Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

I

truly enjoyed this book even though it had some slow spots.  It's a family story that deals with four sisters contending with love and loss,  estrangement and tragedy, and finding ways to deal with each other under these difficult circumstances.

There are two sisters who are twins and the two others who are very closely aligned with each other until one of them marries (the wrong man) and the sisters become estranged for many years.  I won't give any spoilers!

The Kirkus Review is linked, and I agree with it all the way!

So glad I read this book!

I Have Some Questions for You by Rachael Makkai

 

I loved her book, "The Great Believers," and I liked this book, but it didn't match the other in my estimation. It seemed to move along too slowly for me.

The story takes place at a boarding school and goes back and forth in time, from past to present.  The protagonist, Bodie, was a student there many years ago when a murder took place on campus.  The murdered girl was Bodie's roommate, but they were not close.  There was a "resolution" as to who committed the crime, but Bodie questioned it from the start. She goes back to campus to teach a course (she has a successful podcast) on podcasting and one of her students decides to use this murder as the topic of her podcast.

Bodie has ideas as to what happened and who the murderer is, and she speculates throughout the book what could have happened.  The plot moves along somewhat slowly, but we learn a little more with each chapter.

Small World by Laura Zigman

 

How does the death of a child impact a family?  Monumentally, obviously and this book tackles that difficult subject delicately, but with humor and pathos.

It is also about sisters and the issues between them.  I love this quote from the book, and the accompanying narrative from the NYTimes:

Our narrator, Joyce, sums up the aftermath of this loss using the technical term for crooked teeth: “You are born into malocclusion. Into an unlucky family with a disabled child, then a dead child. The hole caused by her absence will eventually cause everything and everyone to shift, and drift, the same way teeth do, after an extraction.” Lenny and Louise never recover; he dies of a drug overdose that may or may not be accidental and she channels her heartbreak into all-consuming activism on behalf of disabled children. Lydia alights for California as soon as she graduates from art school. And Joyce spends as much time as possible at friends’ houses, scrutinizing their framed family photos with the zeal of a detective on the trail of a promising lead.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

 

Another reread for one of my book clubs. I hardly remembered much about this book.  I did enjoy it, but I recall liking it much more the first time.  He is a very clever writer with a lot of humor and pathos.  Most of the people 

Mercy street by Jennifer Haigh

 

Read again for book club. Liked it even more 

Foster by Clair Keegan

A gorgeous little novella! Read in a couple hours, but don't rush through it; the writing is wonderful!

Some snippets from the NYTimes review describe this perfect little book:

"The narrator is a young girl in rural Ireland who is sent by her parents to live with the Kinsella family while her mother, Mary, carries to term another child in a household already bustling with siblings. The Kinsellas, John and Edna, have no children of their own and will foster the girl on their small farm in Wexford, toward the southeastern coast of Ireland.

Keegan’s novella is a master class in child narration. The voice resists the default precociousness and walks the perfect balance between naïveté and acute emotional intelligence.

There is a sadness hovering over the Kinsella home, where “there is no sign, anywhere, of a child.” The girl senses a particular absence in the boy’s clothes she’s given to wear after a bath, and in the wallpaper of trains that covers her bedroom."

The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

We read this for Book Club and it was so well received by all of the women.  I was not as gung-ho.  The problem I had with the book was that it didn't delve as much into the history part as I would have liked.  The story was based on the fact that Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia, was shipwrecked and never found again.  From the NYTimes review:
 

Theodosia’s story is just one of two enigmatic plot lines in Michael Parker’s latest novel, “The Watery Part of the World.” The other is inspired by the real lives of the three last inhabitants of a barrier island in the Outer Banks, an attempt to explain what led these elderly people to abandon their homes and move to the mainland in the early 1970s.

Maybe I didn't give it enough attention; I was so busy at this time that I had trouble getting through it.