Archive for the ‘Friendship’ Category
LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell
LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.
August 24, 2011
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Judi Clark · 
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Tags: 2011 PB Release, Animals, Grief, love, Memoir · Posted in: Award Winning Author, Friendship, Non-fiction, Reading Guide, Writing Life
JOY FOR BEGINNERS by Erica Bauermeister
A few years ago, a new phrase burst into our vernacular: “the bucket list,” based on a movie in which two men confront their limitations and prepare a list of things they must do. The list is predictably exotic: skydiving, flying over the North Pole, eating dinner at Chevre d’Or in France.
In JOY FOR BEGINNERS, it’s the women’s turn to enact that list. On an uncharacteristically sunny day in Seattle, six women assemble to celebrate their friend Kate’s clean bill of health from breast cancer. Unbeknownst to them, right before arrival, Kate’s daughter had suggested an exhilarating white water rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Her friends urge her on and she agrees to go on one condition: that she gets to choose a challenge for each of her friends to overcome.
June 9, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: Contemporary, Sisterhood · Posted in: Contemporary, Friendship, Life Choices, Reading Guide, Theme driven
THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM by Jonathan Coe
A couple of weeks ago, I watched the film “The Social Network.” I expect most of us know what the film is about, but for those who don’t, it’s the fictionalized account of the creation of the social networking internet site: Facebook. I liked the film a lot, and one of the things that remained with me after the credits rolled is the changing idea of friendship. In the age of the internet, what does friendship mean? It used to be that we made friends in school, at work or at university, but now many of us have friendships with people online that we’ve never actually met in person. Are these relationships real? Are they substitutes, or are they a facsimile of the “real” thing.
The authenticity of relationships is just one of the many things that trouble the protagonist of Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM.
March 11, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 2011 Favorites, 21st-Century, Contemporary, Humorous, Jonathan Coe, Knopf, virtual reality · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Contemporary, Drift-of-Life, Friendship, Humorous, Reading Guide, United Kingdom
THE INTIMATES by Ralph Sassone
Robbie and Maize, the principal characters in Ralph Sassone’s immensely readable debut novel, THE INTIMATES, totally fit the profile of these restless and searching young adults. As the book opens, the two are still in high school; Maize nurses a crush on her guidance counselor and when Robbie’s path crosses hers, it doesn’t immediately amount to much. Robbie is gay—a fact he doesn’t realize until much later in high school.
February 21, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: Contemporary, Early Adulthood, FSG, Gay/Lesbian · Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Friendship, Life Choices, New York City
THE MEMORY OF LOVE by Aminatta Forna
Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.
February 14, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 2011 Favorites, Around-the-World, Grief, love, Sierra Leone, violence · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Africa, Award Winning Author, Commonwealth Prize, Friendship, Identity, Losses, Political, War, World Literature
RESCUE by Anita Shreve
RESCUE, by Anita Shreve, focuses on the ways in which parents and children deal with physical and emotional trauma. It is a poignant story about a good man who makes a mistake, but takes full responsibility for his actions.
November 30, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 2011 PB Release, 2013 - authors with books coming out in 2013, Alcoholic, Anita Shreve, Contemporary, Family Matters · Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Friendship, Job, Life Choices, NE & New York
