And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

I didn't realize that And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman is a novella. My community book club is doing a Fredrik Backman author study and that was the first book that I requested. It is a novella. But there's so much packed into this sweet short story.

As a grandfather is approaching the end of his life, this is about his attempt to focus on the memories that he is slowly losing. It's also about how his son and his grandson are coping with the upcoming loss of someone who is so important to each of them. All the while, they continue to care for him.

The grandson, Noah, has such an unbelievably special connection with his grandfather. It gave me pause to think back to the relationships that my parents had with my children (and made me wonder if I'll ever have grandchildren that I might have such a connection with).

This special, impactful story will stick with me for a long time.

 

The Summer Place

Another Jennifer Weiner novel, The Summer Place, is one that fell flat with me. It's the story about a wedding that will bring together a family that hasn't spent enough time together recently.

Ronnie's husband has recently died and she's living alone in her house on Cape Cod. The showcase house where she spent summers with her children when they were kids and where she imagined spending time with her kids and their kids, when they came. That hasn't happened. Sarah, her daughter, is busy with marriage, a career, a stepdaughter (the future bride) and two young sons. Sarah's twin, Sam, has moved to California and just hasn't found himself. At age 38. The house sure hasn't enjoyed the family time it had anticipated.

And yes, the house is a character in the book. Kind of like, if walls could talk. I'm still not sure how I felt about that little bit of narrative.

Sarah's stepdaughter, Ruby, is preparing to marry her quarantine boyfriend. They started dating about six weeks before the first Covid lockdown. Sarah invited Ruby to move back home and quarantine with the family. Ruby brought new boyfriend, Gabe, along.

A houseful of people living together during a pandemic. Sarah's husband checks out. There's way too much together time. And Ruby and Gabe just sort of fall into being engaged.

I liked the way Weiner worked Covid into the story. She fully captured the reality of living thru the early days of the pandemic. Working from home while juggling family obligations. How difficult it can be to spend so much time together all the time.

The reviews on this one are very mixed. I fully understand why. Maybe I didn't really love this novel because it was overly ambitious? It had so many themes. Too many themes.Women's choices, motherhood, step-parenting, identity, sexual identity, divorce, parenting, marriage, infidelity, paternity, abandonment. I'm trying  to think about some of the other story lines. The characters were well-developed, but I didn't particularly like any of them except maybe Connor, Sam's young stepson.

BUT... I would love to stay in the house on the Cape. It sounds like a palace! (The Brooklyn Brownstone doesn't sound too shabby either!)

 

The Last House on the Street

I gave Diane Chamberlain's The Last House on the Street a 5-star rating on Goodreads. It was actually more like a 4.5 that I rounded up to 5. But be warned, this is not a book for everyone.

In 2010, Kayla and her husband, Jackson, build their dream home at the end of a street in a brand new development in Round Hill, North Carolina. Jackson dies in a tragic accident - at the house - before they can move in. And for some reason, discouragement about moving into the house is coming from all different places.

In 1965, Ellie Hockley, a 20-year old from Round Hill, North Carolina, volunteers to work for the summer educating "Negroes" about registering for the vote, in anticipation of the Voting Rights Act. She was part of a program that was put together for students from the North and out west to canvas in rural Black areas in the south. Ellie, as a southerner, was not really who they wanted in the program. Her family and friends are not at all happy that she feels the need to volunteer. She has her reasons and feels that she has to do something to help.

The novel is written in alternating storylines. Kayla's story and Ellie's story. Most of the early part of the novel I was waiting for the two stories to intersect, to help me make sense of Kayla's story.

I don't want to give too much of the story away, so I won't. But living in the south for the past twelve years, I found both the 1965 and 2010 stories hauntingly realistic. They are both stories about blatant racism, the KKK, divisions within the community. It's about new developments in rural areas. It's about relationships - both family and friends - and how far they can be stretched.
 

Lily's Promise

After being disappointed by the supposedly uplifting Holocaust novel, The Seven Year Dress, I wasn't sure what to expect from this new Holocaust memoir, Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live.

Right away I was hooked. Dov Forman is Lily's great grandson. He wants to know Lily's story. And when she shows him a note that she received from a soldier on the day that Lily was liberated, Dov is determined to use social media to track down the GI who gave Lily the note.

Lily's story about her happy childhood in Hungary and then how life changes when Hitler invades Hungary. The story of her life in concentration camps is well told. Her father had recently died of natural causes, her older brother has been conscripted and she, her mother and four siblings are sent to Auschwitz. Her mother and two youngest siblings are immediately selected for death. Lily is determined to honor the promise she made to her father to keep her remaining two sisters safe. She describes the harsh realities of Auschwitz as well as her acts of defiance that give her the strength to keep going. She also makes herself a promise. That after the war, she is going to tell her story. She wants the world to know what has happened.

