Color Me In

I saw this young adult novel recommended on an email from the Jewish Book Council. I thought after the "weightiness" of The Weight of Ink, something more contemporary and shorter might be appreciated for our next synagogue book club meeting. Now that I've read it, even though I enjoyed it, I'm not sure if it's the best choice for this particular book club.

Color Me In is the coming of age story of a 16-year old Nevaeh Levitz. Growing up in an affluent NYC suburb, attending a prestigious private school in Riverdale, Nevaeh never considered her bi-racial roots beyond feeling like she didn’t really “fit in” with her peers. She never even really considered that her very best friend, Stevie, is also bi-racial and facing some of the prejudice that she is able to avoid.

When Nevaeh’s Black mom and White Jewish dad split up, Nevaeh and her mom move in with the mom’s family in Harlem. At the same time, her dad decides that even though Nevaeh is past Bat Mitzvah age, this is a ritual he wishes her to partake in. Now Nevaeh is really forced to come to terms with who she is.

Nevaeh develops a relationship with non-traditional Rabbi Sara while preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. For the sake of the synagogue book club, I wish that this part of the storyline had been more developed. Much more of the story is about Navaeh's realizations of how much easier her life has been because she can pass for White. Thinking outside of just the book club, I really did appreciate the way that Diaz dealt with many of the race issues. 

I also really liked that Color Me In was not predictable. I had a preconceived notion of how the novel would end and it did not end that way.

For the next two months, I will keep my fingers crossed that the members of the book club will have some appreciation for this young adult fiction since I was the one to recommend it.

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

I seem to think that readers of contemporary fiction either love Jodi Picoult or hate Jodi Picoult. I am a fan... and that might color the way I read and review her novels. Jodi Picoult takes contemporary issues (in this case it's race) that she takes from real news sources. She expands them into a fictionalized version of their earlier selves, tells the story from many different points of view. There's a trial. And there's a twist. It's her formula and it works really well. At least I think so.

Small Great Things was no different. But unlike many of her other books, this one was so incredibly thought provoking and one that will stick with me a long time. It made me rethink my views on race in America, something I will continue to ponder over. Prior to reading the book, I thought I knew how I felt. Now I'm not so sure.

The story centers on Ruth, a black nurse in a Connecticut hospital, who is forbidden to care for a newborn baby, Davis. Davis, named after Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, is the son of white supremacists, Turk and Brittany. When Ruth is conveniently the only medical staff person around when Davis starts seizing, stops breathing and dies, she becomes the easy target to blame for Davis' death.  Ruth gets arrested, her public defender is Kennedy, the character in the story that I most related to. Like me, Kennedy thought she knew how she felt about races and racism. Like me, Kennedy had to rethink a whole lot of things. Things like white privilege. I knew it was there... but never really thought about it much, just because, well, it was...

The character that I found most fascinating was Turk. He was the window to learn about different groups of white racists. It was unsettling for the most part but it made me understand that the different groups feel differently about the races and their ways of making things right (in their) worlds can be quite different. I don't know that the differences will really stick with me but the quality of the hate and the anger, that will remain with me a long time. It also gave me insight into some of the racial tensions that I see brewing around me. A usual history and current events lesson all rolled into one.

Picoult weaves real life race issues into the novel. There are references to Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and several others. She even has a fictionalized version of Reverend Al Sharpton.

Some reviewers of Small Great Things found Ruth and her sister, Adisa (previously known as Rachel) as the least believable characters of the novel. They comment that Ruth and Adisa are caricatures of the groups they are meant to represent. I'm not 100% sure about that. Yes, Ruth goes on to get her graduate degree at Yale, to live in a nice neighborhood, to raise one son who is an all-star student in a good high school. Adisa lives in the projects with her five children, although we are reminded that they all had the same father.

