Monthly Archives: April 2013

And Then I Found You

2 Comments

The April She Reads Book Club Selection

And-Then-I-Found-You1

And Then I Found You

by Patti Callahan Henry

published by St. Martin Press

2013

Summary: Kate Vaughan is no stranger to tough choices.

She’s made them before. Now it’s time to do it again.

Kate has a secret, something tucked away in her past. And she’s getting on with her life.  Her business is thriving. She has a strong relationship with her family, and a devoted boyfriend whom she wants to love with all her heart. If Kate had ever made a list, Rowan would fill the imagined boxes of a perfect mate. But she wants more than the perfect on paper relationship; she wants a real and imperfect love. That’s why, when Kate discovers the small velvet box hidden in Rowan’s drawer, she panics.

It always happens this way. Just when Kate thinks she can love, just when she believes she can conquer the fear, she’s filled with dread. And she wants more than anything to make this feeling go away. But how?

When the mistakes have been made and the running is over, it’s time to face the truth. Kate knows this. She understands that a woman can never undo what can never be undone. Yet, for the first time in her life she also knows that she won’t fully love until she confronts those from her past. It’s time to act. 

Can she do it? Can she travel to the place where it all began, to the one who shares her secret? Can the lost ever become found? 

And Then I Found You gives new life to the phrase “inspired by a true story.” By traveling back to a painful time in her own family’s history, the author explores the limits of courage, and the price of a selfless act. — St. Martin’s Press

My Review

For Kate, the first day of spring held more than blooming daffodils.  It was still a day of firsts.  Kate had a ritual, a sacred ritual.  She made sure that she did something she’d never done before, something that would count as new on the first day of spring.  Six years ago she’d opened her boutique.  The year before that she ran a marathon with her sister.  Of course there was that trip to California with Norah.  Then four years ago the midnight swim in the darkest water with Rowan, the first time he’d visited her in South Carolina.  It didn’t matter what she did or said or saw as long as it hadn’t been done, or said, or seen before.

I thought And Then I Found You was  very enjoyable read.  Katie and Jack are childhood friends and high school sweethearts.  After college, they grow apart when Jack goes to law school and then into practice in Alabama and Katie becomes a councilor for troubled girls in the southwest.  When Jack informs Katie he is getting married, she goes to see him one last time.  A few months later, she realizes she is pregnant-and Jack is already married.  Katie chooses to give the baby up for adoption, even though her family, especially her parents, urge her to keep the baby.  She believes this is the best solution, even though she knows it is the hardest fro her to live with.  Thirteen years later, Katie is living a good life, running a successful boutique and in a serious relationship with her boys friend Rowan.  Every year on the first day of spring, their baby’s birthday, she exchanges letters with Jack.  This year, she also finds an engagement ring in Rowans nigh stand.  She realizes she can not move forward with Rowan until she settles her past and she travels to Birmingham to see Jack.   This begins a whole new chapter, that will eventually reunite her with the daughter she gave up thirteen years earlier.

Henry explains in a letter to her readers that this book is loosely based on a true story that happened to her family.  Over twenty years ago, her middle sister placed her baby for adoption.  She states that this was the “most heartrending, courageous, and difficult decision she had ever made…”.  Over two years ago, Henry was received a friend request on Facebook from a young girl with the same birthday as the baby that was adopted.    Reading this book, one can feel the pain and conflict that goes into this amazingly difficult decision on each side of the equation.  Katie struggles with giving up her daughter, always wondering if it was the right decision, if her daughter is happy.  We also see how hard it is for the adoptive family to allow their daughter to reconnect with her birth parents.

While I enjoyed reading this book very much, there were a few issues I had. Jack seems very excited and happy to see Katie after thirteen years, but when she tries to see him after that, he continually pushes her away.  On the other hand, her boyfriend Rowan, who says he wants to be supportive of  Katie (and has a ring in his drawer), acts like he can’ stand to be near her much.  The two men need to realize how awesome Katie is.

I read this book as a part of the She Reads book club.-http://www.shereads.org/2013/04/april-book-club-selection-4/

Stop by there and read the reviews by other bloggers are saying about this novel.

Patti-Callahan-Henry

Author Patti Callahan Henry

http://patticallahanhenry.com/content/index.asp

Life After Life

5 Comments

15790842

Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

published by Little, Brown, and Co.

2013

Summary

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.

Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfaction.  (from Goodreads)

My Review

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

I heard so much about this book, that I was very excited to read it.  While I thought the writing was terrific, in the end, I did not love the story.  Ursula lives many lives.  The first time she is born, the doctor is not there due to a bad snowstorm and she dies when the umbilical chord is wrapped around her neck.  In the next chapter, the doctor arrives in time.The baby survives. “She observed the turn of seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn.”  She survives a few years, until she drown in the ocean with her sister Pamela.  In the following chapter, a gentleman, who happens to be on the beach painting, saves their lives.  Thie is the flow of the book, how small chances and choices affect our entire lives.  Ursula is then possessed with a sixth sense for danger- a sort of deja vu.

I enjoyed reading the book very much, but had a feeling of frustration for Ursula.  I wanted her to be happy, and never sensed she was.  This sense of sadness struck me-“She had had affairs over the years … but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela’s life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”

I would recommend reading this book.  It was a first rate example of what historical fiction should be.  The writing was really wonderful, and many people loved the story.

Rating- 3.5 out of 5

The Orchardist

7 Comments

 

13540215

The Orchardist

by Amanda Coplin

published by Harper Collins

2012

Summary

“You belong to the earth, and the earth is hard.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, in a rural stretch of the Pacific Northwest in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, a solitary orchardist named Talmadge carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century. A gentle, solitary man, he finds solace and purpose in the sweetness of the apples, apricots, and plums he grows, and in the quiet, beating heart of the land-the valley of yellow grass bordering a deep canyon that has been his home since he was nine years old. Everything he is and has known is tied to this patch of earth. It is where his widowed mother is buried, taken by illness when he was just thirteen, and where his only companion, his beloved teenaged sister Elsbeth, mysteriously disappeared. It is where the horse wranglers-native men, mostly Nez Perce-pass through each spring with their wild herds, setting up camp in the flowering meadows between the trees.

One day, while in town to sell his fruit at the market, two girls, barefoot and dirty, steal some apples. Later, they appear on his homestead, cautious yet curious about the man who gave them no chase. Feral, scared, and very pregnant, Jane and her sister Della take up on Talmadage’s land and indulge in his deep reservoir of compassion. Yet just as the girls begin to trust him, brutal men with guns arrive in the orchard, and the shattering tragedy that follows sets Talmadge on an irrevocable course not only to save and protect them, putting himself between the girls and the world, but to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.

Writing with breathtaking precision and empathy, Amanda Coplin has crafted an astonishing debut novel about a man who disrupts the lonely harmony of an ordered life when he opens his heart and lets the world in. Transcribing America as it once was before railways and roads connected its corners, she weaves a tapestry of solitary souls who come together in the wake of unspeakable cruelty and misfortune, bound by their search to discover the place they belong. At once intimate and epic, evocative and atmospheric, filled with haunting characters both vivid and true to life, and told in a distinctive narrative voice, The Orchardist marks the beginning of a stellar literary career. (from Goodreads)

“And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.”
― Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist

My Review

This book was wonderful!  Once I started reading it, I was completely drawn into the world of William Talmadge, who finds safety and peace in his solitary existence.  He tends his orchard alone, with vey little social interaction.  He is a simple and very honorable man, and when he finds two pregnant girls hiding in his orchard, he takes them in.  Shelter is a big theme in this book , for Talmadge as well as the girls, Jane and Della.  The author takes you slowly through her story, especially the beginning.  Descriptions of the orchard, of Talmadge’s solitude, and the unraveling of the ordeal the two girls lived through, were mesmerizing.  The story grows in intensity and consequences as it progresses.  The beginning of the story was especially compelling and I loved the author’s poetic descriptions of the wild, early 20th century Pacific Northwest, as well as the historic details of the period.    I would definitely recommend this book- let me know how you liked it!

Rating

4- out of 5

Honestly, do you keep reading it?

23 Comments

Unknown-1

I am very lucky to be currently reading The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, with some very interesting books waiting in the wings!  BUT, I did have a patch recently where I started a few books I just could not get into.  It made me wonder what other book lovers out there feel about this.  What do you do when you realize you are just not enjoying reading a book?  Do you power through?  Or give it up?  I  read for pleasure- and most of the time, reading gives me great pleasure.  But I have at times had to put a book down and walk away from it.  Sometimes, it is just not an interesting topic.  Or it is TOO cookie cutter.  There are so many books out there, I feel that I might be missing a great story by sticking with something I am not enjoying.

But this does have a big downside.  I can recall many books that I started and stopped, only to try again and realize I loved them.  This was true with two of my favorite books- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Book Thief.  I could not get into either at first.  I put them both down for a long while, only to realize when I did read them in entirety that they were wonderful!

So, the question is to all book lovers-what do you do?

