Friday 20 May 2022

bookclub tonight!

Looking forward to bookclub tonight.
Here's a few recent reads - some good, one not so good.


I enjoyed this big family saga about parents David and Marilyn - still madly in love after 40yrs - and their four daughters. It’s a lengthy book that explores family love, romantic love, sisterly devotion and dysfunction set in Chicagoland... and, it covers all the seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bourgeois couple and their unruly daughters. Beautiful writing & great character development.

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I loved this one! The Spy's Wife by Fiona McIntosh was a great read. From the wide swept moors of the Yorkshire dales to the noisy beer halls of Munich, this is a lively thriller that kept me second guessing until the end.

Fiona's tale "follows stationmaster’s daughter Evie Armstrong who meets and falls in love with the mysterious Max, who often passes through her northern England station, in 1936. The pair become engaged in days and just as their happiness knows no bounds Max is arrested as a German spy. Evie convinces the British government to let them establish themselves in Munich, with herself acting the part of the perfect German wife in a bid to find evidence of Germany’s escalation to war".
 
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Sara Foster’s The Hush, is set in a post-covid world. It's a dystopian (new age sci-fi) novel that is highly believable in many aspects. We find ourselves in the near future England where, seven years after covid, everyone is also dealing with rising sea levels and floods caused by climate change.
There are new laws to govern everyone. Being monitored by the government with smart watches and with babies not breathing after birth, the country has been thrown into turmoil as several pregnant teenagers have vanished. I'm sure it will capture your interest and keep you guessing.

I have to admit though, I'm not sure about how I feel about this novel, it's unsettling to say the least, and I'm hoping to discuss this one at length at bookclub tonight.
*UPDATE: conversation was interesting and we were very divided on this one. 

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This is an intriguing psychological thriller from Jean Hanff Korelitz that immerses the reader into the world of writers and publishing, an area totally foreign to me.

Jacob Finch Bonner has a well received published book behind him but has been unable to get much attention for his further attempts at the next great novel. Years later he's still struggling, working at jobs connected to writing, becoming the cliché of "those who can, do, those who can't, teach".
Then he encounters Evan Parker, who has a story that's going to be The. Next. Best. Seller. A few years later, when Evan dies before getting around to writing his novel, Jacob steals his idea.

Who owns the plot to a story? There's a real underlying tension throughout the book, and I was curious to see how things panned out in the end.
 
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Do you think you know your neighbors? A shooting lays bare the secrets harboured by five families in a sleepy suburban cul-de-sac in this riveting psychological thriller from Joy Fielding. Everyone in this story has secrets and everyone is pretending to be something they’re not.

Happy reading, Linda


2 comments:

FlourishingPalms said...

Well Linda, you've done a wonderful job of getting me to add books to my want-to-read list! I haven't read any of these, so I appreciate your recommendations. I hope your book club chatting was enjoyable. It would be fun to talk about stories with other avid book-readers.

Mystic Quilter said...

You're certainly making great headway with your reading - I have a stack waiting to be read.