Today, I began reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. The novel beautifully explores family, love, and growing up. Patchett once again proves herself as one of America's finest writers. Both hopeful and mournful, it explores happiness even when the world falls apart.
by Ann Patchett
Today, I began reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. The novel beautifully explores family, love, and growing up. Patchett once again proves herself as one of America’s finest writers. Both hopeful and mournful, it explores happiness even when the world falls apart.
The story follows Lara’s three daughters, who return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan in the spring of 2020. While picking cherries, they ask their mother about Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she had a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake.
As Lara reminisces, her daughters are confronted with their own lives and relationships with their mothers, leading them to reevaluate everything they thought they knew. With its hopeful and mournful tone, the novel is a testament to the transformative power of understanding what happiness truly means, even amid chaos. Patchett’s compelling narrative artistry and profound insights into family dynamics weave a rich and luminous story, showcasing why she is one of our time’s most revered and acclaimed literary talents.
I have also read Patchett’s Bel Canto, a compelling tale that explores themes of strength, vulnerability, love, and confinement. It ultimately tells an inspiring story of transcendent romance.
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by Afia Atakora
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora is about a mother and her daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses — at the heart of this dazzling first novel. Conjure Women takes place before, during, and after the Civil War. The book is structured around three-time frames; Slaverytime, Freddomtime, and Wartime.
Having grown up in the South and heard far too many stories about the Lost Cause, it was a joy to read a book narrated by two African-American women. The third leading character is the daughter o the owner of the plantation. At the end of the war, she was hidden away for six years and was unaware the South had surrendered.
Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.
Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, and richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.
Since Jan died, I have read many books that I know she enjoyed. We both enjoyed Call the Midwife, and this book focused on birthing and mothering. Although conjuring was their medical care and not the type practiced in poplar by the Midwives, we would both have enjoyed the book.
Conjure Women also raises questions about the meaning of freedom. For example, Rue chooses not to leave the former plantation after the Klan attacks despite being free.
I recommend this book and look forward to reading more from Afia Atakora.
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by Lily King
Writers and Lovers by Lily King is a page-turner of a book. From page one, I was engaged with Casey and wanted to continue reading to find out how she resolved the crises of her life. The loss of her mother was a constant reminder of my loss. Although she mourned in a different way than I am, there was much we had in common. The big difference was she was writing a novel about her mother, and I am only doing journal entries and occasional posts.
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.
Writers & Lovers follows Casey–a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist–in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
I very much recommend this book and this writer.
Lily King is a bestselling author on the New York Times list, known for her six novels, including Euphoria and Heart the Lover, as well as a collection of short stories titled Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her writing has garnered several prestigious awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. Her books are read worldwide in twenty-eight different languages. She resides in Portland, Maine.
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by Nathaniel Rich
Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich reminds us how close we were to halting the climate emergency, and our failure has resulted in our passing the tilting point. The book “reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil-fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence.”
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change – including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon – the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the significant existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil-fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The audiobook carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.
Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here and how we must go forward.
Losing Earth is a must-read book!
by Mick Herron
Today, I started reading “The Secret Hours” by Mick Herron, a gripping spy thriller about a disastrous MI5 mission in Cold War Berlin. This book is a must-read for fans of “Slow Horses.” “The Secret Hours” is a standalone spy thriller that is both unnerving and poignant yet also has laugh-out-loud moments. It is the breathtaking secret history that Slough House fans have been waiting for.
Two years ago, a hostile prime minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, which aimed to investigate “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, two civil servants seconded to the project, were given unfettered access to all confidential information in the Service archives to ferret any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer.
However, MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. The administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, and the investigation is a total bust. Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as the pounding London rain washes away their career prospects.
On the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin, which ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Exciting, fast-paced, and emotionally charged, Atmosphere showcases Taylor Jenkins Reid at her finest: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and narrating a passionate and uplifting story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars. The book also explores themes of ambition, friendship, and the unknown, making it a compelling read for those interested in contemporary fiction and the exploration of space.
Joan Goodwin’s fascination with the stars has been a lifelong passion. As a thoughtful and reserved professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and a devoted aunt to her precocious niece, Frances, Joan’s life is content. However, her world is turned upside down when she stumbles upon an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan is filled with a burning desire to be among the select few to venture into space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts forge unlikely friendships and prepare for their first flights, Joan discovers a passion and a love she never thought possible. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything took a dramatic turn in an instant.
Taylor Jenkins Reid is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Carrie Soto Is Back, Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their daughter.
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by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a sequel worth reading.
The novel alternates between the perspectives of three women presented as portions of a manuscript written by one (the Ardua Hall Holograph) and testimonies by the other two. Being an amateur historian, I found this a fascinating way for Ms. Atwood to write this book.
Aunt Lydia is the author of the Ardua Hall Holograph, which is a surprise based on her role in The Handmaid’s Tale. It is a surprise that she is a mole who despises Gilead and works for the resistance.
The other characters are young women who, along with Aunt Lydia, are forced to come to terms with who she is and how far she will go for what she believes.
Agnes Jemima was born in Gilead and is being educated not to be literate but to be a wife. She finds out her parents are not who she thought they were when Agnes discovers she is the daughter of a Handmaid.
Daisy was raised in Toronto, lives with her adoptive parents, and is an educated woman. As noted in most reviews, Daisy is also the daughter of a Handmaid. She is Baby Nicole from the original book, and Gilead wants her to return.
