The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction/Literature

The Price family of six travels to the Congo to bring the Baptist faith to the people of the Congo. The couple has four daughters, including twins Leah and Adah. Adah was born with part of her brain not working, suffers a limp, and doesn't talk much but she is incredibly smart. Eldest daughter Rachel is a teenager who only cares about herself and youngest daughter Ruth May is a firecracker.

The Congolese don't take too well to the new faith being shown to them but they don't want the family to suffer either so help out in small unseen ways. Unsurprisingly, things in the Congo don't work like they do in the USA. The family fails at many things and then starts to fail at their relationships as well.

This was a very slow book to read through. There were some uncomfortable subject and some characters that were pretty easy to hate. It's amazing how out of touch the father was.

The ending seemed to just keep going and going. It almost would have been better if the last few chapters weren't included and we weren't given the final update on their adult life. It really just made me feel even more disconnected from the family.

First Line: "Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened."

Rating:
(3/5)

Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas

Fiction/Literature

Ruby is a rebellious teenager who runs away from home in England to visit her grandmother in Cairo. She has basically no relationship with her grandmother, but is desperate to leave and try something new. Showing up on the doorstep of her grandmother, the manservent Mamdooh is none too pleased to see her. She eventually convinces her way in and finds Iris, her grandmother, who is old, ailing, and struggling to remember her past. Ruby offers to help Iris document her history so that it is not forgotten and Iris can't pass that up.

Iris came of age in Cairo during WWII. She fell in love with a soldier and got engaged, working as a secretary to the British government. It was times of high stress but lots of partying and lots of love. People did things quickly for fear that war would wipe out everything.

As Ruby pieces together her grandmother's past, she also finds her own love story in Cairo. She starts to fall for the brother of the taxi driver that took her from the airport to Iris' house. This boy shows her around the city and she starts to love both Cairo and him.

This was a great coming of age story from two different generation's perspective. We learn about Iris' journey to adulthood during the war and we see Ruby's as she grows up in Cairo. Ruby is a believable teenager, starting off a little annoying but coming in to her own. I'm not sure I ever really understand her relationship with her mom, or her mom's relationship with Iris. They tried to flush out the latter in the book but it was a fairly short conversation near the end of the book and not really sufficient for me to understand or believe it.

The event that finally brings everyone together seemed a bit drastic but I guess typical to a coming of age fictional story. I've been having bad luck with books recently, unable to get through a few of them before giving up, so I was happy to be able to easily get through this one.

First Line: "I remember"

Rating:
(3.5/5)

The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg

Fiction

Each year, Laura's family gathers at her parent's place to go to the town fair. It's been a family tradition forever and one that can't be missed. Before she heads there with her husband and two teens, she gets a call from her sister saying that she has something very important to discuss with Laura and their brother. The conversation doesn't get very far before their father has a stroke and heads to the hospital. Laura's sister Caroline can't wait. She has been seeing a therapist and the therapist has recommended she talks to her sibling about what happened in their childhood. Caroline states how her mother never gave her any love and treated her completely different from the other children. When Caroline was supposedly in summer camp, she was actually at a hospital recovering from her mother attacking her with a knife. Laura has a hard time reconciling this with the childhood she remembers.

I got sucked in to this book very quickly. None of the characters are perfect and I was questioning truth along with Laura as she was hearing Caroline's story. There's also guilt of not believing a victim's story. Oddly enough, most of the male characters in this book were pretty much absent from the story because they couldn't handle the discussion, which I found a bit odd. I was a bit disappointed at the ending but still not a bad read.

First Line: "It is a photograph of a staircase that I took with my Brownie camera over forty years ago."

Rating:
(4.5/5)

Bone by Fae M Ng

Fiction

Leila is the eldest of three sisters in a Chinese family living in San Francisco. Her father is no longer around and when her mom remarried, they had two additional daughters. Leila is as close to her half sisters as if they were her full sisters. The youngest sister has moved off to New York, the middle is dating another Chinese guy, and Leila seems to hover around her mom and step-father trying to ensure they are happy.

When the family finds out that the middle sister has committed suicide, the family goes in to a tail spin. The book goes from present day and then works its way back to the day of the suicide. We find out what pushed Ona to jump from the 13th floor and end her life. By the end of the book I was thinking that's it? It didn't seem enough for me. Ona had many different ways she could have reacted to what eventually drove her to suicide, and suicide certainly shouldn't have been at the top of the list.

In the end, this book fell short for me because we're trying to understand why Ona did what she did but we aren't given enough information to figure it out. Instead, we're focusing around how this affects the family which usually is ok for plot, but not when you don't even understand why it happened in the first place.

First Line: "We were a family of three girls."

Rating:
(2.5/5)

When I'm Gone by Emily Bleeker

Fiction

When Luke returns home after burying his wife of sixteen years, Natalie, after she passed away from cancer, he focuses on his three children and keeping a normal life for them. At the front door, he notices a blue envelope with Natalie's handwriting addressed to him. She has written him a letter, from more than a year ago, in the event that she doesn't survive. She reminds Luke that she loves him and didn't want to leave him. Luke clutches to this additional piece of his wife.

