June Book/Candy's Pick:
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
So, I'm a bit belated posting this review.... but here goes. This book was really good. The book was really written in a beautiful. It felt very much like a smooth flowing, gently told story; it was so graceful and melodic. I loved the bee theme that wove its way through the whole story. I thought it was wonderful that the author was able to write like this while writing about such deep and disturbing topics: domestic abuse and its effect on children, racial discrimination, neglect, interracial relationships.... this book really got me thinking about these topics and how I REALLY feel about them.
July book/Kathy's Pick:
The Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney
A really slow starter but after about page 150, this was a pretty good book. It was about four women that formed a group and become great friends. The book rotated from whose perspective it was being written. That was a little hard to get used to. It took me awhile to be able to change gears between the characters. But as you read the book and learned more about each character and the issues that each of them dealt with it, it really started to draw me in. the women's issues went from an abusive relationship, to a terminal disease, to infertility problems, to being in love with a married man. Yet they were all woven together wonderfully within this one book as each women leaned (or didn't lean) on her friends. This book spoke to me about what a friend can be and how I can be better at it.
Upcoming - August book: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (which was picked, by the way, BEFORE he died last Friday...)
2 comments:
Great reports! The Secret...looks really good. I sincerely doubt I could wade through a 150 pg. slow start, since that's about the ideal total length of a book I would read. :-} Would it have seemed that slow if you understood the flow of the changing voices a bit better at the outset?
I don't think it would have been so slow if I wasn't constantly trying to remember the important details of each character as it rotated. However, there was A LOT of setup at first that was just hard to get through to (yet important, I guess). Hey, The Last Lecture is 206pg. Sounds like a winner for your ideal book!
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