Ruth and Rachel were the daughters of single mom, Lou, who worked as a domestic in the home of a wealthy family in Manhattan. They were raised in Harlem. (My one source of serious irritation with the novel was when someone asked Ruth if she was from Manhattan and she said, no, she was from Harlem. Is it my whiteness that has always made me think that Harlem was in Manhattan? Or did Picoult goof here?) Ruth showed academic giftedness at an early age and Lou's employers helped facilitate Ruth's entry and scholarship to be able to attend Dalton, a prestigious private school in good neighborhood. Rachel continued going to her local school up in Harlem. That's when the sisters begin to drift apart, inhabiting totally different worlds. Ruth becomes closer to Lou's employer's daughter, Christina, than she is to her own sister.

It's Ruth and Christina's relationship that really forces those two characters to think about their differences due to race. Quite interesting thoughts at that.

Another comment I saw in more than one review was that Picoult was clearly writing for a white audience when she wrote this book. She most probably was. But to me, a white woman, it didn't diminish the story or how thought provoking I found the novel.

If you're already a fan of Jodi Picoult, I predict that you are going to love this book. If you're not, you might pick apart the story and the characters, and you might really dislike the novel, but I bet you will start rethinking about your views on race and racism. It was an easy read, even with its heavy subject matter. I was able to finish it in two sittings (on my flight to New York and then finished on the flight home). I've read some good books in 2016, but this one, most likely the final book I'll finish this year, stands out as one of the best.

Blue is my favorite color

Sometimes I need time to really think about a book before I write any sort of review about it. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler wasn't really that type of book, but I was away from my computer when I finished it. I only hope I can remember enough to write something worthy here. (I also pray that I can remember enough about the book to be able to discuss it at a book club meeting a few months from now!)

Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed A Spool of Blue Thread. I think it's a good book club book because there are a lot of things that can be discussed. But there was very little action in the book and it wasn't overly character-driven either. It's a family story about a quite ordinary family from Baltimore going back as far as Red's parents and going forward to Red's kids. (The grandchildren are minor characters in the story so it would really be a stretch to say that the plot covered 4 generations.)

Red and Abby Whitshank are a perfectly ordinary couple, parents of 4 children, living in a house that Red's father, Junior, built for wealthy clients but which Junior aspired to live in. He got his wish. The house is as much a character in the book as any of the children - or even Red, Abby, Junior or Linnie Mae.

(Another text-to-self connection here... my family is currently getting ready to sell a house that has been in our family for over 80 years... longer than the Whitshanks lived in their house. Tyler gives you an excellent idea of what the house means to Red. Did my family home mean that much to anyone who had ever lived there? I suppose I will never know.)

The Whitshank kids, Amanda, Jeannie, Denny and Stem, are worried about Abby and Red living in that big old house alone. Abby experiences blackouts and Red has trouble hearing. The kids decide that the parents need help. But the parents don't think they need help nor do they want any help. This allows Tyler to unfold the stories of the Whitshank family. How they got to where they are today, what drives the children, what explains the relationships between the siblings. It's all quite ordinary but it's not. On the surface, the story is simple... and probably more common than I know in the community in which I am now living. It also brought back memories of what I experienced at the point where I worried that my parents probably should not have been living on their own.

Tyler weaves the story back and forth through different periods of time. We start in 1994, jump forward to more current times, then back to learn the story of Red's parents in the 1930s. And then we're mostly back to the present. These movements through time make the story evolve in an unpredictable way. But isn't that the way real life is? The spool of thread that is the Whitshank family slowly unravels and we learn that all is not as it first appears.

I love family sagas. I love reading about ordinary (but not so ordinary) families. And I love Anne Tyler's style of writing. (My favorite book of hers is most likely Back When We Were Grownups.) A Spool of Blue Thread is the type of book that really demands to be read in one sitting. But because my reading time was broken up, it surprisingly took me over 2 weeks to finish.

And like I said, I hope I remember enough of what drew me in during my reading when it comes time to discuss this with my community book club.

P.S. Here's the link to my recap of the book club meeting where A Spool of Blue Thread was discussed.

The Giver

This isn't the first time that I read The Giver by Lois Lowry. I was introduced to the middle grade science fiction novel in a graduate reading class in 1999. Not being a fan of science fiction, I read it begrudgingly and was surprised when I enjoyed it. I went on to read the sequels as they came out, Gathering Blue and The Messenger. The fourth book in the series, Son, came out after I left full-time teaching and my reading of young adult fiction slacked off. It's been on my "to be read" list for years. It might be time to pick that one up.

