Big lies in a small town – Diane Chamberlain

Well written, gripping mystery that takes the reader back and forth from 1940 to 2018, a large mural linking two women, to reveal their connection. Unexpected twists elevate the story beyond the expected and keep one turning the pages.

The only complaint I have is that parts of the book, particularly in the 2018 section were repetitive and too “romance novelly” for my liking, but that did not deter me from thoroughly enjoying this novel.

North Carolina, 2018:
Morgan Christopher’s life has been derailed. Taking the fall for a crime she did not commit, her dream of a career in art is put on hold―until a mysterious visitor makes her an offer that will get her released from prison immediately. Her assignment: restore an old post office mural in a sleepy southern town. Morgan knows nothing about art restoration, but desperate to be free, she accepts. What she finds under the layers of grime is a painting that tells the story of madness, violence, and a conspiracy of small town secrets.

North Carolina, 1940:
Anna Dale, an artist from New Jersey, wins a national contest to paint a mural for the post office in Edenton, North Carolina. Alone in the world and in great need of work, she accepts. But what she doesn’t expect is to find herself immersed in a town where prejudices run deep, where people are hiding secrets behind closed doors, and where the price of being different might just end in murder.

What happened to Anna Dale? Are the clues hidden in the decrepit mural? Can Morgan overcome her own demons to discover what exists beneath the layers of lies?

A Long Walk to Water – Linda Sue Park

Based on a true story, we see the realities of life for so many millions of people in the world outside of our own picket fence—that life is heartbreaking.

In addition to reading this book, watch The Good Lie if you haven’t already seen it.

Both the book and the movie should inspire those us lucky enough to have been born in the right part of the world to do what we can to help.

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A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours’ walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay.

Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya’s in an astonishing and moving way. Includes an afterword by author Linda Sue Park and the real-life Salva Dut, on whom the novel is based, and who went on to found Water for South Sudan.

If I Knew Then – Jann Arden

Who knew a book about aging and dying could be such a feel good read?

Arden deals with death head on. Her honest and forthright manner go a long way in eliminating  fear of death. We’re all going to die one day, so let’s learn to live with the idea. Arden is also brutally honest about her life, which encourages the reader to reflect honestly about their own past, and like Jann, forgive themselves for the mistakes they made over the years. I’m glad I read this book.

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Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser’s game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it’s a hell of a lot of fun: “Being the age I am—that so many women are—is just the best time of my life.”

Jann weaves her own story together with tales of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, and the father she came close to hating, to show her younger self—and all of us—that fear and avoidance is no way to live. “What I’m thinking about now aren’t all the ways I can try to hang on to my youth or all the seconds ticking by in some kind of morbid countdown to death,” she writes, “but rather how I keep becoming someone I always hoped I could be. If I’m lucky one day a very old face will look back at me from the mirror, a face I once shied away from. I will love that old woman ferociously, because she has finally figured out how to live a life of purpose—not in spite of but because of all her mistakes and failures.”

The Seven Sisters – Lucinda Riley

A family saga set in Brazil, with likable characters and intriguing connections between them, provides an enjoyable read. While there were some predictable aspects, strong writing and the setting, lifted this above the usual “beach read” type of book. I liked this enough to want to try the second book of the series.

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Maia D’Apliese and her five sisters gather together at their childhood home, “Atlantis”—a fabulous, secluded castle situated on the shores of Lake Geneva—having been told that their beloved father, who adopted them all as babies, has died. Each sister is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage—a clue that takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there, she begins to put together the pieces of her story.

Eighty years earlier in the Rio of the 1920s, Izabela Bonifacio’s father has aspirations for his daughter to marry into the aristocracy. Meanwhile, architect Heitor da Silva Costa is devising plans for an enormous statue, to be called Christ the Redeemer, and will soon travel to Paris to find the right sculptor to complete his vision. Izabela—passionate and longing to see the world—convinces her father to allow her to accompany him and his family to Europe before she is married. There, at Paul Landowski’s studio and in the heady, vibrant cafes of Montparnasse, she meets ambitious young sculptor Laurent Brouilly, and knows at once that her life will never be the same again.

In this sweeping, epic tale of love and loss—the first in a unique, spellbinding series—Lucinda Riley showcases her storytelling talents like never before.

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The Teacher – Freida McFadden

Teacher/student affair—a story that’s been told many times, becomes fresh here as McFadden adds some unexpected twists making for a suspenseful read.

I felt that some of minor editing could have heightened the tension. First, delete unnecessary repetition and  secondly tighten the writing. Here’s a simple example:

“…not far to the entrance of the store. Then he takes my hand and we walk together to the door of the shoe store.” Why not just stop at “door?”  

Still, a good read.

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Lesson #1: trust no one

Eve has a good life. She gets up each day, gets a kiss from her husband Nate, and heads off to teach math at the local high school. All is as it should be. Except…

Last year, Caseham High was rocked by a scandal involving a student-teacher affair, with one student, Addie, at its center. But Eve knows there is far more to these ugly rumors than meets the eye.

