Lunch in Paris

Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard

Nonfiction - Memoir

22010 Little, Brown and Company

Finished on July 22, 2022

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In Paris for a weekend visit, Elizabeth Bard sat down to lunch with a handsome Frenchman--and never went home again. Was it love at first sight? Or was it the way her knife slid effortlessly through her pave au poivre, the steak's pink juices puddling into the buttery pepper sauce?

Lunch In Paris is a memoir about a young American woman caught up in two passionate love affairs--one with her new beau, Gwendal, the other with French cuisine. Packing her bags for a new life in the world's most romantic city, Elizabeth is plunged into a world of bustling open-air markets, hipster bistros, and size 2 femmes fatales. She learns to gut her first fish (with a little help from Jane Austen), soothe pangs of homesickness (with the rise of a chocolate souffle) and develops a crush on her local butcher (who bears a striking resemblance to Matt Dillon). Elizabeth finds that the deeper she immerses herself in the world of French cuisine, the more Paris itself begins to translate. French culture, she discovers, is not unlike a well-ripened cheese-there may be a crusty exterior, until you cut through to the melting, piquant heart. Peppered with mouth-watering recipes for summer ratatouille, swordfish tartare and molten chocolate cakes, Lunch in Paris is a story of falling in love, redefining success and discovering what it truly means to be at home. In the delicious tradition of memoirs like A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, this book is the perfect treat for anyone who has dreamed that lunch in Paris could change their life.

I love a good memoir, especially one that include travel ideas and recipes. Lunch in Paris has been languishing on my Nook for a few years and I just happened to notice it after I made up my list for the Paris in July reading challenge. Having given up on a few books from that list, I decided to give Elizabeth Bard's memoir a go. I was not disappointed, and yet it didn't resonate with me as much as Eloisa James' memoir, Paris in Love, which I read (and loved) in 2012. I shared a half dozen passages (and marked dozens more) from Paris in Love, but didn't find anything notable in Bard's memoir. I enjoyed her story of falling in love with her husband (and France), and will probably go on to read her follow-up books (Picnic in Provence and Dinner Chez Moi), but I'm not chomping at the bit to buy a print edition of Lunch in Paris for my keeper shelf. I am, however, tempted to curl up with Paris in Love, which deserves a second reading.

Young Jane Young

 

Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin

Fiction

2017 Algonquin Books

Finished on February 14, 2021

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

This is the story of five women . . . 

Meet Rachel Grossman. She’ll stop at nothing to protect her daughter, Aviva, even if it ends up costing her everything. 

Meet Jane Young. She’s disrupting a quiet life with her daughter, Ruby, to seek political office for the first time.

Meet Ruby Young. She thinks her mom has a secret. She’s right. 

Meet Embeth Levin. She’s made a career of cleaning up her congressman husband’s messes. 

Meet Aviva Grossman. The Internet won’t let her or anyone else forget her past transgressions. 

This is the story of five women . . . . . . and the sex sexist scandal that binds them together.

From Gabrielle Zevin, the bestselling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, comes another story with unforgettable characters that is particularly suited to the times we live in now . . .

I loved this book! The first few chapters had me laughing out loud and I considered switching over to the audio, thinking that would be an even more enjoyable experience, but after listening to the audio sample, I quickly decided against it. I found Karen White's narration annoying and not suited for this particular book, so I continued with the ebook, which I had downloaded when the book was first published. 

Young Jane Young is a fast, smart and engaging read and I enjoyed each narrative perspective, but most especially that of Ruby's. Her storyline really brings out the humor, reminding me of the hilarious lines in Be Frank With Me (Julia Claiborne Johnson) and Nothing to See Here (Kevin Wilson). Ruby is one of those young characters who is wise beyond her years and I would have loved another chapter with her. 

The book is peopled with flawed but sympathetic characters and the snappy dialogue kept me reading late into the night.  I loved Zevin's popular novel, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry and had high hopes for this book. Not only did it live up to my expectations, but it exceeded them, so much so that I'm tempted to read it again. I might even have to buy a print copy for my keeper shelf. I'm looking forward to reading more by this author and Elsewhere has been on my TBR list for years, so I'll bump it up and hopefully get to it this year. 

Highly recommend!

Forty Autumns

Forty Autumns by Nina Willner
Nonfiction - Memoir
2016 William Morrow
Finished on November 18, 2019
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family—of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own.

Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart.

In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.

A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.

