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: , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Reading Guide, Theme driven

CENTURIES OF JUNE by Keith Donohue

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

May 31, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Unique Narrative

SOLACE by Belinda McKeon

Solace, by Belinda McKeon, is a novel about love and longing. As a noun, “solace” means to find comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness. As a verb, it means to give solace to someone else or oneself. This book is about people who find solace in the small things of this world and find it difficult to talk about the bigger things. They hang on to what they know, especially when they face tragedy or their worlds turn upside down.

Tom and Mark are father and son. Tom works his farm in Ireland and Mark is working on his doctorate at Trinity University in Dublin. Tom finds it difficult to understand a life that does not consist of working the land and he finds it very difficult to understand his son.

May 28, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, Ireland, Reading Guide, World Lit

A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF by Lawrence Block

A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF is the 17th and very likely final installment of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series of crime fiction novels. In fact, Block had not even envisioned writing another Scudder book. He figured that as Scudder was already in his mid-sixties, semi-retired and collecting social security in ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING, the immediately previous book six years ago, by now Scudder is in his 70’s and settled into a “comfortable retirement” and no longer up to the rigors of private investigating. In HARD STUFF Block finesses this by having Scudder relate events from the past.

May 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, New York City, Sleuths Series, y Award Winning Author

THE YEAR WE LEFT HOME by Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson has been aptly labeled “an American Alice Munro,” and as a reader who has been mesmerized time and again by her captivating short-story collections, I wholeheartedly concur.

Now, in THE YEAR WE LEFT HOME, Ms. Thompson leverages all her strengths and skills as a short-story writer and creates a sweeping and emotionally satisfying novel composed of interlocking, decade-spanning stories of a family in flux. As her grand theme, she takes on the universal quest for “home,” exploring all the manifestations of that search.

May 5, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, US Midwest

WE HAD IT SO GOOD by Linda Grant

The sixties generation broke free of the duty-bound rigors of their Depression era parents and the social constraints of materialism, creating a counterculture of hippies dedicated to revolutionary change. As a secular Jewish middle-aged baby boomer, I can well relate to Linda Grant’s portraiture of aging boomers that once embraced the youth and change and idealism of a new and outrageous culture of acid rock music, heady hallucinogens, diversity, and sexual freedoms.

April 30, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Character Driven, Contemporary, Family Matters