Alix Chamberlain has employed Emira Tucker to babysit  her two year old daughter three days a week.  Alix is thirty something, Caucasian,has started a successful company and just snagged a book deal with Harper Collins.  Emira is Black, a college graduate with no money who is not sure what she wants to do with her life.  When Emira is falsely accused by a security guard of kidnapping Alix’s daughter, she meets Kelley Copeland who tries to help her with this difficult situation.  Coincidentally, Kelley dated and broke up with Alix when they were in high school together.

Yes, when I began reading Such a Fun Age, I thought it was going to be a soap opera-like novel with obvious racial problems.  However, the more I read and thought about Kiley Reid’s debut novel, the more I realized it is a complex work with a number of timely issues.

Mickey and Kacey Fitzgerald are sisters who grew up together but that is where the similarity ends.  Mickey is a policewoman in Philadelphia raising a young son; Kacey is an addict who has been living on the streets for years.  When Mickey discovers a woman murdered on her beat, she has the shocking feeling that her sister might be the next victim.  While Mickey searches the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Philadelphia for her younger sister to alert her,  her mind keeps going back to the past and how Kacey played a major role in it.

Long Bright River is a good read.  Moore vividly portrays the seamy areas of Philadelphia, and she creates a page turner where the reader wants to discover the killer and what happens to Kacey.  Long Bright River would be a fine choice to take on a long plane ride.

It is the summer of 1932 and Odie O’Banion,  the novel’s narrator, is an orphan living at The Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota with his brother Albert.  The institution is a horrible place ruled by Thelma Brickman, the Black Witch.  When Odie commits a terrible crime, he is forced to leave the school, and for a variety of reasons, he takes with him his brother, a mute Native American named Mose, and Emmy, a precocious six year old.  As the four vagabonds travel down the Gilead River in a canoe, they experience danger, adventure and a look at how many Americans lived during The Great Depression.  This Tender Land is a tale about survival, freedom and what constitutes a family.

I enjoyed this novel and was eager to find out what happened to the four vagabonds.  This Tender Land is a good read but in the end, there is nothing to think about or discuss.

 

Informative, laugh-out-loud funny with just the right amount of text and pictures, this is the perfect Hanukkah (that’s the way Butnickm Leibovitz and Oppenheimer spell it), gift.  Everything you want to know or ever thought about that relates to Judaism in anyway, shape or form is humorously, but factually, portrayed in this fabulous book.

2019 Booker Prize co-winner Evaristo’s novel is broken up into five chapters and an epilogue.  Each of the first four chapters describe the life of a black woman living, for the most part, in England.  The twelve women come from all walks of life.  They are gay, straight, wealthy, middle-class, poor, rural, urban, single, married, divorced, transgender, educated and uneducated.  Each woman’s voice is distinctive and each vignette is engrossing and offers the reader much food for thought.

I felt I should read Girl, Woman, Other because it had just won an esteemed literary prize; however, I was prepared to dislike it.  Twelve women-I felt I would often mix some of them up or forget about what happened to some of them.  Also, the structure of the prose is wacky-very few periods and weird paragraphs that sort of flow into each other.  I’m quite pleased that my expectations were unfounded.  Girl, Woman, Other is a wonderfully written work about twelve engaging women.

If you’re a fan of Bill Bryson, and I am, you’ll want to read The Body.  Bryson takes his readers on a detailed tour of our insides and outsides, what works and what doesn’t.  To give you an idea of his exploration, a few chapter titles are:  Down the Hatch:  The Mouth and Throat, The Chemistry Department, The Guts and In the Nether Regions.  The Body not only describes how different parts function, it also relates how some men and women discovered these parts, how they function, what can go wrong and how that can be cured.  And just when this work of nonfiction starts getting a little dry, Bill Bryson drops in an amusing quip or a wry anecdote.

The Body is highly informative and thoroughly enjoyable.

Jaquira Diaz spent her childhood in Puerto Rico and then Miami.  Her mother was a schizophrenic drug addict, her father worked hard but was undemonstrative and insensitive to her feelings and predicaments, and her older brother was physically abusive.  Although she had a positive relationship with her paternal grandmother and her younger sister, their love wasn’t enough to help Jaquira while she was growing up.  She was a juvenile delinquent and was taken into custody numerous times before her sixteenth birthday.  Diaz was a truant who began drinking and taking drugs at age eleven, the year she first attempted suicide.  Ordinary Girls is Jaquira Diaz’s life-its horrors and triumphs.

This memoir is a difficult read.  The author describes her life in harsh, graphic language.  Her upbringing was deprived and violent in so many ways-some of which were her own fault.  , Ordinary Girls is very well written, but it certainly is not for everyone.

Sarah Broom grew up in New Orleans, the youngest of twelve children.  Her father died when she was six months old, and her mother spent almost all of her time keeping her family safe and the house, the yellow house, from falling into disrepair.  Their home was in a poor black section of the city with no zoning, no decent schools and very few city services.  When Katrina, known around New Orleans as “the water,” hit, the yellow house was torn apart, much like the Broom family who dispersed to California, Texas and other parts of Louisiana.

The Yellow House is an interesting, well-written memoir.  However,  parts of it describe areas of New Orleans in detail, and since I have never lived there and only visited once, these sections meant nothing to me.

McDougall, his wife and two daughters live on a large tract of land in Pennsylvania in the heart of Amish country.  One day he is asked to help rescue a donkey from a man who hoards animals.  With encouragement from the youngest daughter, the McDougall’s adopt the donkey, name him Sherman and work to heal him both physically and psychologically. After he is fit,  friends and neighbors help Chris train Sherman and two other donkeys for a world champion race in Leadville, Colorado.  Along the way the author introduces his readers to a number of people who have their share of troubles, but nonetheless want help Sherman and his gang get to Colorado.

The best word to describe Running with Sherman is heartwarming.  If you’re an animal lover and were or are a runner, you will enjoy this memoir immensely.

I usually don’t read self-help or “how to” books, but this one is the exception.  I picked up How to Raise a Reader thinking I would only glance at what it had to say, and I couldn’t put it down.  Paul and Russo are editors of The New York Times Book Review and each has raised a family of readers.  Chapters are divided according to the age of the child, beginning at birth and ending at the teen years.  Most of their advice is practical, easy to understand and carry out and makes a lot of sense.  Also, at the end of each chapter are favorite books for each age – title, author and a brief summary.  At the end of How to Raise a Reader are book suggestions by category, i.e. family stories, tear jerkers, historical fiction, etc.  This is the perfect gift for  parents or grandparents of a newborn who want to pass on their love of the written word.