OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout

Big-wristed Olive Kitteridge is the imposing, even frightful, over-sized woman at the center of this novel. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine, where traditionally people keep to themselves, living out lives of granite-like individuality. She trucks no silliness, has little patience for people she does not care for, which is virtually everyone, and has no problem speaking her mind, in fact seems genetically predisposed to it. She is a retired high school math teacher, who, her adult son tells her, was the “scariest teacher in the school.” She is one of those individuals you meet and wonder, how does a person get this way?

January 19, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Contemporary, Literary, NE & New York, Pulitzer Prize, Reading Guide, Short Stories, y Award Winning Author

LYING WITH THE DEAD by Michael Mewshaw

LYING WITH THE DEAD by Michael Mewshaw is a novel about a dysfunctional family but it is also much more than that. It is a Greek tragedy, a morality tale, a story about the conflicting and diametrically opposed emotions that grip us all, and a novel about sibling love. The novel unfolds in chapters told from the points of view of each of the children – - Quinn, Maury and Candy.

January 14, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters

ANNA IN-BETWEEN by Elizabeth Nunez

ANNA IN-BETWEEN is a novel about an unmarried, Caribbean woman in her late thirties, Anna Sinclair, who begins to understand herself as she comes to understand her parents. The novel explores issues of caste, race and culture in a moving, deeply poignant tale of mother and daughter. Anna goes back to the island of her birth as she does every year, but this time she stays for a month to spend more time with her aging parents…

November 14, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Caribbean, Class - Race - Gender, Family Matters, Latin American/Caribbean, Literary, y Award Winning Author

REAL LIFE & LIARS by Kristina Riggle

In REAL LIFE & LIARS, protagonist Mira Zielinski represents a new demographic for our times: hippie turned senior, at age sixty-five still free-spirited and defiant, who has decided to refuse treatment for her recently diagnosed breast cancer. She’s also decided to withhold the diagnosis from her three grown children, as they converge on the family home for a grand 35th anniversary party. As it turns out, however, the Zielinski children are bringing home a few secrets of their own.

October 19, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Debut Novel, End-of-Life, Family Matters, Reading Guide, US Midwest

SAVING SAMMY: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD by Beth Alison Maloney

Are your kids healthy and happy? If so, you are way ahead of the game. Just ask Beth Alison Maloney, whose son, Sammy, came down with a mysterious malady at the age of twelve. He started yelling at the treetops and the squirrels, refused to go into bed at night, could not enter or exit through the front door of his home, and did not allow anyone to touch him…

September 22, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: NE & New York, Non-fiction

YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER by Margaret Leroy

In YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER, Grace is a single mother living in London with her nearly 4-year old daughter, Sylvie. Sylvie is an interesting child. She has never once called her mother anything but “Grace” from the time that she started talking. She is completely phobic about getting any water on her face and she draws the same house over and over, claiming it to be “my house,” though the house looks nothing like the flat she and her mother live in. She says other weird things, such as accusing her best friend Lennie as being “not my Lennie.” And, she is very sad. Normal children are not sad.

June 10, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: Family Matters, Mystery/Suspense, Reading Guide, United Kingdom