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

I didn’t know what to expect from this novel when I started reading it.  But a good friend recommended it and she and I seem to have similar tastes in books.  Would it be a novel that somehow incorporated recipes?  A tour of kitchens in Minnesota and Indiana?  What I got – and you will too – is a delightful and truly unique novel, constructed as a series of stories, about the memorable main character, Eva Thorvald.

This amazing book has what is perhaps one of the most memorable and clever constructs of any novel that I’ve read.  Ruth, a contemporary writer living on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, discovers a lunchbox among the trash that washes up on her local beach.  Inside she finds the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Nao, who is contemplating suicide.  Ruth believes the lunchbox and diary are debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan. 

Janice Lee is officially one of my favorite living authors.  I loved The Piano Teacher (her debut novel) and I think The Expatriates is even better. 

This is a throwback, classic Bohjalian from 1999 that I picked up at a library book sale. I always love his Northern Kingdom settings and the slow unraveling of the very human mysteries. This book follows a recently widowed state’s attorney raising his young daughter alone in rural Vermont. 

Anna Pitoniak’s first novel is gripping from the first page to the last.  It is the story of a young couple that meet and fall in love while students at Yale.  She’s from a privileged Massachusetts upbringing and he grew up in rural British Columbia and was recruited to play hockey at Yale.  Upon graduating, they take an apartment together in New York City – he with a flashy job at a hedge fund and she uncertain what she will do.

In one sentence, I would describe The Just City as a beach read for philosophy nerds.  Set in ancient times (sort of) the premise is that the goddess Athena transports people from all over the world, and throughout history, who have studied Plato and wish to build the Just City as described in Plato’s Republic.

Upfront confession:  I think Ann Patchett consistently writes some of the best American novels of our time.  She has not let me down with this, her newest novel: it may just be her best one yet!

Anna Quindlen writes at her best in this brilliant novel about Mimi Miller and her family as they come to grips with the US government’s plan to re-direct a local dam, thereby reclaiming an entire neighborhood which includes the Miller family home. 

First things first: this book is massive.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book this long and epic that wasn’t by Dickens or Dostoyevsky.  But Hallberg knows what he is doing, and I never once found myself counting pages.  He keeps the story moving, the mystery unraveling, and the cast of characters constantly changing. He even varies the format, inserting “interludes” with snippets of newspaper articles, journals and even a fan ‘zine.

This book, at heart, is the story of an extended family over the course of five decades centering around the marriage of Meridia and Daniel. But both setting and style are unusual in the extreme, blending elements of fairy tale and magical realism to create a world like none I’ve ever experienced.  If you are someone who needs to understand what is happening at every moment in a book—this is not the book for you.  But if you are open to sinking into a metaphor and letting it wrap the story around you like, well, a mist—you’ve gotta read this!