 

Moon Over Edisto

3 Comments


15894012

Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

published by Thomas Nelson

20113

Edisto Island was where it all came apart. Can the Bennett girls ever be whole again?

Once, they were the happiest family under the sun, crabbing and fishing and painting on beautiful Edisto Island in South Carolina’s lowcountry.

Then everything went wrong, and twenty years later the Bennett family is still in pieces. Mary Ellen still struggles to understand why her picture-perfect marriage came apart. Daughter Meg keeps a death grip on her own family, controlling her relationships at a distance. And eldest daughter, Julia, left it all behind years ago, forging a whole new life as an artist and academic in Manhattan. She’s engaged to an art dealer and has no intentions of returning to Edisto. Ever.

Then an emergency forces Julia back to Edisto to care for her three young half-siblings. She grudgingly agrees to stay a week. But there’s something about Edisto that changes people. Can Julia and her fractured family somehow manage to come together again under that low-hanging Edisto moon?

“A rich, endearing, can’t-stop-reading book about what matters most, the power of love to transform the human heart.” –Dorothea Benton Frank, “New York Times “best-selling author, “Porch Lights”

(from Goodreads)

My Review

First, let me say I LOVE reading books about the South, especially South Carolina.   I have family that live right outside of Charleston, and I have been visiting there almost yearly for most of my life.  When I read a book set in Charleston, I get an extra thrill, because I know those streets, store, restaurants, etc.  I also know the outlying islands, including Edisto.  The author does a great job bringing the area to life.  The story, of betrayal and forgiveness, works very well in the southern setting.

Julia’s best friend Marney broke up her parents’ marriage in their senior year of college.  Almost twenty years later, Julia is enjoying s successful career in art and teaching, and has just gotten engaged.  Marney shows up at her door.  Now a widow and the mother to Julia’s three half siblings, she has lung cancer.  She needs surgery, and there is no one to care for the children during her recovery.  She asks Julia to return to Edisto to help her.

The story is told from the points of view of different characters- Julia, her mom MaryEllen, her sister Meg, Jed-doctor and neighbor, and Etta, her nine year old half sister.The characters develop quickly and I became immersed in each of their stories, especially MaryEllen.  She is still hurt by the collapse of her marriage and confused as to why both her daughters keep her at a distance.

I thought this was well written and moved quickly.

I received a copy of this book as part of a random give away through Goodreads.

 

Rating 3.5 out of 5

Sunrise at Edisto Beach SC

Sunrise at Edisto Beach SC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Silver Linings Playbook

4 Comments

9780374532284_p0_v1_s260x420Silver Linings Playbook

by Matthew Quick

published by Sarah Crichton Books

2008

Meet Pat. Pat has a theory: his life is a movie produced by God. And his God-given mission is to become physically fit and emotionally literate, whereupon God will ensure a happy ending for him — the return of his estranged wife Nikki. (It might not come as a surprise to learn that Pat has spent time in a mental health facility.) The problem is, Pat’s now home, and everything feels off. No one will talk to him about Nikki; his beloved Philadelphia Eagles keep losing; he’s being pursued by the deeply odd Tiffany; his new therapist seems to recommend adultery as a form of theraphy. Plus, he’s being hunted by Kenny G!

In this enchanting novel, Matthew Quick takes us inside Pat’s mind, showing us the world from his distorted yet endearing perspective. As the award-winning novelist Justin Cronin put it: “Tender, soulful, hilarious, and true, The Silver Linings Playbook is a wonderful debut.” (from Goodreads)

My Review

I started to enjoy this story almost as soon as I began reading it.  Silver Linings Playbook is a fast read, and it is very easy to get into.  The only drawback for me was not knowing why Pat had ended up in a mental facility.  It almost seemed there was a bit of brain damage, the way he was so childlike and unknowing of the world around him and of passing time.

The characters in this book draw you in and make you root for them to succeed. Pat is working very hard on “being kind, not right”.  The relationships in this book are touching, messy, and feel real.  I love the way Pat interacts with his mother and brother, who are there for him and help him.  Pat and his Dad, though, have a very difficult relationship, and the fact that it is not all cleared up and perfect at the end makes it even better.  I think, perhaps, the character that really stayed with me was Tiffany.  In Tiffany, we see how grief can truly rip a life apart, and the wonder of the human spirit, to fight to come back from despair.

I loved this book.  It was a little darker than I had anticipated.  I am looking forward to discussing it for my local bookclub next week.  I have not seen the movie yet, but do want to.  My mom-always trust her when it comes to books- said it was very good, but of course, not as good as the book.

rating-3.5 out of 5