Addie can’t be trusted. She lies. She hurts people. She destroys lives. At least, that’s what everyone says. 

But nobody knows the real Addie. Nobody knows the secrets that could destroy her. And Addie will do anything to keep it quiet.

From the New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden comes a story of twisting secrets and long-awaited revenge.

Burial Rites – Hannah Kent

The “good old days” were not good. Kent does a marvelous job bringing us the true story of Agnes Magusdotter, accused of killing two men and sentenced to beheading.

The primitive living conditions in Iceland at the time—the tip of the iceberg—don’t come anywhere near fully revealing the harsh realities of life especially for women.

The brutalities Agnes endured throughout her life, the tiny bits of humanity, not nearly enough to assuage her suffering, will tear at your heart.

Kent has brought history to life and given Agnes a sort of rebirth—perhaps she was not after all,  “an inhumane witch stirring up murder.”

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Set against Iceland’s stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tv=ti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes’s death looms, the farmer’s wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they’ve heard.

Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

Yellowface – R. F. Kuang

A gripping story—until it wasn’t.

While I had no empathy for any of the characters with the exception of Athena’s mother, I was initially captivated by the story, but repulsed by June. At some point, in the grinding saga of her selfishness and sense of entitlement, I wanted to quit reading. I did finish the book, but skimmed through the last chapters.

The irony is that I really wanted to like this book, but a large part of it became a litany of the woes of our modern world: (rape, cyber bullying, racism …) and we get more than enough of that in our news.  

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Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable. 

The Bittlemores – Jann Arden

Some truly terrible people, a few wise farm animals with murderess intent, a missing new-born baby, an assortment of peripheral characters—sounds wacky and it is—but Arden has given us a delightful page turner.

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On mean Harp Bittlemore’s blighted farm, hidden away in the Backhills, nothing has gone right for a very long time. Crops don’t grow, the pigs and chickens stay skinny and the three aged dairy cows, Berle, Crilla and Dally, are so desperate they are plotting an escape. The one thing holding them back is the thought of abandoning young Willa, the single bright point in their life since her older sister, Margaret, ran away.
But Willa Bittlemore, just turning 14, is planning her own rebellion. Something doesn’t add up in the story she’s been told about her missing sister, and she’s beginning to question if her horrible parents are even her parents at all. Just as things are really coming to a head, a bright young police officer starts investigating a cold case involving a baby stolen from a little rural hospital 28 years earlier, and Willa and the cows find out exactly how far the Bittlemores will go to protect a festering secret.
Written with Jann’s trademark outrageous humour and full of her down-to-earth wisdom, The Bittlemores is a rural fairytale, a coming-of-age story and a prairie mystery all-in-one, saturated with her observations of the world she grew up in and her deep connection to the animals we exploit. This marvel of a first novel digs into how people come to be so cruel, but it also glories in the miracle of human kindness.

The perfect horse – Elizabth Letts

Meticulously researched to
present the complex history of the people and the animals involved in the
rescue of hundreds of Lipizzaner and Arabian horses at the end of WWII. Enemies
ignored their uniforms and battled together to keep the horses from being
slaughtered for food or be commandeered by opposing forces.

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In the chaotic last days of the
war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and
makes an astonishing find—his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful
white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy
lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world’s finest purebreds in order to breed the
perfect military machine—an equine master race. But with the starving Russian
army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for
food.

With only hours to spare, one of the U.S. Army’s last great cavalrymen, Colonel
Hank Reed, makes a bold decision—with General George Patton’s blessing—to mount
a covert rescue operation. Racing against time, Reed’s small but determined
force of soldiers, aided by several turncoat Germans, steals across enemy lines
in a last-ditch effort to save the horses.

Pulling together this multistranded story, Elizabeth Letts introduces us to an
unforgettable cast of characters: Alois Podhajsky, director of the famed
Spanish Riding School of Vienna, a former Olympic medalist who is forced to
flee the bomb-ravaged Austrian capital with his entire stable in tow; Gustav
Rau, Hitler’s imperious chief of horse breeding, a proponent of eugenics who
dreams of genetically engineering the perfect warhorse for Germany; and Tom
Stewart, a senator’s son who makes a daring moonlight ride on a white stallion
to secure the farm’s surrender.

A compelling account for animal lovers and World War II buffs alike, The
Perfect Horse tells for the first time the full story of these events.
Elizabeth Letts’s exhilarating tale of behind-enemy-lines adventure, courage,
and sacrifice brings to life one of the most inspiring chapters in the annals
of human valor.

 

Hang the Moon – Jeanetter Walls

A vivid look at prohibition and bootlegging complicated by family secrets that cause havoc for the members of the Kincaid family. At the center of this drama, Sallie Kincaid fights for independence and struggles to do the right thing to support her family and help the poor in their constant fight to survive.

Walls, once again gives us a great read.

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Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.

Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.

“You’ll fall in love with Sallie on the very first page and keep rooting for her all the way through to the last”(Good Housekeeping) in this thrilling read that “goes down easy…like the forbidden whisky that defines the life of Sallie Kincaid” (Associated Press).