Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarity

"A murder... a tragic accident... or just parents behaving badly? What's indisputable is that someone is dead. But who did what? Big Little Lies follows three women, each at a crossroads: Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She's funny and biting, passionate, she remembers everything and forgives no one. Her ex-husband and his yogi new wife have moved into her beloved beachside community, and their daughter is in the same kindergarten class as Madeline's youngest (how is this possible?). And to top it all off, Madeline's teenage daughter seems to be choosing Madeline's ex-husband over her.  Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. While she may seem a bit flustered at times, who wouldn't be, with those rambunctious twin boys? Now that the boys are starting school, Celeste and her husband look set to become the king and queen of the school parent body. But royalty often comes at a price, and Celeste is grappling with how much more she is willing to pay. New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for the nanny. Jane is sad beyond her years and harbors secret doubts about her son. But why? While Madeline and Celeste soon take Jane under their wing, none of them realizes how the arrival of Jane and her inscrutable little boy will affect them all."

 I was skeptical when I read about this book when it first came out. I read Liane's other recent book and thought it was OK, but this one really was good. Very scathing indictment of the "helicopter parent" scene and a good look at domestic violence and how women rationalize and cover it up.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

From Westchester Library System Booklist Review:

Waters' darkly atmospheric fifth novel is set at a decaying mansion in postwar England. The narrator, Dr. Faraday, first visited Hundreds Hall as a child, when his mother, a servant at the great manor, brought him there for a party. Nearly three decades later, he returns on a professional call and soon finds himself growing close to the owners: the widowed Mrs. Ayers, who has never gotten over the death of her oldest daughter, and her two adult children, Caroline and Roderick. Faraday treats Roderick's war injury but watches helplessly as the young man, who is convinced there is an evil presence in the house, slides into madness. After a devastating incident involving a young neighbor, Faraday finds he has no choice but to commit Roderick to a mental institution. Faraday finally faces the feelings he's developed for Caroline, but the malevolent force shadowing Hundreds Hall hasn't finished with the Ayers family yet. An eerie ghost story mixed with piercing class commentary, Waters' latest is downright haunting.

I really enjoyed reading this book. A good story, page-turner, interesting characters, good social commentary.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: it's Franny and Jim's thirty-fifth anniversary, and their daughter has graduated from high school. The sunlit island also promises an escape from the tensions simmering at home. But all does not go according to plan: secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

From Amazon:

From the beginning, no one is particularly thrilled about this sojourn. Initially booked as a 35th wedding anniversary present, the Post marriage is now in flux. 60 year old Jim has recently been forced to resign as the editor of a New York Magazine for his dalliance with a 23 year old intern. His wife Fanny is a writer "going around the world and writing about what she ate" is deciding what her next course of action might be. Sylvia, their 18 year old daughter, is ready to begin Brown University in the fall and wants to lose her virginity. She is disheartened to see the fighting among her parents and has recently gone through her own angst due to her girl /boyfriend's duplicitous actions. 28 year old Bobby is a realtor and lives in Florida. He is a casualty of the real-estate bubble. He has been living with his girlfriend Carmen, who is 10 years older, for seven years without making a commitment. Carmen is an instructor at the Total Body Power and feels like an outsider, everything she does in order to please her boyfriend's family "never seemed to be right". Charles is Fanny's best friend and he and husband Lawrence have been trying to adopt a baby to complete their family.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

I enjoyed this book very much, but it did feel a bit too long.  The writing was very good and the characters carefully drawn and developed, but in my opinion, the story could have been told in fewer pages.  Here is a review from Publisher's Weekly:

In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman's life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu. Eileen Tumulty was born in the early '40s, the only child and dutiful caretaker of alcoholic parents. As a young woman, she hopes to leave her family's dingy apartment in Woodside, Queens, and move up the social ladder. Eileen falls in love with and marries Ed Leary, a quiet neuroscientist whom she sees as the means to an upper-middle-class future. But Ed is dedicated to pure scientific research, and he turns down lucrative job offers from pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions. The couple's apartment in Jackson Heights is a step up from Eileen's parents' apartment, but she wants a home in tony Westchester County. Later, Eileen pursues an arduous career as a nursing administrator to secure a future for their son, Connell. But once she gets her gracious but dilapidated fixer-upper in Bronxville, in southern Westchester, Ed is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and the family slowly endures "the encroaching of a fathomless darkness." Thomas works on a large canvas to create a memorable depiction of Eileen's vibrant spirit, the intimacy of her love for Ed, and the desperate stoicism she exhibits as reality narrows her dreams. Her life, observed over a span of six decades, comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas's emotional truthfulness combines with the novel's texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative.

