I started reading “The Book of Love: A Novel” by Kelly Link today. The book showcases her exceptional writing skills, where she channels different forms of love, including friendships, romance, and family ties, with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary prowess. Readers can expect to experience joy, a little terror, and an affirmation that love endures despite challenges.

The story revolves around Laura, Daniel, and Mo, who mysteriously vanished from their hometown in Lovesend, Massachusetts, and were presumed dead. However, almost a year later, they find themselves in a high school classroom with their unremarkable music teacher. The teacher seems to know why they disappeared and what brought them back. They agree to undertake magical tasks to reclaim their lives, allowing them to return to their families and friends, but they can’t reveal where they’ve been. The tasks would lead to winners and losers.

Their resurrection attracts the attention of other supernatural beings with their agendas, which puts the community in danger and chaos. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo try to piece their lives together, and Laura’s sister Susannah tries to make sense of what she remembers, they must solve the mystery of their deaths to prevent a looming disaster.

The story takes place in Lovesend, where readers will experience love and loss, laughter and dread, magic, karaoke, and some delicious pizza.

I started reading Anna Quindlen‘s “After Annie: A Novel” today. Forty years ago, my wife Jan and I used to read Ms. Quindlen’s column “Life in the Thirties” in The New York Times, even if we didn’t have time to read anything else. We clipped and saved each column, which helped us manage getting older with children. I am reading “After Annie,” which is about how love can overcome loss.

Anna Quindlen, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs and One True Thing, is known for her insightful wisdom on family, friendship, and the bonds that unite us. Her latest novel explores the power of love to overcome loss and adversity.

The story centers around the Brown family and their matriarch, Annie. When Annie suddenly passes away, the family is forced to navigate life without their beloved wife, mother, and friend. Bill, Annie’s husband, struggles to cope with the loss, while Annemarie, her best friend, must confront the bad habits she once overcame with Annie’s help. Ali, Annie’s eldest child, must take on new responsibilities to care for her younger brothers and father.

Although Annie is no longer physically present, her memory continues to guide and inspire those who love her. Her voice resonates in their minds, offering them comfort, wisdom, and clarity. Through the power of her love, Annie gives her family the strength they need to move on without her. They learn that even though their beloved Annie is gone, she will always be with them in spirit.

“After Annie” is a poignant and touching story exploring the unanticipated ways adversity can transform our lives. With her signature style that strikes an emotional chord, Quindlen delivers a heartwarming tale about the tenacity of love and how it can triumph over even the most formidable obstacles. This story of hope is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit and its ability to rise above life’s challenges. It inspires us to believe in the power of love and its capacity to reshape our lives for the better.

Today, I started reading Lorrie Moore‘s latest novel; I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. It’s her first book since A Gate at the Stairs, and it’s a bold and contemplative exploration of love, death, passion, and grief. Moore examines what it means to be haunted by the past in terms of history and the human heart.

The story follows a teacher who visits his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the 19th century is stolen from a boarding house. There’s also a therapy clown and an assassin, who is presumed dead but may not be.

Moore’s unique wordplay, wry humor, and wisdom make for an enchanting read. She presents us with a magic box of surprises, exploring themes of love, rebirth, and the pull toward life. This novel is a poetic and imaginative portrait of lovers and siblings that questions the stories we’ve been told and whether they’re true.

With I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Moore takes us on a journey to a windswept, tragic, and comic landscape. It’s unmistakably her world and a journey you won’t forget.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is a transporting novel about a man sentenced by the government to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. In 1922, a Bolshevik tribunal deemed Count Alexander Rostov an unrepentant aristocrat. His house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.

During my grief journey, I have on occasion felt as if I was a prisoner in my apartment, so I found this novel to be one that provided me an alternative to understanding what it would have been like to be under house arrest as Count Rostov was.

A Gentleman in Moscow was a page-turner. The plot captures a unique historical time and how Count Rostov makes the best of a bad situation. I highly recommend this novel.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with a splendid atmosphere and an excellent command of style. As NPR commented, readers and critics were enchanted, “Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.”

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day. He must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates to the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected “Invisible Child” as one of the best books published this year. It is indeed one of the top books on my all-time list.