When The Giver was suggested in Books and Beer Club last week, I remembered that I did like the book. I remembered some of the story but not all. And I remembered that my favorite book in the series was The Gatherer. But for the life of me, I couldn't tell you why.

Some of the book club members mentioned that the movie of The Giver which was released in 2014 is on Netflix. Rather than my normal preference for reading the book and then watching the movie, I figured since I'd already read the book (albeit 17 years ago), I could watch the movie before the reread.

More details of the novel came back to me as I watched the movie. I loved the movie. It seemed very loyal to what I remembered of the novel. The cinematography was wonderful.

The night I watched the movie, I downloaded The Giver from the library. I started rereading it the following evening.

The setting of The Giver is a time in the future, after some really bad things have happened in the world and people are living in planned communities where sameness is the goal. There's no need for real decision making as the community makes all the decisions for the whole. Clothing and food and dwellings are provided by the community. Family units consist of a father, a mother (who are put in a family unit based on temperaments by the community) and two children, a boy and a girl (did you expect anything else?) specifically selected for them. There is no love. Every relationship is planned out by the community. After the children are grown and assigned to their own dwellings, the parents go to the place where childless people live. As opposed to the place where older people go.

In the community, there's no love. There's no emotion. There's no color. At twelve years old, children are thanked for their childhood and are assigned jobs based on their aptitude. Again, there are no choices involved.

Oh, and naturally there are no birthdays. There's nothing individual at all in the community. Each December there's a ceremony where all the babies born in the prior year are assigned to their family unit. There's a prescribed change for children at every single age. At 9-years old the children receive a bicycle, the only form of transportation in the community.

The year that Jonas becomes a twelve, all the other twelves are assigned to jobs. Jonas wonders what is going on when he doesn't get an assignment. The reason for that is because Jonas is selected for the most honored job in the community. Jonas is going to be the Receiver of Memory. Apparently memories, good and bad, interfere with living the kind of life those in the community wish to live. One person holds all the memories of past time so that everyone else in the community is living in the here and now. The previous Receiver of Memory is responsible for the training of Jonas. As such, the previous Receiver becomes the Giver. Through the transfer of memories from Giver to Receiver, Jonas begins to question the dystopian community he lives in.

As much as I loved the movie, I loved the book that much more. My memory served me correctly and the movie was very true to the novel with just some small exceptions. Since I was rereading the book and I'd seen the movie, I was able to move a little bit beyond the main story and catch details I hadn't caught before. There's definitely more to this novel that meets the eye.

I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoy young adult fiction and to those who have always wondered what it would be like to live in a world where you don't have to make choices, everything is done for you, there's no war, no religion, and people generally get along.

The Seven Year Dress

It's April again. This year, Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is on April 27th. The synagogue book club reads their one Holocaust novel in conjunction with Yom HaShoah observance. I'd gotten a list of lots of novels and memoirs. Restricting myself to novels, I selected a few that were considered more uplifting than completely distressing and this was high on the list. The group voted and selected The Seven Year Dress by Paulette Mahurin.

I'm curious to learn if others in the group felt this was uplifting. The Tattooist of Auschwitz was a Holocaust novel that I considered uplifting. This one, not so much so.

What would have really made this book would have been if Mahurin had given some information about how much of this story was based on the actual experience of someone she knows or why she was inspired to write this novel. I'll do some research before the book club meeting, but it would have been nice to have that information as part of the experience of reading the novel.

Helen's story of the 7 years that she was either in hiding or as a prisoner in a concentration camp was slightly different than others that I've read. So there should be something to discuss her. But the novel didn't live up to the slight hype that it received. I hope the group won't be angry at me for suggesting this one. They weren't thrilled about Color Me In. Thinking someone else should make the book recommendations for awhile.

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison has been on my "to be read" list for years. Since my daughter worked on the play back when she was working in theater. Shortly after I first read Beloved. I finally picked it up now because one of my book clubs is discussing banned books in October. We're all reading George by Alex Gino and then in addition, we're each supposed to pick another banned book that we've never read before. Perfect opportunity for me to read The Bluest Eye.

