Here are the books I had the pleasure of reading this month.
This book was recommended to me after a friend had done it for her book club. Here is a synopsis I found and liked best:
"It’s 1990 and seventeen-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance. With Marley as their light, the Joseph brothers must decide whether they can save the family they’ve always known—or whether together they can build something stronger in its place."
I loved how the author wrote and developed the characters, how it was highly relational and had such depth to it. I would absolutely recommend it!
This is my second book by Rebecca Serle. I genuinely enjoy her writing style and the story that she wrote on these pages. Here is the synopsis:"At one point or another, we’ve all been asked to name five people, living or dead, with whom we’d like to have dinner. Why do we choose the people we do? And what if that dinner was to actually happen? These are the questions Rebecca Serle contends with in her utterly captivating novel, The Dinner List.
When Sabrina arrives at her thirtieth birthday dinner she finds at the table not just her best friend, but also three significant people from her past, and well, Audrey Hepburn. As the appetizers are served, wine poured, and dinner table conversation begins, it becomes clear that there’s a reason these six people have been gathered together."
I love the concept of the story and the way she developed the story line and characters and I enjoyed the twists and surprises...
I would recommend it.
My sister recommended this book to me and I loved it. It's filled with facts and science, but also personal stories from the over 80 year scientific study on happiness that was done at Harvard. They have exercises and questions to ask yourself and to sit with to help cultivate introspection and self-evaluation, as well as tools for navigating things that they learned are needed from the participants. It was so good. I had borrowed it from the library and ended up buying a copy to have!
I haven't read a book like this before but I really enjoyed it! A tiny summation:
The main character Alice gets bumped on her head and loses ten years of her memory. The last thing she remembers is being twenty-nine, in love with her husband Nick, and pregnant with their first child. Instead, she's now thirty-nine, has three children, and is about to get divorced. The book unravels Alice putting her life back together. There is reconciliation and healing as she figures out what has happened in the last decade. I loved the characters. It almost read as a mystery and that made it really fun for me. I would absolutely recommend it!
This is another one that I loved. Alice Wright marries American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. However, small town Kentucky proves equally claustrophobic, especially living with her overbearing father-in-law. When I call goes for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt's new traveling library, Alice jumps at the chance. The women and the relationships that they form are so well written and heart felt and the story was one that I had a hard time putting down. This book was STRONGLY recommended to me and I can see why! It is inspired by true events of a mid-wife in late 1700's Maine whose main claim to fame is the 1000's of births that that she had overseen, and she had never lost a mother. It is an intense mystery, almost a thriller that makes it hard to put down. The author writes incredible character development and how the story evolves and unfolds. I strongly recommend it!