The war ends and after being in a refugee camp in Switzerland, Lily and her sisters move to Mandatory Palestine, what will shortly become Israel. Life goes on. Lily falls in love and gets married. They have children. And she realizes that no one really wants to hear about what happened during the war. They are busy trying to build new lives... and forget.

It wasn't until many years later, in London, that Lily has the opportunity to honor the promise she made to herself in 1944. She starts talking about her experiences during the Holocaust. And she doesn't stop.

During the pandemic, during the many lockdowns in London, Dov gives Lily a new outlook for speaking out to the world. TikTok. Lily becomes a TikTok sensation. Her stories are now going to a younger generation. That part of the story was what made this the most interesting and the most hopeful. I'd highly recommend this new memoir.

After I finished the memoir, I looked for Lily online and before I found some of her TikTok posts, I found this article, 98-year-old Holocaust survivor reaches younger generations on TikTok: "I will tell my story". I spent the next hour watching the documentary that was imbedded in the article. The survivors that are still around to tell their stories are such a blessing. Only then did I go on to look at some of her posts on TikTok. What a treasure she is and she does seem to make a connection with younger people. 

Sadly, even after years of saying "Never again," it seems like too many are looking the other way. We must change the refrain to "Never forget." Lily and her fellow survivors, for as long as they live, will keep the story alive for us.

 

Book Lovers

How could a book lover who also loves Hallmark movies not love Emily Henry's latest, Book Lovers?

After my last finish (The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle), I needed a book that was going to captivate me and that I'd be able to tear through. Book Lovers was that book. 

Emily Henry starts the novel with her character talking about Hallmark movies. I was hooked! And truly, the plot of the novel could easily be a Hallmark movie. Nora is an intense book agent in NYC. She's very cutthroat, her clients love her for what she can achieve, but they call her "the shark" behind her back. The only relationship she is able to hold on to is with her younger sister, Libby, and her sister's family.

She approaches Charlie, a NYC editor, to see if he'd be interested in a novel by one of her hot authors. Charlie is not interested in that at all. He thought the author's last novel was terrible. And their meeting did not go well at all.

Story then jumps ahead a few years. Libby is pregnant with her 3rd child and needs a little break before the baby comes. She invites - coerces - Nora to accompany her to Sunshine Falls, NC, the setting of one of the novels that Nora represented. The one that Charlie seemed to hate. Libby has a list of things that Nora needs to accomplish on this month-long getaway. Silly things like wearing a flannel shirt, dating a local, riding a horse. Silly things like that.

It's Nora and Libby's first morning in NC. Libby is being a pregnant slug so Nora walks into town and who does she spy in the coffee shop but a guy who looks exactly like Charlie. What do you know? It IS Charlie! They get thrown together repeatedly. The banter between these two main characters is what makes the book so enjoyable. It is just such smart, witty banter. And they can read each other like a book!

I really enjoyed Beach Read. Enjoyed People You Meet on Vacation even more. I loved Book Lovers. If I need a little break from heavier reading and Emily Henry has a new romance novel out, that is what I will choose to read. Highly recommend.

 

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton was selected by my Books and Beer Club for our mystery selection. It was a mystery combined with a sort of time travel and other fantasy aspects. I really expected to like it. I don't love mysteries, I'm very particular about the type of fantasy that I like, but I really love time travel. This one was okay, but I found it tedious to read. At several points, I just wanted the book to be over.

Book club is this evening and I'm curious to see what others thought about the book. I wonder if I'm in the minority.

Aiden Bishop is somehow at this creepy estate where the youngest Hardcastle son died many years ago. Lady Hardcastle decides to hold a party at the estate that had pretty much been abandoned after the son's death on the anniversary of his death. Maybe the 20th anniversary. I finished this last week and I already can't remember.

Somehow Aiden knows that Evelyn is going to be murdered that night and he needs to prevent it. But... Aiden isn't in his own body. He's in the body of one of the guests. He goes to bed at night, and the next morning (actually that morning - again - kind of like the movie "Groundhog Day") he's in the body of another one of the guests. This goes on for days. Which each transformation, Aiden's personality has to fight with the personality of the guest whose body he is in. But, Aiden now has a little bit more information than he did "the day before."

If this sounds confusing, it was. I really hoped that everything would come together by the end of the novel in some grand conclusion and that didn't happen. The mystery was solved. And I was surprised. But I felt the ending fell flat.

Maybe my opinion will change after this evening's discussion. We shall see. As of right now, I wouldn't recommend. 

The rest of the book club felt the way that I felt. We spent most of the discussion comparing the way we interpreted the story!