I found this a book that was disturbing to read. I keep debating in my head whether The Bluest Eye or Beloved tells the more horrific story. The experience of reading both was the same. I'd pick up the book. Read a little bit. Then need to put it down.

The Bluest Eye is the story of Pecola Breedlove, an 11-year old girl in Ohio who comes from a family devoid of love, where ugliness and violence seem to rule. Spoiler alert: Pecola gets raped by her father. Pecola thinks if only she had blue eyes, her life would be perfect.The story told in an interesting way, with different sections of the book focusing on one character or another with whom Pecola interacts.

While I don't think any book should be banned, I can see what might be objectionable to some readers. There are many teachable moments in any controversial book. In this case, there can be discussions about race. Why were there no dolls of color until recently making white, blond, blue-eyed dolls a standard of beauty? What does lack of parenting do to a person? What about poverty? If a person objects to the language and sexual explicitness of the novel, then don't pick it up to read on your own. There are so many books. On your own time, for your own pleasure, pick your own book. There is much to be learned by reading The Bluest Eye. Life isn't all Shirley Temple dolls and happy moments. Nor are the stories that can be told.

The craft of the novel is something to talk about, too. Why did she choose to present the material in the manner that she did? There were messages imbedded within the rich language.

Pecola's story is based in Ohio. But parts of the story goes to the South in the early 20th century so we get a little taste of that setting as well. 

This is a story about  a lonely, vulnerable girl.

I gave The Bluest Eye only 3 stars on goodreads because of how disturbingly difficult it was to read. I know that if I were reading it for a book club where we had all read The Bluest Eye, my opinion of the book would change because there is so much powerful material to discuss. On second thought, I'm going to revise my rating to 4 stars because this is a novel that is going to stick with me and I'm sure it will come up in conversation with some of my more readerly friends.

 

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead is equal parts compelling and truly difficult to read. I mostly read at night before turning off the light to go to sleep. I'd get to the end of a chapter and would turn to the next chapter... and next another. But then the next day I had to force myself to pick up the book again. I wanted to see where she was taking the story, but I almost really didn't. Very conflicting feelings.

The subject matter is very difficult. Damon Fields is born to a single mother in Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia in the 1980s. His father died several months prior to his birth at a place called the Devil's Bathtub. As a result, Damon was always afraid of bathtubs. His mother was a poor struggling teen living in a single-wide trailer on the property of an older couple who are responsible for raising their grandson since his father is gone and his mother is in prison. Such is the life in Appalachia.

Damon is nicknamed Demon and his Copperhead comes from the vibrant color of his hair. (There's also some legend told about a copperhead snake, but that is debatable.) This is his story. It includes an abusive stepfather, time in foster care, child labor, star athlete, unrequited love, addiction, and then the kind of love that drags a person down. There was also a little bit of hope.

Reading about the foster care system and the addiction of all types of people was difficult to get through. Foster parents who took in kids for the money. Or for slave labor. Or for whatever their agenda was.

I've mentioned Renee's Reading Club, a Faebook group, before. That group is solely for recommendations. There's also an RRC discussion group where you can discuss books after you finish them or as you're reading them. Spoilers are allowed. After I finished reading this novel, I went to the discussion group and wrote my observations about the book and how I think living in a rural area with lots of poverty gave me a different perspective than had I stayed in my little metro-NYC area bubble. In the book, Demon has a running commentary about what he thinks about large cities (the word large being relative since he's mostly talking about Knoxville, Tennessee) and how city folk think about people in rural America. Kingsolver lives in Appalachia so she knows what she's talking about.

I'd love for my community book club to read and discuss Demon Copperhead. We're all transplants here from somewhere, and I'd like to see if they feel they have more of a connection to the setting in the novel after having lived here. This would make a great book club book.

Would I recommend this one? It's very  difficult to read, but if you can read it, it will force you to think about some of the uglier things in life which need to be addressed and not ignored.

It Can't Happen Here

Goodreads can sum up It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis far more succinctly than I could hope to.

"The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to "save the nation." Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news."

