🌟 The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Just read this for my 2nd book club and really enjoyed it.  It's a bit different for Patchett, I think and I heard her interviewed on the radio and heard her discuss how she hasn't done "evil or bad characters."  So that was a goal for this book.
Here's the opener for the NPR review:

Patchett's eighth novel is a paradise lost tale dusted with a sprinkling of Cinderella, The Little Princess and Hansel and Gretel. Two siblings, Maeve and Danny Conroy, bond tightly after their mother leaves home when they're 10 and 3. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. The house, built by a Dutch couple who made their fortune in cigarettes, is grand, with an ornate dining room ceiling, six bedrooms on the second floor, and a ballroom on the third floor. His wife, Elna, hates it, aesthetically and ethically. After she flees, ostensibly to India to devote herself to the poor, her family suffers, as if "they had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale," Patchett writes.

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

This is a very different kind of book for me....so I am glad that my book club chose it.  I really enjoyed it.  This is a family saga about a Mexican-American family - BIG family, and their relationaships, struggles, successes and more. Here, from Westchester Library System, is a great summary:

"In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life. Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home"--

The Need by Helen Phillips

"Motherhood Is Scary and Crazy and Darkly Comic. So Is This Novel About It." This is the headline title of the NY Times book review about this book and it nails it - right on.

It's a really interesting book - half sci-fi, half horror, but in the end, it's apart a woman's quest to find herself. She has fantasies and nightmares and can't figure out what's real and what's imagined. But her life seems to be unraveling.

The issues are issues that I imagine many working moms deal with, but they deal better than Molly. But who knows? How many are terrorized by these conflicting feelings?

It's powerful and strange and not like many books I have read. I really recommend it. But it's not "light."

The Times review points out that readers who are NOT moms, or parents, may not get it and may have no sympathy for Molly. I get that.....but they should try to read it and understand it