Beartown by Fredrik Backman

After reading A Man Called Ove I was hooked and had to read everything I could get my hands on by Backman. I went on to read My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry and now Beartown and I have Brit-marie Was Here waiting in my to-read pile. I am looking forward to getting a copy of And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer And Longer.

Backman writes in such a moving, real way. His characters and their flaws are so human and just get into the reader. Even the awful ones. And there are awful ones in this story.

The backdrop for the tale he spins in Beartown is a town wrapped up in its hockey league and how that makes, breaks, forms, and changes people. In a town where the economy has all but crashed there is still the hopes pinned on a boys hockey team (because girls don't get hockey). If the Junior Team can win the championship a school for hockey will come to Beartown and save them all. In building to this dream the boys are made to believe they are the end-all-be-all and entitled. And in this environment one young player sexually assaults a young girl.

The first half or so of the book leads up to this tragic and horrible event. The rest of the book is the fall out. What does it do to the young woman, the young man, the team, the town, the Hockey club....what does it mean to be a team, a family, a community? That is what is examined in Beartown. And it is painful and raw and infuriating. And so beautifully written.


Backman is an artist in making the reader think and question and look inside for their own reactions and feelings and examine them in light of the characters on the page.

So many residents of Beartown are more than they first appear and so many more are less. It is like the real world. People are seldom all that we think they are and sometimes those around us surprise us in the best or in the worst possible ways.


(Finished February 27, 2018)

Glass Sword (Red Queen #2) by Victoria Aveyard

I read the first book in the series, Red Queen, at the end of last year and I was very glad to read the next installment and am no looking forward to the next.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't high end classic literature, but it is more than just a fluff sandwich. It is another story, one that gets told in many ways so often, of what happens when governing becomes so deeply an us-vs-them ideology. I believe the reason is it so often the story being told because it so closely resembles the ideology of the world we live in.

In Red Queen we met Mare and her family, friends, and enemies. In Glass Sword we meet more people like Mare, people Red by blood but with Silver abilities.

The sacrifices of war are further examined. The characters face the costs for a person who survives and for those who have to go on to live without their loved ones as well as the ultimate cost a person pays, their life. An argument could be made and is explored in these pages, that perhaps the ultimate sacrifice isn't ones life but ones humanity.

(Finished February 21, 2018)

Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics by Lawrence O'Donnell

Lawrence O'Donnell is the host of The Last Word on MSNBC and was a writer on The West Wing (a great show) among other accomplishments.

He clearly has a love of the written word, politics, and history.
But don't let that fool you or make you stay away from this book. It is so well written, not at all a dry political history book. It is approachable and reads more like a political mystery than a history book but it is full of interesting facts and history that needs to be preserved, to be remembered, to be passed on to the current and to future generations.

There have been many comparisons to Trump and/or his campaign's possible collusion with Russia in meddling with the 2016 election and Nixon's Watergate scandal/crime. But there are so many more similarities between the current political climate and the 1968 election. Even some of the players are the same. It is crazy and eerie. And makes for a read more entertaining than expected, well not by me but I am sure by some. I fully expected to be entertained while I learned, and I wasn't let down at all. Though I was deeply disturbed, rightly, with the lengths that were gone to in the name of election and legacy making.....


(Finished February 13, 2018)

The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff

Found this one on the infamous Buy 2 Get 1 Free table at Barnes & Noble.

This was one of the most moving (yes another most moving, I find so many of them, and I think you will agree when you read this) stories I have ever read.

When things get hard sometimes we find help, love, and friendship, where we least expect it. Like at a circus in Germany during the worst of WWII. That is where we find the growing relationship between Noa and Astrid.

Noa is cast out of her family because of a poor choice and the consequence of that choice, a pregnancy. She finds a baby, well a lot of babies, but one specific one that changes her life and sends her running into the woods.

Astrid is from a circus family and is a flyer. She is married and living in Berlin with her husband, an officer in the Reich. And Astrid is Jewish.

When Astrid's husband sends her packing because of the rules she tries to go home, but home isn't an option anymore so she joins the neighboring circus family where she finds a new chance at life while she hides in plain sight. When Noa finds a train car full of babies after having her baby taken from her and rescues one she ends up rescued by Peter a clown who isn't at all clownish and the circus owner.

What happens next is a growing love that is so hard to nurture between the women as their secrets, fears, and the real dangers of the war, make it hard to trust. But they end up with a bond and love so deep it hurts and is so lovely and beautiful.

Oh how I loved this book!!! Strong women characters who love and need each other even as they fight it and hurt each other and themselves and grow and forgive and love and lose.