I first spotted this novel in Barnes & Noble sometime prior to the 2016 election. It put a little shiver of fear in me at the time, but I didn't even want to go down that road so didn't even consider reading it. Now, feeling as though democracy is as frail as its ever been in my lifetime, I decided to take a second look.

I found It Can't Happen Here a little difficult to read. The sentences were long, I didn't understand some of the historical references and often had no clue if characters were from real life or totally imagined. Once I realized how I could skim without losing the drift of the story, that's what I did. Another thing that made this difficult for me to read is that it was overtype satirical. Like ridiculous. Like spread out the satire a little bit or something! But satire was piled on.

There were so many passages in the novel that I highlighted because they were so relevant to today. I won't bore you with all 30-something that I highlighted, but I will share two with you.

• He believed that dissent - even a cranky, erratic, eccentric, old-fashioned version of it - was not disloyalty but at the heart of an American democratic identity. 
  This is so counter to those who say, "If you don't like it here, leave." I don't believe that's in the spirit of democracy. If you don't like it here, but this is your country, voice your dissatisfaction and work towards improving things. Don't just walk away - and don't allow yourself to be chased away.
  
  
• ... most of them newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had met him... Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column...
  If that's not descriptive of the trump era, than I'm not sure what is!

That's as political as I care to get here. If anything that I've written intrigues you, you might want to take a look at this classic novel. I expected to lose sleep with worry and finish up with a increased sense of dread. That didn't happen, although the book did give me some things to think about... and more things to throw about while conversing about politics with my husband or kids.

 

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

How coincidental that two novels were published about the Pack Horse Library project within a few months of each other! Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was published in May of 2019 and The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes just a few months later, in October. I read The Giver of Stars earlier this year.

Shall I start with the comparison of the two historical fiction novels? Hard not to compare them since they are pretty similar. They both use the backdrop of the Pack Horse Library in which to set their stories.

I think I'll start with the biggest differences first. To me, The Giver of Stars is primarily a story about friendship and about overcoming odds. The romance got a bit schmaltzy at times, but I enjoy Moyes straightforward writing style. And since it was the first of the two that I read, I got to learn about the (mostly) women who drove all over Appalachia delivering books to communities that wouldn't have had access any other way. So that's The Giver of Stars. The main storyline of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was about skin color. Notice how I didn't say "race"? The main character in Book Woman is Cussy Mary, also called "Bluet," one of the blue-skinned people from Kentucky. People afflicted with an enzyme deficiency can have blue  skin. In the 1930s in Kentucky (and I'd imagine a while afterwards), those with blue skin were lumped with "the coloreds." This is a big part of the story. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is almost a coming-of-age story about what it was like for Cussy Mark to reach adulthood as someone with blue skin.

The biggest similarity is that in both historical fiction novels the main characters are book women and have a love of books and words.

As soon as The Giver of Stars was released, there were accusations of plagiarism. That Jojo Moyes had copied many of the ideas from Kim Michele Richardson. I don't know if that's true, and I don't recall anything strikingly similar between the two plots. I would imagine that the similarities exist in description of the Pack Horse Librarians, but I can't be sure.

Richardson's language is a little richer and probably more fitting with the time during which the novel is set. Sometimes that language slowed me down a little, but not in any terrible way.

I gave both novels 4-stars on goodreads. That was a rounding up for The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, but a solid 4-stars for The Giver of Stars. Which is not to say that I liked the latter much more than the former. I just found Moyes a bit easier and quicker to read, and I love stories about women's friendships and second chances a bit more than coming of age stories at this point in my life.

You can't go wrong with either novel.

One of the best, most evocative first pages of a novel I have ever read

I was about halfway through reading Barkskins, an 800+ page saga by Annie Proulx when the e-book expired off my iPad. I quickly got through A Wrinkle in Time in spite of not loving that book.

I started browsing available e-books through the library's online catalog. I was looking for something to pop up that was on my "to be read" list, for something popular that I never got around to adding to my list or for something quick and easy. Stumbled across nine, ten: a September 11 story by Nora Raleigh Baskins, read the description, checked out the numerical rating on goodreads (4.05), checked it out and downloaded it.