I didn't really love Eileen, but I guess I was  not supposed to....that was one issue I had with the book. I wanted to feel her pain a little more deeply, but her character flaws prevented that. Still, it was a really interesting view of what a family would go through when encountering Early Alzheimer's disease. Scary!

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

This is the story of an American family....an ordinary family in every way but one...but I won't say how the family is different and be a spoiler. (Although I knew when I started the book.)

Here is a quote from the author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini:

"I thought this was a gripping, big-hearted book . . . through the tender voice of her protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language, science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human being."

The Cooke family: Mom and Dad, brother Lowell  and sisters Fern and the narrator, Rosemary form this family that is broken up and separated when Rosemary is just five years old.  Her journey is told in this gripping story...a book I could not put down. It's full of truths about humans, our connections to animals, about humanity in general.

Read it. You will fall in love with Fern and even Lowell, once you understand where his anger is coming from.

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

At the start, I like this book, but after reading half of it, I was sick of it. The characters did not engage me particularly. And I was troubled that her conflict between family and career ended up taking a back seat.  (Maybe that was the idea?)

I will say that I liked the general theme - marriage as a difficult institution.  The relationship between Georgie McCool (yes, that name pissed me off from the beginning, but look at the author's name!) and Neal is challenging but no probably no more challenging than the "typical" marriage.  Life has ups and downs and living with another human being is not always easy.  There was no abuse, or infidelity

Rowell uses a very clever device - the landline - in a sci fi kind of way when she "talks" to her husband and children in Omaha during the Christmas vacation. She has stayed behind while he takes their two girls to Omaha to visit his mother for Christmas.  Georgie stays behind to write scripts for the TV show that she and her partner, Seth, have just had accepted by a big TV producer, This is their BIG BREAK finally, and she can't risk taking off for Omaha when their deadline looms near.

Seth and Georgie are like brother and sister. They have been writing partners for years and know each other better than anyone else. In some ways, she's closer to Seth than to Neal. But Neal is not jealous; maybe that bothers her!

In any event, she tries over and over to talk to Neal in Omaha and eventually reaches him on the landline in her childhood room, but the Neal she is talking to is the one she was dating about 20 years ago. This is an interesting technique the author uses to fill us in on their relationship history, courtship and engagement, and also offers insight into how and why Georgie fell in love with Neal and her inner conflict over the issues in their lives.

Anyway, in the end, it was not one of my favorites, but it was a fast and easy read.

The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter

Loved Beautiful Ruins  so picked this up and was not disappointed. It's a very different book from Beautiful Ruins. Much funnier and sarcastic and cynical.

This novel tells a story of a small town financial journalist who has quit his job and is on the verge of bankruptcy. His marriage is failing (he suspects his wife is fooling around with an old flame) and he is logging into her social media accounts to spy on her.  He had this idea to develop a website, poetfolio.com, that combines free verse with financial journalism. The book starts off with some free verse and every chapter begins that way. Some entire chapters are in free verse. A very interesting concept.
Walter is a very talented and funny author. I found myself marveling at his imagery, metaphors and clever writing. 
The story started to wear on me, however, and I did figure out how it would end.
But I will continue to explore Walters' books. He is a real talent.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

What a captivating story! I loved this book. It takes place in Alaska in 1920. Jack and Mabel, a childless couple from Pennsylvania have decided to homestead in a  brutal place: Alaska. They are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From Westchester Library System:

To the women in the hair-braiding salon, Ifemelu seems to have everything a Nigerian immigrant in America could desire, but the culture shock, hardships, and racism she's endured have left her feeling like she has cement in her soul. Smart, irreverent, and outspoken, she reluctantly left Nigeria on a college scholarship. Her aunty Uju, the pampered mistress of a general in Lagos, is now struggling on her own in the U.S., trying to secure her medical license. Ifemelu's discouraging job search brings on desperation and depression until a babysitting gig leads to a cashmere-and-champagne romance with a wealthy white man. Astonished at the labyrinthine racial strictures she's confronted with, Ifemelu, defining herself as a Non-American Black, launches an audacious, provocative, and instantly popular blog in which she explores what she calls Racial Disorder Syndrome. Meanwhile, her abandoned true love, Obinze, is suffering his own cold miseries as an unwanted African in London. Americanah is a courageous, world-class novel about independence, integrity, community, and love and what it takes to become a full human being

The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt

A page-turner, for sure, and an interesting one, too. I am lazy today, so will copy and paste from the Westchester Library System's synopsis of this book. It says it better than I can with all on my plate today!

