Today, I began reading "Welcome Home, Stranger: A Novel" by Kate Christensen. The book tells the story of a woman in her fifties who returns home to Maine after her mother's passing. The novel explores themes of grief, love, growing older, and family complexities. It raises the question: Can you ever honestly go back home?
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by Kate Christensen
Today, I began reading “Welcome Home, Stranger: A Novel” by Kate Christensen. The book tells the story of a woman in her fifties who returns home to Maine after her mother’s passing. The novel explores themes of grief, love, growing older, and family complexities. It raises the question: Can you ever honestly go back home?
Rachel is an environmental journalist living in Washington, DC. She has been estranged from her working-class family in New England for many years. Having gone through a divorce and being childless in her middle age, Rachel is a truly independent spirit who has experienced a lot of pain. She feels like her life is falling apart and is struggling to cope with big and small challenges. However, her life takes a different turn when she gets a call to return home for her mother’s funeral.
Then, everything falls apart.
Rachel is surrounded by a cast of characters who are sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreakingly earnest. Her sister is an arriviste, her brother-in-law is an alcoholic, and the love of her life has recently married her sister’s best friend. Rachel must face her past and come to terms with the sorrow she has long buried. She must also confront the ghost of her mother, who, for better or worse, made her the woman she is today.
Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. 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.
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by Jung Yun
O Beautiful: A Novel by Jung Yun, the critically acclaimed author of Shelter, has written an unflinching portrayal of a woman trying to come to terms with the ghosts of her past and the tortured realities of a deeply divided America. With spare and graceful prose, O Beautiful presents an immersive portrait of a community rife with tensions, competing interests, and one woman’s attempts to reconcile her anger with her love of beautiful but troubled land. I highly recommend O Beautiful!
I finished reading O Beautiful on International Women’s Day. It might have been coincidental, but in my humble opinion, it was the perfect book to read on this important day. Ms. Yun has written a novel that touches on the intersectionality of the core issues of our divided land. The misogyny, the racism, and the impact of capitalism out of control are all related and are affecting the quality of life in the early twenty-first century.
Elinor Hanson, the protagonist, is so vividly written that she jumps off the page and becomes someone we know as a family member. When she returned home to write about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota, I felt I had known her all my life. Unfortunately, the novel ended when she finally understood the issues and was in touch with her anger. I wish it would have continued so that the problems might have been addressed. Despite this, I highly recommend this novel.
O Beautiful is the twenty-first book I have read this year! My goal was twenty-three.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, struggles to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota.
Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers.
Surrounded by roughnecks seeking their fortunes in oil and long-time residents worried about their changing community, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation and grief. She rages at the unrelenting male gaze, the locals who still see her as a foreigner, and the memories of her family’s estrangement after her mother decided to escape her unhappy marriage, leaving Elinor and her sister behind.
The longer she pursues this potentially career-altering assignment, the more her past intertwines with the story she’s trying to tell, revealing disturbing new realities that will forever change her and how she looks at the world.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. 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 son Richman
The Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman was one of the first books I read after Jan died. It was the perfect love story to read after the loss of the love of my life. The love Jan and I shared was because we shared a portion of the soul of the other, and thus we were meant for each other from day one.
The two primary characters – Elodie Bertolotti and Angelo Rosselli – resonated with me as they were also people who shared souls. The book “captures the hope, suspense, and romance of an uncertain era, in an epic intertwining story of first love, great tragedy, and spectacular bravery.“
As I turned every page, the story filled my heart with love and happiness as it reminded me of the love that Jan and I shared.
Portofino, Italy, 1943. A young woman steps off a boat in a scenic coastal village. Although she knows how to disappear in a crowd, Elodie is too terrified to slip by the German officers while carrying her poorly forged identity papers. She is frozen until a man she’s never met before claims to know her. In desperate need of shelter, Elodie follows him back to his home on the cliffs of Portofino.
Only months before, Elodie Bertolotti was a cello prodigy in Verona, unconcerned with world events. But when Mussolini’s Fascist regime strikes her family, Elodie is drawn into the burgeoning resistance movement by Luca, a young and impassioned bookseller. As the occupation looms, she discovers that her unique musical talents, and her courage, have the power to save lives.
In Portofino, young doctor Angelo Rosselli gives the frightened and exhausted girl sanctuary. He is a man with painful secrets of his own, haunted by guilt and remorse. But Elodie’s arrival has the power to awaken a sense of hope that Angelo thought was lost to him forever.
I not only recommend this book, but I am also looking forward to reading more of her novels.
by Audrey Niffenegger
My wife had asked me to read – The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – on several occasions. When we first met, we both liked to read fiction and non-fiction. As we aged, I focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, and she focused on fiction. Since her passing, I have started reading more of both genres. We could now have a book club!
Both Jan and I have always enjoyed books and movies about time travel. If I could travel back in time, there are tens of thousands of days I would love to spend with her again. But time travel is not possible. Or is it? Her spirit returns to me whenever I am paralyzed and encourages me to dust myself off and keep going. Maybe one day we will time travel together!
I enjoyed reading this book, even if it was difficult to keep track of the periods. It is very much the type of time traveling book that both of us would have liked to read, and it has helped me to imagine a world in which Jan and I will meet again.
But what if it is not time travel as imagined by H. G. Wells. As the Hasidic story foretold, God split our souls at birth and placed one part of my soul in her body and placed the rest into my body. Very few people are lucky enough to find the person who has the other half of their soul, and Jan and I did.
When my life ends, what if God takes a portion of our two souls and places them into new bodies. Each of their souls would include a part of each of us. Those two new people would have to find each other in the future to connect as we did. They might not see each other and forever hunger for true love. Whatever happened, they would not know that they once were very much in love.
by Jesmyn Ward
Today, I started reading Let Us Descend: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward. She is a two-time National Book Award winner, the youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and a MacArthur Fellow. The book is a haunting masterpiece that is sure to become an instant classic. It tells the story of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.
The book’s title is from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.” Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, beautifully rendered yet heart-wrenching. The novel takes us on a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
Annis is the reader’s guide through this hellscape, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her. As Annis struggles through the miles-long march, she turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout the journey, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history, spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
Let Us Descend is a magnificent novel that inscribes Black American grief and joy in the very land of the American South. Ward’s writing takes you through the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the South, making this novel a masterwork for the ages.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. 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 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 great 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!
