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

A newly published book by Geraldine Brooks will always make my “Must Read” list.  And Horse surpassed all of my expectations. Based on an actual mid-nineteenth century racehorse, named Lexington, Brooks deftly weaves three stories together. 

In West with Giraffes, Lynda Rutledge has written the best story I can remember reading since Great Circle by Maggie Showstead (reviewed here). Thank you, Karen, for recommending it! At age 105, our protagonist, Woodrow Wilson Nickel, learns that giraffes may be going extinct. In response, he feels compelled to write down his story from 1938, when as a 17-year-old with plenty of real-life problems of his own, he became part of a caravan that transported two giraffes across country from New York City to the San Diego Zoo.

Reading a story this brilliant and beautiful is so rare that I want to start my review by saying I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone looking for an amazing summer book. Not only is the story complex and epic, but Gyasi creates characters with whom the reader feels intimately connected.

Despite it being a potentially difficult moment to read it, The Women in the Castle is an absolutely phenomenal book. From start to finish I was gripped by the plot and the characters. Shattuck tells a moving story with many twists and surprises. Although I would not describe her writing as poetic or elevated, it never got in the way of my enjoyment either.

A perfect historical fiction escape following a young dancer destined to be a movie star and her small-town chaperone who is searching for details of her past in 1920’s New York City.

Homegoing is Ya Gyasi’s stunning debut novel which begins in Ghana in the 18th century and follows two Ghanian half-sisters and their descendants through seven generations up to the present in the United States. (The sisters don’t know of each other’s existence.) From this description, you would expect a very long novel. In fact, Gyasi has structured her book so that each chapter is almost a distinct short story.

If you’ve been an L&L reader for a while, you know that I love a good historical drama, and Conjure Women is one of the best I have read in a long time. Like many contemporary writers, Atakora jumps around in the timeline to build suspense, but she does it with expert skill that keeps you turning pages much later into the night than you probably should.

In Deacon King Kong, James McBride once again proves his master storyteller status. McBride sets the novel in the housing projects of New York City in the late 1960s with an unforgettable main character named Sportcoat. Beloved by many, Sportcoat is an old, Black man who fights his demons by consuming vast quantities of bootleg liquor.

What an absolute gem of a book Maggie O’Farrell has written in Hamnet. The novel starts off slow and feels almost pastoral. But, it keeps growing in intensity until culminating in one of the most heart-wrenching and satisfying endings I can remember ever reading.

What better time to tackle those huge tome-like books you have always meant to read than during an overlong quarantine? That was my thinking when I finally sank my teeth into Shantaram, which appears on many “all-time best books” lists and had been sitting on my shelf for years. After finishing that and recovering by reading several shorter books, I decided to take the plunge into The Pillars of The Earth, my first-ever Ken Follett book.

When I read (and reviewed) Americanahlast year, I knew I wanted to read more of Adichie’s work, and I was not disappointed by Half of a Yellow Sun. Once again Adichie creates a vivid world full of compelling and complicated characters, all of whom struggle to balance tradition and the hope for a more successful and just future.

There is nothing small about a Ken Follett book, and the intimidating weight of A Column of Firekept me from picking it up for almost two years after purchasing it. But once again (like The Pillars of the Earth) the book flies by with characters and plot lines you’ll remember for years.

This debut novel set on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia tells the fascinating story of two young sisters who go missing one day and the year that follows as the search for the girls ensues. Each chapter is set one month after the previous one and examines the search from a different character’s perspective: the mother of the girls, a neighbor, a witness, a detective. This structure could have felt contrived, but instead added to the overall appeal of the book.