GoodReads summary provides a good overview,

The riveting, unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, poverty, and racism in an unequal America—from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott of The New York Times

Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. When Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis explodes as the chasm deepens between rich and poor.

In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools, and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

Jan and I were involved and knew that child poverty and homelessness needed repair. In addition, Jan lived on Washington Park across from Ft. Greene Park in 1974-75. We knew the neighborhood where much of the book’s story takes place. 

Before meeting Jan in 1973, I was both a community/tenant organizer and a youth worker. In the latter role, I made weekly hostel trips for eight to ten young boys from East Williamsburg during 1973. The trips were the first the boys had ever been outside of their neighborhood.

Many of them had imaginations like Dasani. They also had her instinct to fight. One of my first tasks was to check for any weapons.

Decades later, when I would see any of them, now adults, they would ask when we were going on another trip. I wish I had met Jan when I made those trips. She would have helped me improve them and document the impact. If I could re-write history, I would have her join me as the second adult on the hostel trips.

After that summer, it was clear my primary skills were as a community/tenant organizer. Over the next few years, my work focused on creating affordable and supportive housing.

Jan and I did meaningful work that made a difference, yet the need for a permanent solution to the crisis remains. The book highlights the crucial role of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. As a nation, we cannot undermine those values by breaking up families, impeding resilience, and maintaining racial and economic inequality. 

The current debate in Washington over the Build Back Better legislation needs to focus not on how much we spend but on its impact on children and families. 

David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has supported these expenditures for what they can do to address this country’s cultural and economic crisis. 

These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.

This is how you fortify a compelling moral identity, which is what all of us need if we’re going to be able to look in the mirror with self-respect. This is the cultural transformation that good policy can sometimes achieve. Statecraft is soulcraft.

If you can only read one book this year, this is the one to read. Child poverty, homelessness, and inequality impact all of us. Ending child poverty and homelessness will make us a healthier and more inclusive nation. It is time for a compelling moral call to action!

Subscribe

Contact Us

When you buy a book or product using a link on this page, I receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

Today, I began reading The Covenant of Water, the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the significant word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. The Covenant of Water was a holiday gift from Mike, Elyssa, Nick, and Wes.

From 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast. It follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes throughout her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and human understanding and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

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.

Subscribe

Contact Us

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.

Today, I dove into Charlotte Wood‘s captivating novel, “Stone Yard Devotional.” I couldn’t resist picking it up after discovering a glowing review by Joumana Khatib. She expressed her fondness for the book in the New York Times Book Review Newsletter, saying, “I’m still so enamored of Charlotte Wood’s novel.” It’s impressive that this work was a finalist for the Booker Prize last year! I’m eager to read the book to determine if it is a “love story,” as Ms. Khatib believes.

Burnt out and needing a retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to her childhood home, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She does not believe in God and is unfamiliar with the concept of prayer, finding herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

However, her secluded life is disrupted by three significant events. First, a terrible mouse plague marks a new battle against the growing infestation daily. Second, the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades ago and was presumed murdered return. Finally, a troubling visitor brings her further into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, “Stone Yard Devotional” is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power. It explores the meaning of retreating from the world, forgiveness’s true nature, and grief‘s lasting effects on the human soul.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Before I finished the last page of The Keeper by Tana French, I found myself missing Cal, Lena, and Trey, along with the other characters from the Irish village of Ardnakelty. Tana French is a renowned crime writer who has inspired a devoted following among readers and has been described as “incandescent” by Stephen King. She is releasing the third and final book in the million-copy bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy.

On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.

In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, splitting the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace begins to crack. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.

“One of the greatest crime novelists writing today,” according to Vox, crafts a masterwork of atmospheric suspense that brings the story of one of her most beloved characters to a spellbinding conclusion.

Tana French is the New York Times–bestselling author of nine previous books, including In the Woods, The Searcher, and The Hunter. Her novels have sold over eight million copies worldwide and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Supporting these selections not only helps me continue to provide you with personalized recommendations but also ensures you have access to meaningful stories that enrich your life. Your support truly makes a difference in helping me share more books and insights with you!