How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
Fiction
2024
Finished on August 13, 2024
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
Publisher's Blurb:
Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…
Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.
When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.
How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.
How to Read a Book had all the ingredients of a saccharine, fluffy novel, but it turned out to be very enjoyable. While somewhat predictable, I came to care about the three main characters, and especially enjoyed Violet's interactions with the African grey parrots for which she became responsible in her new position as a research assistant at a local university. This feel-good story of second chances and new friendships (which brought to mind Elizabeth Berg's Night of Miracles, with its endearing characters) is a perfect summer read. I'm looking forward to reading Wood's previous novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy, which sounds equally delightful.
