🟣 :::READING THREAD::: Week of July 17th

Last night I finished Her Perfect Family by Theresa Driscoll. In retrospect, I actually found it kind of tedious. There were some parts I liked okay but overall it was a 3/5 read at best. It was the kind of book I couldn't wait to finish, KWIM? With really good books I don't want them to end and will miss the characters.

I read Tools Of Engagement by Tessa Bailey.
Cute romance book. Pretty predictable.
Hair, makeup, clothing, decor everything in Bethany Castle's world is organized, planned and styled to perfection. The homes she designs for her family's real estate business are the most coveted in town. The only thing not perfect the men in her life. So she is on a dating hiatus so she can finally focus on her dream flipping a house all on her own. Except her older brother runs the company and won't take her seriously.
When a television producer gets wind of the sibling rivalry, they're invited on Flip Off, a competition reality show to see who can do the best renovation. Bethany wants bragging rights but she needs a crew of her own and Wes Daniels the new guy in town jumps ship from her brother's crew to help her. Wes's Texas drawl and handsome face get under Bethany's skin from day one.
Wes has temporarily taken over the care of his young niece Laura. As Bethany and Wes banter and trade barbs during the remodel it becomes a labor of love, hate and everything in between.

I just finished and gave it 5 stars! entertaining for sure

I'm reading The Lake House by Kate Morton. I am finding it a very slow read - I just feel like she uses 15 words when 5 would do. It is for book club so I will finish it but there is a lot of skimming going on.

Here is the description from Goodreads:
"An abandoned house...
June 1933, and sixteen-year-old Alice Edevane is preparing for her family's Midsummer Eve party at their country home, Loeanneth. But by the time midnight strikes and fireworks light up the night skies, the Edevane family will have suffered a loss so great that they leave Loeanneth forever.

A missing child...
Seventy years later, after a particularly troubling case, Detective Sadie Sparrow retreats to her beloved grandfather's cottage in Cornwall. Once there, she stumbles upon an abandoned house, and learns the story of a baby boy who disappeared without a trace.

An unsolved mystery...
Meanwhile, in her elegant Hampstead home, the formidable Alice Edevane, now an old lady, leads a life as neatly plotted as the bestselling detective novels she writes. Until a young police detective starts asking questions about her family's past, seeking to resurrect the complex tangle of secrets Alice has spent her life trying to escape..."

For fiction, I read What the Neighbors Saw by Melissa Adelman. I wasn't a huge fan, although it was a quick read so oh well. The writing is the main problem -- with all respect to her, you notice the writing, and I don't really care for that. The plot is a good idea -- young yuppie couple buys a fixer-upper in a really great DC suburban neighborhood, and quickly finds both that the house is a money-pit and that the neighbors are all pieces of work. When one turns up dead, pretty much everyone is suspicious. The book is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of the young money-pit wife and the wife of the guy who gets murdered. The ending is super obvious from early in the book.

For nonfiction, I read both The Drama of the Gifted Child and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents because I am still in therapy after my father's death and we had another round of irritating events this past week that made me want to find some ways to process and cope (my cousin who was found deceased a few months ago had a funeral, and my mother didn't bother to tell me about it because she wasn't going and "they changed the date several times"). Anyhow, I didn't actually find either book that illuminating -- I thought that the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents book was clearly written and would be helpful for someone with parents in that position, but I think my parents were less emotionally immature than (1) unavailable and (2) mentally ill. The Drama of the Gifted Child I just didn't get -- it seemed stream of consciousness, almost, in how it was written, and frankly the only real advice was "get a therapist," which -- I did that!


Anyhow, I'm currently reading the new Linda Castillo and will report back.

These are from the past couple of weeks.

The Cloisters by Katy Hay. A mystery-ish novel about a young woman from a small Western town who ends up in a post-grad internship at the Cloisters in NYC. She's intimidated and overwhelmed by this gorgeous medieval art museum and her wealthy and sophisticated co-workers. She gets pulled in to her boss's obsession with Renaissance tarot cards, and after a murder occurs at the museum, she ends up learning a lot about herself and what she wants from life. This story was not perfect, but I liked the settings and the fish-out-of-water element. The author is an art history professor and if she writes another novel, I'd probably give it a try.

The Watchmaker's Daughter: The True Story of World War II Heroine Corrie ten Boom by Larry Loftis. If you grew up Christian in the US, you very well may have read Corrie ten Boom's memoir The Hiding Place about her family's experiences hiding Jewish people during the German occupation of the Netherlands. It was a huge evangelical bestseller because Corrie and her family were devout Christians. This biography by a secular author was not as well-written as I had hoped, but it had some good details and photos that helped round out Corrie's memoir a bit. If you've never heard her story, then I'd highly recommend The Hiding Place; if you're familiar with her, then this book might be of interest.

The Trackers by Charles Frazier. I picked this one up at the library because the cover was attractive. 😄 Frazier wrote Cold Mountain years ago, and has written several other novels since that massive hit. This was the story of a painter assigned to paint a WPA mural in Wyoming during the Depression. He boards with a local rancher and his much younger wife. The wife runs off, the painter is tasked with chasing her down along with the valuable painting she stole, and so we get some good descriptions of Depression-era Florida, Seattle, and San Francisco, along with a less successful attempt to be noir-ish. I really didn't care for it. The wife's character in particular was ridiculous. One reviewer called her a manic pixie Depression girl--hilarious and accurate!

