There is a lot in this book that I never thought about. Much of it covers familiar ground. It is a story of three characters at a crossroad whose lives converge. It is about forgiveness. It is about the long arm of incarceration. And of course, it is about the power of books. But most of all it examines how single, life changing moments may have the power to override all your life has been and will be.
Simon & Schuster 2025 Theo of Golden began its publishing journey as a self published book written by 70 year old Allen Levi as a debut novel. Through word of mouth, he sold 10,000 copies and was then picked up by Simon & Schuster. A dream come true. The reason, I think, is that it … Continue reading Theo of Golden: A Story of Kindness and Generosity
When a child goes missing, an unfathomable nightmare begins for a family, the community and the police. Yet, we have a bizarre fascination with these events as evidenced by the upsurge in true crime media. It seems people can’t get enough of podcasts, TV shows, movies and books. Although some of this story has the feel of a whodunnit and what happened, at its core it's about the forever toll a child gone missing takes on families and neighbors. It weakens faith in home as a place of safety. What piqued my interest in this novel is how characters with different kinds of involvement weathered the loss.
The fact that history repeats itself is never more obvious than when reading historical fiction. This book, The Book Club for Troublesome Women depicts the wives of 1960s middle class families and the societal pressure to keep women at home. This was a time period when women were discouraged from pursuing careers or stimulation outside of their families. Fifty years later, these regressive ideas are gaining momentum once again in the form of misguided restrictive laws based on false memory about how good this was for women.
The Stolen Child is a beautiful story of regret, forgiveness, and the pursuit of dreams.
This novel is set in a time not yet popularized in historical novels. Kate Quinn, best known for her World War II novels, The Alice Network, The Rose Code and The Huntress, ventures into the McCarthy years in this intriguing novel. It is the time of the Red Scare, when people are losing jobs, fear for their safety, and face loss of reputation for their ideas and associations.
There were many projects developed for young artists to keep them going under during the Depression. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) and the Federal Art Project (FAP) were created to keep struggling artists working. Artists that eventually came into their own such as Jackson Pollack, Willem DeKooning, Mark Rothko, and Dorothea Lange were kept afloat during this period. They were charged with creating work for public spaces. In this story, a young woman artist entered a contest to paint a mural for her local post office in New Jersey but need meant shifts and she was sent to a town she’d never heard of—Edenton, North Carolina—to paint their post office mural.
A truth that none of us think much about (or we’d go crazy) is how precarious our lives are or how they could be upended without warning. A tragedy and its blowback on everyone involved is the through line of this beautifully wrought book.
There have been many novels recently written about the Holocaust—its devastation, its unimaginable cruelty, its heroes, its far-reaching effects into the future. And unfortunately, many of the tropes of those times resonate in our world right now. I try not to read them. Family members who survived are each heroes to me in their own way and their lives were forever shaped by what they experienced. In its way, this novel demonstrates this.
Do you ever wonder about what your life might have looked like if you made one different decision? Or wonder if you were not afraid to take risk that might have changed everything? Perhaps, a first love didn't work out the way you'd hoped and you wonder what might have been... It's easy to fall down that rabbit hole but sometimes it's more satisfying to read somebody else's should have could have story. As I was reading this book, I thought about people and times in my own life who I hadn't thought about in years. It's good when a book gives you a look back into your own memories. As long as you don't spin out!
Reader’s Cafe 