I recommended Forty Autumns to my book group after learning about it from a friend who also read it for her book group. She raved about the book and said her group had a wonderful discussion, so I was sold. World War II is a subject I'm drawn to, but I didn't know much about this part of Germany's history when I picked up the book. Like most major events in history such as JFK's assassination, Apollo 11 moon landing, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion and 9/11 (the sort that we can recall where we were when we first heard that shocking news), I remember when I first heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was busy with work and family life and while I knew it was a historical event, I didn't fully understand the enormous impact it had for those German families who had been separated from their loved ones for decades. Nina Willner's narrative sheds light on the authoritarian rule and repression by the East German government, as well as sharing her family's individual story of fear and uncertainty, including the separation of family members over the course of forty years. Willner's poignant memoir is well written and informative, but sadly, I didn't love it. It started off very strong and readable, but began to drag halfway through. I felt that the author kept her readers at a distance, in spite of sharing such a personal story, and I might have enjoyed it better had it been presented as a historical novel rather than a memoir.

The Library Book

The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Nonfiction
2018 Simon & Schuster
Finished on March 19, 2019
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present—from Mary Foy, who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as “The Human Encyclopedia” who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves.

Brimming with her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, The Library Book is Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks that reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country. It is also a master journalist’s reminder that, perhaps especially in the digital era, they are more necessary than ever.

The Library Book is sure to be a favorite of any lover of books and libraries. I couldn't put it down! I was very impressed with the amount of research that went into this work and marveled at Orlean's skill. She was able to take the two threads (the fire and the history of the library) and weave them into a compelling narrative, which piqued my curiosity, sending me to Google for images and more facts about the Los Angeles Central Library and its architect (the same individual who designed the state Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska). To borrow another reviewer's statement about a different book, The Library Book is "broad in scope, intimate in detail." The majority of my book club enjoyed Orlean's book and if my sister-in-law, who now works for the Lincoln City Libraries, and my book-loving firefighter friend, haven't yet read this, I highly recommend it to both! I would love to hear their thoughts on this compelling account of the Los Angeles Central Library fire. I'm also eager to hear my husband's thoughts, as he grew up in L.A., although he and I were both living in San Diego when the fire occurred. Surprisingly, neither of us remember hearing anything about it, but now knowing the story, I would love to visit the library if we're ever in the area on one of our road trips.

Favorite Passages:

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

and

A puff of outside air wafted in and down the hall. Then, in an instant, people poured in--the hoverers, who bolted from their posts in the garden, and the wall-sitters, and the morning fumblers, and the school groups, and the businesspeople, and the parents with strollers heading to story time, and the students, and the homeless, who rushed straight to the bathrooms and then made a beeline to the computer center, and the scholars, and the time-wasters, and the readers, and the curious, and the bored[...]

and 

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

and

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.

and

I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?

and

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books. But the more time I spent at Central, the more I realized that a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears. There were days when I came to the library and planted myself near the center of the main corridor and simply watched the whirl and throb of the place. Sometimes people ambled by, with no apparent destination. Some people marched crisply, full of purpose. Many were alone, some were in pairs; occasionally they traveled in a gaggle. People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren't. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

and

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

and 

They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book and look forward to trying more by Susan Orlean. Any recommendations? The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin both sound wonderful.

The Children's Crusade

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
Fiction
2015 Scribner
Finished on October 13, 2017
Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades.

Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, at a time when women chafed at the conventions imposed on them. She finds salvation in art, but the cost is high.

Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family's future. One by one, the siblings take turns telling the story--Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and James, the malcontent, the problem child, the only one who hasn't settled down-their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at crucial points in their history.

In spite of the depressing nature of the plot and the unlikeable characters, I loved this novel. I could easily picture the house and surrounding land in which Packer sets her story because it sounds so much like my grandparents' property in Woodside, CA. Packer writes beautifully and I think this character driven story would make a marvelous movie. It certainly provided a lot of material for my book club discussion. Highly recommend!

Homegoing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Fiction
2016 Alfred A. Knopf
Finished on July 5, 2017
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

I read Homegoing for my new book club here in Oregon and had I read it simply for my personal enjoyment, I don't think I would've finished (or even read past page 50). The structure of the book deals with two branches of one family for a total of seven generations. Each chapter reads like a short story and while they are all loosely connected, there is no sense of cohesiveness when one reaches the final page. There were a few chapters that I enjoyed more than others and I found myself wishing for more time with those characters, but they disappeared once their chapter concluded. Maybe this would be a good book to read in a literature class, but I was confused about who was who and how they were related to the people in previous chapters. 

