Book Review: Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

Title: Be Frank with Me
Author: Julia Claiborne Johnson
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A little bit of sex but a pretty clean read

M. M. Banning sprung to fame in the 1970s when her only novel topped the bestseller charts. But the adulation was too much for Mimi, and she retreated to a mansion in Bel-Air, and never published another book. More than thirty years later, she's taken in by a Ponzi scheme and her publisher sends Alice to keep tabs on Mimi and help care for Frank, Mimi's nine-year-old son so Mimi can write another bestseller.

While Be Frank with Me is fascinating on many levels (who hasn't wondered what the rest of Harper Lee's life has been like, for example?), it's Alice's relationship with Frank that is at the heart of the book. Although Frank is never labeled with anything, he seems to have Asperger's (he doesn't enjoy other kids, is obsessed with vintage clothes and old movies, doesn't sleep at night, and is comforted by tight pressure). While Mimi (who is unusual and difficult herself) adores Frank, she's also a little wary of him. But I loved watching Alice fall in love with Frank as the novel progressed. Also, there's a lovely twist at the end of the novel that is exactly the opposite of what I was expecting.

Book Review: A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman

Title: A Man Called Ove
Author: Frederik Backman
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a clean read with a couple of bad words

Ove doesn't have anything left to live for. His dear wife, Sonia, died six months ago. He was just let go from the job he held for almost forty years. And he's always been grumpy by nature. He's just about to pull the plug on his life when the new neighbors, a young couple with two daughters, run their U-Haul into his mailbox. Over the next few weeks, Ove's suicide attempts are thwarted again and again as he makes friends, adopts a cat, saves a man from an oncoming train, and brings couples together, all against his will.

If you want a funny, feel-good book that isn't cheesy, A Man Called Ove might just be the book for you. Backman's Ove is so curmudgeonly that it's lovely to watch both his transformation and learn about his back story (in alternating chapters). Of course the book is a little Pollyannaish, but everyone needs a happy story from time to time. Besides, I've read so many dark and depressing Swedish books (hello Stieg Larsson) that it was really nice to read something light and Swedish for a change.

Book Review: The Lake House by Kate Morton

Title: The Lake House
Author: Kate Morton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A pretty darn clean read

When Sadie Sparrow is placed on administrative leave from her police job (basically for becoming overly involved in the family of one of the cases she was investigating), she retreats to her newly-retired grandfather's home in Western England. Even though she's supposed to be relaxing and regrouping, her mind cannot rest, and soon she finds herself investigating the decades-old disappearance of a baby boy from an estate in town. She reaches out to Alice Edevane, the sister of the lost boy, who was sixteen when her brother disappears and is now a reclusive, cranky writer in her eighties. Alice and her sister have never talked about their brother's disappearance, and both always carried the weight of their own culpability. In The Lake House, Morton manages to marry the strains of guilt, responsibility and familial love of all kinds.

The Lake House is a remarkable book. There are many books that I get to the end of and think, "I could have written that." The Lake House has such a complicated story, and Morton manages to bring back tiny threads from early in the story that become prominent as everything comes to light. I was delighted to guess the mystery right with about 100 pages left to go, and even though some people might say that the way Morton ties together some of the threads are implausible, I prefer to see them as lovely and serendipitous.

Book Review: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Title: The Heart Goes Last
Author: Margaret Atwood
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: sex, language

At a time in a dystopian near future, the Earth has fallen to ruin. Like many of their peers, Charmaine and Stan, who formerly had steady jobs (she had a college degree and worked in a nursing home), now live in their car, surviving on donuts, never knowing when their next shower will be. When they learn about Consilience, a utopian development, their desire for stability overrides any concern they might have about the place, even though part of the condition of living there is that they voluntarily surrender themselves to a prison every other month. Soon they find themselves involved in all sorts of entanglements (romantic and more nefarious), until they wonder if life on the inside is all it's cracked up to be.

Before I read The Heart Goes Last, I would have told you that I loved Atwood's realistic fiction (The Blind Assassin is one of my all-time favorite books), but was less a fan of her speculative fiction (yes, I appreciated The Handmaid's Tale, and I think it is one of the best book club/literature seminar books because it's so much fun to discuss, but it's not where I'd naturally gravitate). This book is dark, funny, and profoundly weird. It's also really memorable. While the experience reading it wasn't as enjoyable for me as some of Atwood's other novels, I'm still glad I read it, and would love the chance to talk with other people about Atwood's purposes for creating this story.