All That Is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay. A wife and mom disappears from her home in 1975, no one can figure out what happened. Although the husband/dad is the prime suspect, there's no evidence. The story follows various members of the family through the next forty years as they grapple with the loss of their mother and their suspicions of their father. This should have been so much better than it was. The narrative devices were poorly chosen, and there was a ton of courtroom back-and-forth that just felt like padding.

A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett. This one was a Kindle Unlimited recommendation based on my fondness for fluffy-ish British mysteries. The main character is an ecologist/biologist or something like that, and she finds herself the prime suspect for a murder because she's checking out a bat colony in the same tunnel at the same time as the murder. I liked reading about bats; I liked the character's job; I didn't care for her so much; and she got involved in a ridiculous love triangle that seems to carry over into the next book, from the preview I read. I'm trying to decide if I care enough to try again with her!

I feel like the universe owes me a really good piece of fiction right now. 😄

Thanks - that was on my list and I've just removed it! Sounds a bit like The Whispering Game, which I didn't like and DNF.

I also finished The Covenant of Water this week and loved it. It’s long and beautifully written, so take your time and enjoy. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I also read Lisa See’s Circle of Women, the story of the life of two women in 1400s China, one born into wealth and privilege, and the other to a working family. It contains many references to Chinese medicine and customs. I enjoyed it. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I read Uncultured: A Memoir by Daniella Mestyanek Young. The author grew up in the Children of God cult. It is difficult to read about the physical and sexual abuse that the author and the other children in the cult endured.

The book is well written and it is uplifting to to know that the author could overcome such a terrible childhood.

The past two weeks I have read:

Falling TJ Newman - This was relatively engrossing but I gave it 3 stars. I liked it okay.

Safe Haven Patricia MacDonald - I think this was a book available free on Amazon Prime check out. It definitely kept my attention in the end 3 stars.

Drowning TJ Newman - Another book involving planes by the same author. It coincidentally became available just a couple weeks after I finished the other plane book above. I think I liked this one better, faster moving, a little more character development so I give it 4 stars.

Another set of books that I have read over the past couple years is by Kelley Armstrong. She has a mystery/suspense series involving a town called Rockton, I think the first book is called City of the Lost. There are six books taking place in Rockton. The brief premise is that Rockton is a town in the Canadian wilderness which is not on a map. It is a town that people go to when they need to disappear for a while.

Her latest involves the same main character but is in another town called Haven's Rock. Technically it is the 7th book involving the main character Casey Duncan - but she may have named it book 1 since it is starting in a different town. Anyway, I do recommend these books. Some are better than others of course, but I like the series and loved the most recent book.

This one is definitely going on my TBR List.  

Currently not available on U.S. Kindle but I did find her last book, ALL HER FAULT (‘21) on sale for $.99. Definitely grabbed it and I’m hoping it’s just as good as the one you read!  Here’s the description of All Her Fault ……

“Marissa Irvine arrives at 14 Tudor Grove, expecting to pick up her young son Milo from his first playdate with a boy at his new school. But the woman who answers the door isn't a mother she recognises. She isn't the nanny. She doesn't have Milo. And so begins every parent's worst nightmare.
As news of the disappearance filters through the quiet Dublin suburb and an unexpected suspect is named, whispers start to spread about the four women most closely connected to the shocking event. Because only one of them may have taken Milo - but they could all be blamed.”  

I'm reading "While Justice Sleeps" by Stacey Abrams. Yes, THAT Stacey Abrams! It's a political mystery fiction novel. It's good. I'll probably ready the next one too - "Rogue Justice".

This one is about a law clerk for a Supremem Court Justice. I don't want to give too many details so I won't spoil it. I'm enjoying it.

I posted on the last thread that I discovered that my nephew’s wife had written a book series.  I am estranged from my sister so I had no idea.  I mentioned it to my son and found out that my nephew cheated on her, got the new girl pregnant and they divorced and she and the two kids moved back to live with her mom.  I am so disappointed in my nephew.  Little a hole.  

I really really liked his wife.  I have known her since she was about 14 years old.  She was close friends with my two nieces so she was always at my sister’s house every time I visited there.  I’m sure they must be furious with their brother too.

Anyway, I started reading the first book in her series and I commented that I would bring it here if it was any good. I found a few grammar errors and there were parts of the story that were not fleshed out enough.  She jumped scenes without building up to them to make the transition better.  But for a first book, it was an interesting and unusual topic and I was engaged to learn more about how she was going to build the story.

Well, I was reading along and I turned to the next chapter on my Kindle and suddenly the female character in the book is in bed with the male character.  First, there was no buildup between them that preceded this and I thought maybe I had accidentally skipped ahead in the kindle by mistake.  I scrolled back.  No, I was in the right place, the story had just suddenly jumped into a sex scene.

Now, I am certainly no prude, but I found that I just could not read this stuff.  I know my nephew was her only sexual experience since they met so young and she adored him.  So that made me think that what she was writing had to come from her own experiences and it made me feel icky.  I felt like I was prying into her diary or something and it felt so wrong.  I stopped reading it and skipped ahead to where the story picked up again.

But it wasn’t too far into the story again when there was another sex scene.  I have decided not to read her books.  And I am so glad that I did not contact her when I found them to tell her that I had discovered she was an author and that I had just purchased the series.  She would have undoubtedly asked what I thought.  

Am I weird?  It felt voyeuristic and there is no way I can read it.  Maybe if they had met after she had been to college and I wouldn’t know how many males she had been with.  But I do know.  And it feels so wrong.  I can’t read her books.

I have one more in the Dalgliesh series featuring Norfolk that I have been reading so I’m returning to that.