The letters keep coming, and Natalie makes some requests. Make the kids pancakes, become friends with Natalie's best friend Annie, and hire a student from her university to look after the kids. Luke respects Natalie's wishes, but runs in to problems along the way. Annie's relationship with her husband is not good and the university student Jessie is also very sick. Luke has to confront his past and his relationship with Natalie when he realizes not everything was as it seemed.

Even though this isn't a thriller, it reads like one. There are a few twists throughout the book to keep you turning pages.

Luke is a pretty complex character and one I really enjoyed reading about. He's a good dad but not without his problems. His history is complex. At times I wondered why parts of Luke's history were being re-hashed. I think they required a bit more context when they were originally raised but everything made sense in the end. Luke does a great job of driving the story forward.

For a great story that had me turning the pages and staying up late at night, there were two things that bothered me. First, Luke was willing to move on from Natalie way too soon. He started dating another women about 6 months after his wife's death when he was still obviously struggling with her loss. Second, the ending was overkill. The twists leading up to it were believable and captured me but the final one had me rolling my eyes. It was way too much.

Still, a book's ability to capture me is measured by me not falling asleep on the train while reading it (I didn't) and staying up late to finish it (I did)!

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this tour!

First Line: "It was a beautiful funeral."

Rating:
(4/5)

About the Author Emily Bleeker is a mom of four, an author and Chicagoland native. Her first novel, WRECKAGE, was released by Lake Union Publishing March 2015. Her second book, WHEN I’M GONE, will hit shelves March 2016. She's learning to balance life as a stay-at-home mom with her life as a writer. Both come with a lot of laughter, tears and a shocking amount of Diet Coke. Find Emily on Twitter, Facebook and at her website.

Montpelier Tomorrow by Marylee MacDonald

Fiction

Colleen's husband died of a tragic accident while she was still pregnant with her 3rd child. She does her best to raise her children while still working as a teacher. Years later, her daughter Sandy is a grown woman with her old child when Colleen learns that Sandy's husband has ALS. There's no cure for ALS. Colleen flies down to help her daughter manage the house, the children, and take care of her ailing husband.

This book is obviously rife with emotion as it explores how a family, including children, react to a father slowly losing his muscle abilities and choosing how he'll finish his life. However none of the reactions are really what one would expect.

Tony: The father with ALS. Though he is the one that's ill, this book doesn't revolve around him, as much as he would like it to. As any person with an illness would feel self-pity. One would hope that eventually you'd move on to another emotion and try to live each day to its fullest. Unfortunately Tony never gets past self-pity. As the book continues, I found myself getting more annoyed with him and then annoyed with myself for getting annoyed with him. About 75% of the way through the book, it's finally explained that many ALS patients go through these types of emotions and then I found the remaining 25% of the book Tony was bearable. I'm not sure if it was a switch in me that accepted this behaviour as part of the disease or he actually became more bearable. Either way, I wish this had been told earlier in the book. I want to believe I would have been more accepting.

Colleen: The mother taking care of her daughter and son-in-law. Overall, the least annoying of all the characters. There's some self-righteousness in what she's doing but it's justified. She has some really odd reactions to her daughter spilling out her emotions.

Sandy: The daughter. Wow, what a piece of work. She fought her mom every step of the way, completely ungrateful for all help that was offered. As someone who has lost her mom, I can't even imagine doing this. I'd be so grateful just for a moment more. The story tries to pin down why Sandy acts the way she does but the reasoning isn't enough for me to cause the kind of hatred shown. To quote Colleen, "Sandy misunderstood me, intentionally, it seemed." That's right. She knowingly despised her mother and held her responsible for something small that happened when she was a kid.

Lillian and Aldo: Parents of Tony, who think throwing money at the problem will solve it. They have no interest in helping their son beyond monetary assistance. It was kind of despicable.

And then there's the girl who lives in Colleen's house. I can't remember her name and couldn't find it while flipping through the book. This side story was seemingly pointless to me. There were long swaths where she wasn't mentioned other than "I wonder how she's doing".

Overall, this book will certainly make you feel something. There are some great moments between Colleen and Tony. It's too bad there wasn't more of that. But I understand the point of the book it to not show a happy family, but a bit more nitty gritty of a story on how ALS can affect a family.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this tour!.

Purchase Links

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

First Line: "Time robs us of chances for reconciliation."

Rating:
(3/5)

About the Author A former carpenter and mother of five, Marylee MacDonald began writing when her last child left for college. Her fiction has won the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award, the Barry Hannah Prize, the Ron Rash Award, the Matt Clark Prize, and the ALR Fiction Award. Her novel, Montpelier Tomorrow, was a Finalist in the 2014 IPPY Awards and the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize. She is widely published in literary magazines. Find out more about Marylee at her website, see what she's pinning on Pinterest, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter. You can also follow her blog and add her to your circles on Google+.