The members of my book group were somewhat divided about their reaction to the book and although we had a decent discussion, there were a few who didn't chime in and I wonder if they even read the book. One member said she read one side of the family's story first, then went back and read the other side's story. She said it was less confusing that way.

Homegoing was less than satisfying, but I am in the minority as it has received numerous awards and was a favorite with a lot of my blogging friends.

American Book Award (2017), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Audie Award for Literary Fiction & Classics (2017), Dylan Thomas Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017), National Book Critics Circle Award for John Leonard Prize (2016), The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2016), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction (2016), Alabama Author Award - Fiction (2017).

Did You Ever Have a Family

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
Fiction
2015 Simon & Schuster ebook
Finished on January 1, 2016
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fair)





LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, MAN BOOKER PRIZE, PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE, AND ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Amazon • Library Journal • Booklist • NPR • Kirkus Reviews • Guardian • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Google Play • Kobo • Literary Hub • Powell’s

Publisher’s Blurb:

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke—her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor.

Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

From the couple running a motel on the Pacific Ocean where June eventually settles into a quiet half-life, to the wedding’s caterer whose bill has been forgotten, to Luke’s mother, the shattered outcast of the town—everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.

This debut novel got so much buzz when it was first released and I quickly downloaded a copy to my Nook, eager to read it on my flight to Oregon on Christmas Day. Not especially joyful reading, but one which I thought would grab my attention and keep me distracted until we landed in Portland. I think I read it mostly on the flight out, set it aside for the remainder of the week, and finished it on the flight home. I never connected with any of the characters and I found the alternating chapters, told from a different point-of-view (which read like separate vignettes), somewhat jarring. It wasn’t until the last quarter of the book that I finally came to care about what happened and the final outcome for those involved.

Final Thoughts:

I’m definitely in the minority on this one. Read it for yourself and let me know your thoughts.

Our Souls at Night

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
Fiction
2015 Knopf ebook
Finished on August 1, 2015
Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good!)





Publisher's Blurb:

A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.

In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.

Their brave adventures—their pleasures and their difficulties—are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature.

Another winner by the late Kent Haruf. I started this novel back in June, but set it aside to read a month later on my flight to Oregon. I wound up reading it on the flight home and the time passed very quickly. I love Haruf's spare prose and familiar settings and quickly came to care about the characters in this gem of a book. My only complaint is that it was too short. I wanted more and was surprised when I reached the last page. (I never pay attention to my place in a book while reading an ebook!) 

Final Thoughts:

This one's a keeper and worthy of several re-reads. R.I.P. Kent Haruf. You left us at the top of your game.

Stephen King's 11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King
Fiction
2011 Scribner
e-book
Finished on November 20, 2014
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)





Publisher’s Blurb:

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.


I haven’t jumped on the ereader bandwagon like so many of my friends and relatives have in the past few years. It’s not that I’m against ebooks. I just don’t buy that many books, in any format, since I already own so many unread books on my shelves, not to mention all the ARCs I get from work (and have previously accepted from publishers). However, 11/22/63 is a huge novel, weighing in at 849 pages. If I needed a good reason to finally buy an ebook, this was it! I do most of my reading in bed and the thought of holding that heavy book was very unappealing. After a little mishap of accidentally downloading the Spanish edition of the ebook (for which I kindly received a credit), I started reading this highly acclaimed novel while flying home from Oregon in December 2013. I know I read it for a week or two, but somewhere along the line, I got distracted by other shiny new books, and wound up setting this one aside for several months. I’m not sure when I finally picked it up again, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. I love a good time-travel story and this hit all the marks.

Final Thoughts:

Part time-travel, part speculative fiction, 11/22/63 is not your typical Stephen King horror novel. I was able to read late into the night without ever feeling spooked, and while the characters and plot may have invaded my dreams, I was never afraid to turn out the lights and go to sleep (unlike my experience with It and The Shining). Yes, the book is quite long and meanders a bit, but King is an excellent storyteller and the dialogue and suspense kept the pages turning. Fans of Ken Grimwood’s Replay and Jack Finney’s Time and Again will find 11/22/63 to be a very satisfying read.

Under the Dome

Under the Dome by Stephen King
Fiction
2009 Scribner eBook
Finished on 7/9/13
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)




Synopsis:

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener’s hand is severed as “the dome” comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when—or if—it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens—town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician’s assistant at the hospital, a selectwoman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing—even murder—to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn’t just short. It’s running out.

