🎃 Happy Halloween🎃
Here are the books I enjoyed this month!
The novel weaves together the lives of three main characters, told in alternating perspectives, and follows their emotional journeys of guilt, forgiveness, second chances, and connection.
- Violet Powell is a young woman who served 22 months in prison for a drunk-driving accident that killed a kindergarten teacher. She’s being released and must rebuild her life while carrying deep remorse.
- Harriet Larson, retired English teacher and widow, runs the book club in the women’s prison. She forms a bond with Violet through the reading group. Harriet is also confronting her own life changes, including her identity after being what she sees as an “empty nester.”
- Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, is the widower of the woman Violet killed. He works part-time as a handyman at a bookstore in Portland, Maine. He’s grappling with his grief and the complexity of his marriage and loss.
Their lives intersect by chance in a bookstore: Violet goes there after her release to buy a particular novel she’d been reading in prison; Harriet is selecting books for her prison book club; Frank is performing his handyman duties. That encounter begins a process of transformation for all three.
Miss Benson’s Beetle is a heartwarming and adventurous novel about Margery Benson, a lonely, middle-aged schoolteacher in 1950s England who abandons her unfulfilling life to pursue a lifelong dream: to find a rare golden beetle in the wilds of New Caledonia. She hires an unexpected assistant, the eccentric and vibrant Enid Pretty, and together they embark on a transformative journey full of danger, friendship, and self-discovery. As their bond deepens, the two women face both external challenges and inner demons, ultimately finding courage, purpose, and unexpected joy in the most unlikely of places.