Needing to get things done, I quickly glanced at the first page. It was the best, most evocative first page of a novel, children's literature or adult, that I have ever read. Quite possibly because my memories of September 11, 2001 will always include marveling over the color of the sky at the start of the day. A perfectly gorgeous blue sky no longer renders the same positive feeling that it did on that morning. But will there ever be a sky as gorgeous as the one that morning? I will never forget looking through the window of my sky blue bathroom in my New York City suburban home as I was getting ready for work that morning. I will never forget appreciating how the sky blue hue to the sky was even more wonderful than the sky blue tone of my bathroom walls. The color of the sky that morning was that big a deal.

It was such a big deal that there's a whole section of the 9-11 Memorial on the site of the World Trade Center in New York City that is devoted to the color of the sky on that memorable day.

Baskins' prologue to nine, ten: a September 11 story brings me right back to that sky. I've reread the page several times, I've read it aloud to my husband, I hope to share it with anyone who will listen. And right now, I feel the need to share it with you.

Everyone will mention the same thing, and if they don't, when you ask them, they will remember. It was a perfect day.

More than eight million people lived in New York City that year, so of course, not everyone's day started perfectly. There was excitement and pain, anxiety and boredom, love and loneliness, anger and joy. But everyone who looked up that morning must have marveled, whether noting it out loud or not: What a perfect day.

 The sky was robin's-egg blue. There were one or two fluffy, almost decorative clouds. It was late-summer warm, so the air was still and clear, not the least bit humid. Warm the exact way you would set the temperature of the earth, if you could. Clear, with just enough breeze so you knew you were outside, breathing fresh air. People would remember that day with all sorts of adjectives: serene, lovely, cheerful, invigorating, peaceful, quiet, astounding, crystalline, blue.

Perfect.

Until 8:46 a.m., when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center and nothing would ever be the same again.

But that has not happened yet.

If the rest of the book is as wonderful as the prologue, I'm in for an emotional ride.

Girl, Woman, Other

I was very engaged in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other. It's the January choice for my community book club. I probably should not have read it so far in advance since it's a book with lots of characters, lots of nuance. I hope I remember enough to be able to discuss it intelligently two months from now. I'd love to be discussing it now. There's just so much meat to it.

Now, how to describe this fictional title. Is it a novel? Is it a compilation of related short stories? I'm not even sure how I'd categorize it. Evaristo's writing style is unique. It's a combination of prose and poetry.

But what is is about? It's about the intersecting lives of several women. Mostly in England. Mostly women of color.  It explores their relationships with their parents, their partners, their friends. It examines their sexuality. It dissects career choices. It's about identity. It's about how to fit into society. Like I said, there is so much there.

What can readers relate to? What can readers learn from the characters in the book?

I found a great blog post that with some notes written down now should help me remember some of the things I'll want to bring up at book club  in January. I need to explore that website to see what they have for other books I might have read.

 

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

I'm in a Facebook group called Renee's Reading Club and everyone there has been raving about Robert Dugoni's The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. It comes up all the time when someone is asking for a nice, good novel. Easy to read during a pandemic. A feel good novel.

I liked the book. It was easy to read. It was a good distraction from what's going on around us. The end left me with a feel good feeling. But did I love it? No. I merely liked it, although I really liked Dugoni's writing style. Would I recommend this novel? Sure. Why not?

Samuel Hill, a small town ophthalmologist, was born with an eye condition, ocular albinism, which gives his eyes a red color. When he started primary school, the kids called him "Devil Boy" which led to him being called Sam Hell. His mother always claimed that he had extraordinary eyes because he was going to have an extraordinary life.

It was Sam's two best friends, Ernie and Mickie, who helped him get through those primary school days and beyond. This is really a novel about friendship. What we need our friends for and how we give back. I was envious of the close friendships that Sam was able to maintain for so many years.

I'm hoping this won't be my last post for who knows how long. I'm having trouble with the new format of blogger. Once the "legacy" format goes away, unless they really fix the new format, I won't be able to post. Blogger says I'll be able to use the old format for another two weeks. And I'm sure I'll finish a few more books before then. In the meantime, this is frustrating. Follow me on Facebook if you can't follow me here.