(Finished February 12, 2018)

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

This one brought to mind a book I loved when I read it back in 2013, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Both are the stories of someone hurting and leaving their life behind with pretty much the clothes on their back and setting off on what turns into an amazing journey of self-discovery and healing.


It is lines like this, a message meant to be absorbed and a point touched upon a number of times in the story, "The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body be loved. But all is has to do is be capable of loving-and being loved."

The Little Paris Bookshop is a barge that Jean Perdu has turned into an apothecary of books. He can tell by asking people about themselves what kind of book they need to help them heal or move on or find peace. The only person he isn't helping is himself. He has closed off a room in his home and the room in heart. Until something happens to crack the door open a little....and he flees...on an adventure to find his lost love and past and to defrost his heart and find life and see if he can live it. Along the way he hurts, loves, grows, laughs, and cries. And I laughed and loved and cried with him.

I will be honest, my love of this book grew as I read it. I wasn't sure at first how I would end up liking it. It was a slow burn. But all of a sudden I realized I was fully invested and wanting to know how Jean and his friends would end up, where they would end up, and I fell in love with them all and their world.

Nina George writes in such a lovely way, I could feel and see the France she wrote about.

I found this read on the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table at Barnes & Noble (you know how much I love and hate that table) and I grabbed it at first thinking it was something else, but when I realized I had the wrong title in mind I had already read the back and had to have it because it says "The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives." AND THAT IS ME FOR SURE!!!!!

(Finished February 10, 2018)

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama

After 12 months of the disgusting Trump administration reading the words of President Obama was soothing. I surely don't agree with every word he says or has said but even when I disagree it is on substance and not garbage and attacks. I miss the days of having a president who was classy, smart, and well spoken.

I honestly don't remember when President Obama announced his run, if it was before or after the release of this book in 2006 but it sure reads like the kind of thing someone without much history in politics would write and put out near or just after announcing a run for President.

While there are points he makes in Audacity that I don't agree with in part or fully, but the main point he sets out to make, at least as I see it, is one I do agree fully with.

Things like "whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose" and "Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose." and "the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country" but especially "What's needed is a broad majority of Americans- Democrats, Republicans, and independents of goodwill- who are reengaged in the project of national renewal, and who see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others."

He is absolutely a smart and well spoken man. He writes like an academic, a little more so than the last book I finished, What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton which was a little warmer (intentionally so I think) but still smart, but it is still readable and full of interesting ideas.

(Finished February 3, 2018)

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

It's no secret if you know me even a little but I actually like HRC. I think she is far from perfect but I like her. I voted for her. I campaigned for her. My son and I went to a rally in NH and were on the stage behind her. And I cried when she lost.

But I am also fascinated by her, well not just her, but the way some people love her and others think she is The Antichrist. I am amazed at the double standard that surrounds everything she does...for example all the outrage over her standing by her husband when he was President and the affair with Lewinsky was exposed and yet now the current Idiot-In-Chief pays off a porn star to keep their affair secret, is accused by well over a dozen women of sexual assault, bragging about trapping women by the pussy, and yet listen do you hear it? No, because there is no outcry for his wife to leave him, and as a matter of fact the Christian right wants him to have understanding and a mulligan.


Ok, enough ranting, my review of the book.

It read very conversationally and I enjoyed it. I cried at a few parts reliving election night and seeing my children cry as the results came in. I was angry at reliving the mess the press made of the coverage. I think she made mistakes along the way, but to me she has in the past, and more so in this book, claims full responsibility for her own choices. She owns the fact that there were times the advice she was given was not what she felt right following but that she did it anyway, sometimes because she allowed herself to be convinced and at others because she was trying to avoid being the annoying and overly opinionated woman. She talks about how she would do things differently, how she did what she thought best at the time, and how she knew it other things were mistakes but she doubted herself and what the outcome was.

And in light of the current news these past couple of days, weeks, and months, some of what she writes is now coming all to true and there is a damn we should have listened to her feeling....

I enjoyed when she writes about her daughter and grandchildren, you can feel her humanity, love, and a lightness and joy jumping off the page. When she writes about her marriage you can feel her love and her frustration at the pain and the way people want her to rip her scabs off for them.

All of this to say that she writes in a more folksy way then she presents as a candidate but that makes a lot of sense. She is a policy wonk with a sharp brain and great ideas and it why she was a great Secretary of State, Senator, First Lady, advocate but why she wasn't a great candidate...as she says she was more interested in getting down to the business of serving and governing and the running part was hard for her...and really given how she has been treated over the years, can we really blame her for being careful with her answers and words? Words have power and when you slip and the world never lets you live it down you learn to be more and more careful and guarded....but she shines on the page here, she feels alive and warm and human...even when I found myself disagreeing with her I found myself liking her more.

(Finished February 2, 2018)