in the 1920s when Ernest was still an unknown author. This is no secret, but Ernest left Hadley for her best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer. The story illustrates the truly complicated nature of their dynamic and how Ernest (a complicated, longsuffering person himself) loved them both. Spoiler al ..read more

I loved this book and give it 4 stars. “On New Years’ Eve in 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a Greenwich Village jazz bar with her boardinghouse roommate stretching three dollars as far as it will go when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with blue eyes and a tempered smile, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool toward the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast–rarefied environs where she will have little to rely upon othe ..read more

I read The Most Fun We Ever Had because Elin Hilderbrand told me to. Sort of. I read it because at Hilderbrand’s signing tour for her new book, What Happens in Paradise, at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa in October, someone in the audience asked her the best book she read in 2019, and Hilderbrand said it was Claire Lombardo‘s “The Most Fun We Ever Had.” So I had to read it. I love Elin Hilderbrand. If she loved this book, then I would love this book. Sadly, I did not love this book. I didn’t hate the book, I just didn’t love it. I’d give it 3 stars out of 5. The Most Fun We’ve Ever Had is a fami ..read more