I initially bought this book for my son-in-law because grocery stores are in his realm of professional expertise. I am so glad that I asked to borrow it back from him after he had read it. I found Lorr’s non-fiction examination of the American supermarket fascinating on many levels.
If you read only one collection of short stories this year, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies should be the one. This group of nine stories is Philyaw’s debut publication and deserves all of the accolades that it has received, including winning the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
I have found in my limited reading of short story collections that when I find one I really enjoy, I tend to read them even faster than I would a novel. There is something about finishing a story and knowing that the next one holds an entirely new set of characters and problems that keeps me turning pages. Alexia Arthurs drew me in over and over, and I ended up reading the entire collection in about a day and a half.
I recently heard Erin French being interviewed on NPR and my ears perked up. I realized that she is the chef/owner of The Lost Kitchen, a tiny, impossible-to-get-into restaurant in Freedom, Maine. Ranked among the best restaurants in the United States, we live close enough to go there for dinner – if only we could get a reservation. But the restaurant’s immense success isn’t the only reason French was being interviewed. She recently released Finding Freedom in which she tells the back story to her success: how she worked long years at her father’s diner; broke away to go to college; and returned home after her second year, pregnant and determined to raise the child on her own.
From the description of this book, I was a bit hesitant to begin reading it. How could a book about an eight-year-old girl dealing with an imaginary friend have enough depth and plot to hold my interest? It sounded more like something I would read to Charlotte. My fears were truly unfounded, however, and I found The Icarus Girl suspenseful and full of emotional depth.
Spy novels and thrillers are not my go-to genres of book. But my trusted friend Jane recommended Northern Spy so I took the plunge. Set in modern- day Belfast, Northern Ireland, Northern Spy deftly lays out the story of Tessa, a single mother and producer at the BBC.
I learned about The Orchardist from one of our L&L Readers, Kathleen, who included it on a list of her top five books of the year that she emailed to us. (Shuggie Bain, reviewed in March 2021, was also on that list.) Thank goodness for reader recommendations or I may have missed this truly unforgettable book.
It is still an unusual event when I choose to read a book about history. Even with my conversion by Doris Kearns Goodwin, I do not find myself naturally drawn to this genre. So again, I must celebrate being a member of the Bates Boston Alumna Book Club for forcing me to read books I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise.
Raven Leilani writes with a brilliant blend of urgency and humor in Luster. Her protagonist Edie finds herself sexually entangled with an older male colleague, who himself is in an open marriage. Edie is a twenty-something, Black woman and the married couple is older and white. Leilani explores the dynamics of this threesome across race and class and propels Luster to a level far beyond what could sound like a soap opera trope.
In Breath from Salt, Bijal P. Trivedi takes what could have been a slog through scientific detail and creates a fascinating read by weaving the medical research together with the stories of real families desperate to find a cure for cystic fibrosis (CF), a congenital disease that kills most of its victims before they reach adulthood. The reader learns the details of how the cure was found through a combination of decades-long research looking for the causes of, and potential treatments for, the disease with the support of determined parents who fundraised hundreds of millions of dollars towards that research.
Given the title of this book and the subject matter, it is a wonder that I ever chose to read it. But, it appeared on a list of two “must-read” books for people anxious to understand what has brought the United States to the point where insurrectionists storm the Capital building in Washington D.C. and why Americans are so severely divided that they can no longer even talk to onr another.
Like many readers I suspect, my only Zora Neale Hurston experience was reading (and loving) Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school. Although I remember truly enjoying the book, I didn’t remember much about the author, and so was glad to find this short story collection comes with a lengthy intro. It reminded me about her rise to fame at a time when Black fiction was scarce and Black, female authors almost entirely unknown.
Yaa Gyasi has been on my radar for a while, but somehow I have never read her award-winning first novel Homegoing. (It won at least four major literary prizes.). But now that I have read her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, I cannot wait to read her first. Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama and draws on those experiences in Transcendent Kingdom. With prose so succinct and beautiful it reads like poetry, Gyasi tells the story of Gifty, a sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University.
With an author as prolific as Margaret Atwood, it seems I can always find another of her books to read. I don’t remember how this 2015 novel made its way onto my reading list, but it is a fascinating story with plenty of psychological tricks and thrills, like so many of Atwood’s better-known works.
I had never heard of this book until Kathleen, a friend of a friend and a reader of L & L, wrote my editor and me an email which included her favorite recent reads. It makes me so happy to hear from readers–and to get book recommendations. Please, keep them coming!
This beautifully written novel somehow manages to feel like a meditation or poetry while simultaneously spinning out the story of two lives over a sixty-year span. Yuki Oyama is a young Japanese girl growing up in New York in the 60s. When her parents decide to return to Japan, she chooses to stay with a friend to finish her high school years in America.
Every once in a while I like to read a really good social psychology book. I’m not sure that’s exactly how Adam Grant would describe his work. But for me, Give and Take is a succinct, data-driven manifesto on how we interact with and treat the people around us and how that can determine our success.
The author Margot Livesay has been on the periphery of my reading consciousness for a while and yet I had never read anything she’d written until The Boy In The Field. This, her tenth novel, is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, with a haunting story that has remained with me since I finished it weeks ago. I am always thrilled to discover an author that I enjoy who has written lots of other books for me to explore!
I had wanted to read Christie Tate’s Group for a while. Reviewers compared it to Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, a book about a psychotherapist’s experience being in therapy herself, that I enjoyed immensely and recommended to you in a previous L & L Review. (And my co-editor praised in a Second Helping.) Reese Witherspoon selected Group for her book club. Although I was nervous that the book couldn’t possibly live up to its hype, I can happily recommend Group with the highest praise.
Was there a more highly recommended book published this year than The Vanishing Half? It appears on everyone’s “Best-of 2020” reading lists and was recommended to me by friends and by my son. Naturally, I had very high expectations for the book, and it mostly came through for me. Bennett follows twin teenage sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes as they run away from their small, southern, Black community to the big city of New Orleans and a life of freedom together.