It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon, Portugal, is the only neutral port left in Europe--a city filled with spies, crowned heads, and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to while away the time until their escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York on the SS Manhattan, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, sophisticated, independently wealthy, bohemian, and beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class. As Portugal's neutrality, and the world's future, hang in the balance, the hidden threads in the lives of these four characters--Julia's status as a Jew, Pete and Edward's improbable affair, Iris's increasingly desperate efforts to save her tenuous marriage--begin to come loose. This journey will change their lives irrevocably, as Europe sinks into war.Gorgeously written, sexually and politically charged, David Leavitt's long-awaited new novel is an extraordinary work.

I agree! An extraordinary book. I plan to try Leavitt's others, too.

Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li

This is brilliant writing by an intellectually and emotionally brilliant author. I think this is one the most finely crafted novels that I have read in a long time. And it's complex, deep and thought-provoking, while telling a story of four childhood friends who have grown up in  Beijing during the 1990s. One of them is poisoned — possibly by someone in the circle — and the group drifts apart, numbed by the experience.

"For Shaoai, the damage is physiological, shutting down her body’s faculties one by one until she is trapped in bloated flesh, where she will languish for 21 years before her murder is finally consummated. For the others, the poisons will be more subtle. Each will erect an emotional wall, a hermetic husk, and, in the end, each will be as unrecognizable as the victim."

Take time reading this novel; it's worth savoring every passage.

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

I loved Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead, so when I found this  new book by her, I snatched it off the shelf.  It is a well-written and compelling glimpse into the passionate, political world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations. Astonish Me tells the story of Joan, a ballerina whose life has been shaped by her relationship with a world-famous dancer Arslan Ruskov, whom she helps defect from the Soviet Union to the U.S. While Arslan's career takes off in New York, Joan's slowly declines, ending when she becomes pregnant and decides to marry her longtime admirer, a PhD student named Jacob. As the years pass, Joan settles into her new life in California, teaching dance and watching her son, Harry, become a ballet prodigy himself. But when Harry's success brings him into close contact with Arslan, secrets are revealed that shatter the delicate balance Joan has struck between her past and present.
This book is certainly for ballet lovers, but anyone can enjoy the great story, too!
 

The Age of Miracles by Nancy Thompson Walker

What would happen if suddenly the days became 25 or 30 hours long? Would we, as a human race, adjust accordingly, or still try to maintain the 24 hour day we are accustomed to and that works for us?

This is the premise of this interesting book. It is, at its core, a "coming of age story," told from a 12 year old's perspective. But still, it is compelling and draws the reader in from the start.

I don't normally like "sci-fi" books like this but I did really enjoy reading this novel. And now I am watching "the Leftovers," on HBO, from the Tom Perotta novel by the same name. 

Dirty Love by Andres Dubus

This is one of my favorite authors, even though there are not that many novels by Dubus.  When I saw this in the Library, I grabbed it even though it's a collection of four short stories. I don't usually read short stories, for some reason.
All four stories are about love, as the title reveals ("Dirty Love" is the last of the four stories).  All of the characters grapple with their own issues regarding love, lust, and envy.
There's Marla, the main character of the story that bears her name. She's an overweight, kind of ordinary young woman who works in a bank and finally meets a guy who wants to be with her.
Then there's Mark, in the first story, whose wife has been having an affair, he discovers, as he discovers truths about himself that are hard to face.
The last story, "Dirty Love," was actually my least favorite. But I think I have to give it another chance.
I enjoyed reading Dubus because he is an amazing writer, and this read only made me want his next novel to come out soon!

The Partner Track by Helen Wan

Very engaging and suspenseful novel! I read about it in the New York Times and thought it sounded interesting. The novel takes place at a highly esteemed and venerable law practice in NYC and the main character, Ingrid Yung, is brilliant and beautiful Asian American woman on her way towards partnership.....but there are a few obstacles in her way.  And those obstacles also can be the reason she may get partner instead of her friend Murph, who is "typical." She is a woman and a minority, but she also  has an impeccable work ethic.  From Booklist:

When she’s simultaneously assigned to a huge case and asked to spearhead the firm’s new diversity initiative, however, Ingrid’s ­priorities begin to shift from playing the corporate game to exposing the injustices of the old-boy network, even though it may cost her both her partnership and her relationship with a fellow associate. Debut novelist Wan, an associate general counsel at Time Inc. shows that she has writing chops in addition to legal acumen. In spite of creating a lackluster romance and pat epilogue, Wan succeeds in exploring and fictionalizing the timely topics of sexism and racism in workplace politics in a fluent, thought-provoking, and compelling tale.