I’ve read quite a few books by Stephen King, but I’m not a diehard fan who anxiously awaits his new releases. I’ve never read the Dark Tower series, and I’ve let a lot of his early works go unread. However, I’ve enjoyed quite a few from his extensive backlist (a list of my favorites can be found here), but it’s been six years since I visited King’s scary world. And, as I re-read my review for Dreamcatcher, I noticed that it had been many, many years since I’d read anything by King. I suspect the length of his more recent works has something to do with this. When Under the Dome was released, I gave it a cursory glance, but was put off by the sheer enormity of the novel. But I’ve recently read a few chunksters (The Passage and The Twelve), so when a few blogmates suggested a read-along, I decided it was time to give it a try. I chose to read the book on my husband’s Simple Touch, which turned out to be a blessing and a curse. I doubt I would have hauled that tome (1088 pages in the paperback edition) around with me on vacation, but I was frustrated with King’s large cast of characters and trying to sort out their relationships was more difficult with the eBook. I’m used to being able to flip back and forth in a book and it took me longer than normal to get a sense of who was important and who was a throw-away character. I also kept glancing down at the page number (a total of 1349 in the eBook), feeling anxious that it was going to take me forever to finish the book. Well, it wasn’t forever, but it did wind up taking me 6 weeks! The first half was a challenge, but once I hit the halfway mark, I was fully engrossed and couldn’t put it down. With that said, though, I also couldn’t wait to start reading something new!

Overall, I enjoyed the storyline, and was somewhat relieved that it wasn’t a typical horror story. I could read the book at night, walk my dog without getting freaked out by the storm drains, and look through a photo album without worrying about the people coming to life. I also liked the frequent nods to other books (Alas, Babylon; On the Beach; and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series) and writers in general. Fun stuff! I didn’t spend too much time trying to figure out the cause of the Dome and was a bit let down with the final explanation, but not so much that it ruined the experience of reading such a long book.

Final Thoughts: 

A big thanks to Natalie from Coffee and a Book Chick for hosting the DomeAlong. Also, a huge thank you to Trish and SuziQ for keeping me motivated via Twitter. Without their encouragement, I may have quit long before I got hooked. While I enjoyed reading Under the Dome, I’ve decided to skip the TV series. I’ve heard it’s based very loosely on the novel and I have a feeling I’d wind up disappointed. Maybe after a year or so, when the story isn’t as fresh, I can give it a try.

Fly Away Home

Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner
Fiction
2010 Atria
eBook
Finished 8/8/10
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)



Product Description

Sometimes all you can do is fly away home . . .

When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician’s wife—her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator.

Lizzie, the Woodruffs’ younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more.

After Richard’s extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.

Written with an irresistible blend of heartbreak and hilarity, Fly Away Home is an unforgettable story of a mother and two daughters who after a lifetime of distance finally learn to find refuge in one another.

This was my very first eBook and I have to say I loved the entire experience. I was able to quickly download the book to my iPad while sitting on a plane in Virginia Beach. I'd been reading Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English and it simply wasn't holding my interest. I had other books in my carry-on, but didn't have time to get out of my seat since we were about to push back from the gate. I was so impressed by the ease and speed with which I was able to download the book and even more impressed with the iPad reader. I love the layout and the ease of turning "pages." Quickly sucked into the narrative from the opening pages, I completely forgot that I wasn't reading a "real" book. So much so that I caught myself reaching up toward the top right corner, ready to turn the page! And, I know I wasn't, but it sure felt like I was reading faster than usual. Maybe that had more to do with the nature of the book and not the manner in which it was read. Nonetheless, it was a great experience and I look forward to reading more eBooks.

Fly Away Home was just what I wanted for the trip home from our vacation. It was light and easy to get into, yet not so simplistic that I wound up focusing on the aircraft noises or felt all the bumps and drops during the all-too-typical encounters with turbulence. I've only read one other book by Weiner (back in my pre-book blogging days) and as I recall, it was also light and entertaining. And yet as I reflect on the novel, I have to admit that the characters were somewhat flat and unmemorable. Maybe I'm just itching for another great read like The Help, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle or World Without End. Fly Away Home fits the bill for a light summer beach read, but I'm ready for something more complex, peopled with rich, fully-drawn characters who will stay with me long after I've read the final lines.

Final thoughts: Worthwhile, but grab a copy at your local library.