I really enjoyed reading this book.  It dealt with a lot of real issues and is told in an easy and engaging manner.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Surprised that I have never read anything by Eggers before. Loved visiting his "Pirate Store" at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, just around the corner from where my son lived.
Anyway, I also was surprised that I had not heard about this book earlier; I just found it on the shelf of the Library, read it's inside cover description and thought, "I have to read this book! So relevant to what I lived and do each day."

Mae Holland is hired to work at the Circle, the world's most powerful Internet company (think Google!). This is the opportunity of a lifetime. The description of the office reminded me of the Google offices in San Francisco where my nephew worked for a while.  At the Circle, users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing are linked up with a universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Mae is enthralled with the office, dorm rooms for those who work late, the parties that last through the night, the famous musicians playing on the lawn. There are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Some of the book seemed predictable, but I never tired of reading it. And the end was a bit of a surprise for me.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

Louisa Clark is an ordinary British girl in an ordinary British family. She has a steady boyfriend, who she is clearly resigned to be with, but not madly in love with. Her life is quiet, rather dull and pedestrian.  She is content working in a cafe and does nothing to upset the quiet monotony of her life. Her family struggles financially, she has a less than wonderful relationship with her sister and she and Patrick (boyfriend) go out to pubs with friends.
She loses her cafe job when the owner decides to close up shop. Lou needs a job!
She is suggested for a job as an assistant to a quadriplegic. The pay is good and it's close to home. She won't have to do any of the "personal grooming," but rather, just keep him company and in good spirits. What a job that turns out to be.
The interesting part of this novel is captured in this passage from a NYTimes review by Liesl Schillinger:

Lou has never fully lived; Will has, but no longer can. In health, he had exhilarated in “crushing people in business deals.” He had scaled rock faces at Yosemite, swum in volcanic springs in Iceland, sampled warm croissants in the Marais and had his pick of glamorous, leggy girlfriends. After the accident, he can’t walk, can’t feed himself, can’t have sex. The only power he believes he retains is the power to end his life; and, as a man of action, he wants to exercise that power.  But in Lou, he discovers an unexpected outlet for his thwarted energies: teaching her how to exert her own autonomy. “You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are ‘not that sort of person,’ ” he scolds her. “You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

A lot of this book is predictable, for sure, but I read it quickly and it was entertaining.


The ending may surprise some readers. I liked the ending.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

What a beautiful novel....simple, thoughtful, and quiet, but powerful. The writing is wonderful and the main character is so interesting, in a simple way.
Rebecca Winter is an artist on the other side of her career. She's 60, divorced, in financial straights and making changes in her life....and not dealing too well with those changes. Her parents are both alive, one with Alzheimer's and in a nursing home, and the other (her father) is frail and living with a housekeeper. Rebecca has to make payments on both of those places, and pay for her own UWS apartment, but she's having a hard time making ends meet. She comes up with a plan to rent out her fancy apartment and move to a cottage upstate.
The first night there she hears an animal in the attic - she doesn't know it's an animal until Jim Bates, the roofer, comes and tells her and sets a trap for it.
Rebecca is the once famous artist who created "Still Life with Bread Crumbs" and other domestic works of photographic art.  She is still somewhat of a legend, but clearly the pinnacle of her career is past. But read on, and see how she reinvents her life and figures herself out in her later years.
I loved the writing and the tone of the book. Anna Quindlen is one of my favorite authors and this is a new departure from her former fictional works.

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarity

I read this book on the recommendation of several friends, and I enjoyed it. Great literature - no, but a good read. Here is the information from the Westchester Library System:

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret - something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive... Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all - shes an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia - or each other - but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husbands secret.
Australian author Moriarty, in her fifth novel (after The Hypnotist's Love Story), puts three women in an impossible situation and doesn't cut them any slack. Cecilia Fitzpatrick lives to be perfect: a perfect marriage, three perfect daughters, and a perfectly organized life. Then she finds a letter from her husband, John-Paul, to be opened only in the event of his death. She opens it anyway, and everything she believed is thrown into doubt. Meanwhile, Tess O'Leary's husband, Will, and her cousin and best friend, Felicity, confess they've fallen in love, so Tess takes her young son, Liam, and goes to Sydney to live with her mother. There she meets up with an old boyfriend, Connor Whitby, while enrolling Liam in St. Angela's Primary School, where Cecilia is the star mother. Rachel Crowley, the school secretary, believes that Connor, St. Angela's PE teacher, is the man who, nearly three decades before, got away with murdering her daughter-a daughter for whom she is still grieving. Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty's novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I was captivated by this book and annoyed at the same time.  The main character, Victoria, will drive you crazy. You want to shake her and talk some sense into this girl! But, she is a child without a mother, who has been in over 30 foster homes during her short 18 year life, so you forgive her and are sympathetic....to a point.
There were parts that were not at all believable, but still, I wanted to read this book and finish it, so that is a testament to its merit.  The reader wants to know what Victoria did to Elizabeth, the one foster "mother" who loved her and wanted to adopt her formally. You want to know what happened between Elizabeth and her sister, Catherine, that keeps cropping up over and over. And  you want to tell her, "Just love Grant! He is a gem!"
So, I read the book in just a few days because the story is compelling and the reader is drawn in.  But is it great literature? Probably not. I did learn a lot about flowers, though!

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

I loved reading the last 150 pages of this book, and I actually loved the first 150, too, but in the middle there were LONG passages that I felt could have been much condensed. There were long passages describing what a courtesan should expect and do for their clients and that chapter was far too long and not really that interesting.
What I did love about the book was the way it came full circle in the end, reuniting the three women: Lulu, Violet and Flora (grandmother, mother and daughter) and showing their similarities. It was a touching and satisfying ending to a too long book.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

I liked this book but sometimes found it a bit self important.  Can't explain why exactly, but the author sometimes seemed like she was trying too hard to be reflective.
The main character, Nora (reference to A Doll's House?) is a third grade teacher who bemoans the fact that she is just so ordinary. Her aspirations to be an artist were thwarted by her parents when she was deciding where to go to college.
Nora is taken into the folds of a European family, the Shahids, who comes to Cambridge for a year with their son, who enrolls in Nora's class. His father is Lebanese scholar and his mother an Italian artist of some note. They are in Cambridge for a year.
Nora falls in love with each of them and becomes obsessed with the family - each of them - for different reasons.
Sirena, the artist, mother of Reza and wife of Skandar, asks a lot of Nora, and she acquiesces each time.  They share a studio together and encourage each other's art.
This is a psychological thriller with a very surprise ending.  It's worth the read, for sure, and makes me want to read Messud's other books.

Fin and Lady by Cathleen Schine

Really enjoyed this book - the second one by Schine I have read.
From Westchester Library System Synopsis:

From the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport , a wise, clever story of New York in the '60sIt's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady-giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free-is as much his responsibility as he is hers. So begins Fin & Lady , the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport . Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the '60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War-Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself. From a writer The New York Times has praised as "sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting," Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

This is the story of four slave mistresses, known as "wenches " who become friends at Tawawa House in Ohio.  Tawawa is a resort that "masters" travel to for a few weeks each summer with their "slave wives," leaving their actual wives home on the plantation with the kids. Of course, some of the kids are the offspring of the wench and the master, rather than the wife and the master. It's a tough book but very interesting and enlightening. I was not aware of this place Tawawa, but it really existed and later became a Wilberforce University, attended mainly by African Americans, some of the first students being the offspring of these wenches and their masters! And  W.E.B DuBois taught there.

The women contemplate freedom, learn each others' stories and deepest fears. Some stories are brutal, but the main character, Lizzie, sleeps in the same bed with her owner, the father of her two children, and thinks herself in love with him. And he with her.

I enjoyed this book even though some of it was brutal. 

The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

Three great books in a row! I am on a roll.
I  have read another book by Julia Glass before and enjoyed it, so downloaded this from the Library onto my iPad (the way I have been reading lately, now that I know  how to work "the system.")
The novel opens as Percy Darling, the widower, returns from his daily run. While he is 70 years old, he keeps up a fitness regime of running and swimming. He lives in a big old house, where he lived with his wife who he lost 30 years ago in an accidental drowning (more about that later.)
He has two daughters who  he has raised by himself; one is a successful oncologist and the other a not-so-successful mother of two divorcee, who is just starting to work for a prestigious nursery school in the barn on Percy's property that used to be his wife's dance studio.
The plot has many disparate elements and characters that all end up related and interwoven. Percy is very close to Robert, his grandson, who is a student at Harvard (Percy used to be a Librarian at the Widener Library on that campus), and who falls in with an ecoterrorist group through his roommate, Turo.  Percy also falls for a local artist, Sarah, and helps in her discovery that she has breast cancer.
A lot of "bad" things happen in this bucolic suburban community on the outskirts of Boston and the novel deals well with the social issues, the gulf between the classes and our excessive modern society. It's really a very satisfying and thought-provoking novel.