Book Review: The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati

Title: The Gilded Hour
Author: Sara Donati
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: violence, sexual violence, lots of talking about sex (but not a lot of sex itself)

When Dr. Anna Savard gets called from her New York home to vaccinate Italian orphans one morning in 1883, she can't foresee the many ways her life will change as a result of that day. First, she meets Rosa and her brothers and sisters, and Anna promises them that she will try to make sure they aren't separated. Then she meets Jack, a detective with the New York Police Department. While the young family and Jack enrich Anna's personal life, her professional life, along with that of her cousin, Dr. Sophie Savard, is under attack due to their involvement with a young mother who had been under their care and died after receiving an abortion. Donati uses this story to highlight the lack of family planning options available to women at this time, and to the evils of the Comstock laws, a series of anti-vice laws. Sophie, who is of mixed-race, also figures prominently in the book, especially as she prepares to marry her childhood love, the scion of a wealthy New York family, and travel to Switzerland with him so he can receive treatment for tuberculosis.

Some of my very favorite books ever (Caleb Carr's The Alienist, Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni) have taken place in the same NYC Donati uses as her setting. It's a place of swishing skirts, menacing shadows, wealth, poverty, and danger. Typically, I am also a huge fan of books with medical subjects, and of books that really get into a world I'm interested in. Readers of The Gilded Hour know about everything from the style of dress that was popular at the time, to home decorating trends, to what foods were popular in Italian immigrant families, to birth control methods. I loved that aspect of the book, as well as the character development-- Jack and Anna's relationship was so smart and measured and romantic, I wanted to live in it. In the second half of the book, Donati introduces the idea of a serial murderer performing abortions in a way that will kill the women who seek them, and while this story was engrossing, the fact that this part of the narrative (along with several others) doesn't have a clear resolution, weakens the reading experience for me, even though I knew from the outset that this was going to be the first book of a series. At 700+ pages, at least tie up the murder mystery, please.

I'm now interested in Donati's Wilderness books. The covers looks SO much like historical romance novels, which makes me a little less interested in reading them than if they were historical novels with romantic subplots, which is how I would characterize The Gilded Hour.

Book Review: The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

Title: The Last Anniversary
Author: Liane Moriarty
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing (a pretty clean read)

Three years after Sophie Honeywell broke Thomas Gordon's heart, he calls her out of the blue and wants to meet. She knows he isn't eager to get back together, since he and his wife recently had a baby, but the truth is even more shocking than that situation would be-- Thomas's elderly aunt Connie died, and left her her home on Scribbly Gum Island (on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, Australia). Aunt Connie and her sister Rose became famous in the 1930s, when they reported making a visit to their only neighbor on the island, to discover that the couple had disappeared without a trace, leaving their infant daughter behind. Connie and Rose named the baby Enigma and raised her as their own. Moving to the home of the Munro Baby Mystery complicates Sophie's boring, ordered life, and brings her right into the hearts of Connie's family.

Like many of Moriarty's books, The Last Anniversary centers on domestic dramas. Sophie worries that she should have settled for Thomas, because she's 39 and her biological clock is ticking. Thomas's sister Grace seems to have it all, including a crippling case of postpartum depression. Parents squabble with their children, and secrets come out. And, eventually, the Munro Baby Mystery is solved. I figured out the mystery about halfway through and enjoyed watching it tumble out. Moriarty does a lovely job managing many characters and serious themes with a lightness that works, but in this case, some of the near misses of the story (particularly Grace's story) made me squirm as a reader, and I'm not sure how Moriarty's resolution to Sophie's childlessness plays to today's audience, since the book was published ten years ago. A picky aside-- the chronology of the story doesn't seem to work here. If Enigma is 74, it seems unlikely that her grandchildren would be nearly 40.

Book Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Title: Between the World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing

I pay for an Audible account that gives me two book credits per month. In that month, I'll probably run about 250 miles, much of it by myself, and I use the books to keep myself entertained. So I tend to shop for long books. Alexander Hamilton, at more than thirty hours, was a good buy. I was loath to spend the money on Ta-Nehisi Coatses's book, Between the World and Me, since it's only 3 1/2 hours long. But within a couple of days of each other, I heard that the book won a National Book Award, and I heard an extended interview with Coates about his newfound success on This American Life, and I knew I had to part with the credit and listen to the book.

Between the World and Me, which is written as a letter from the author to his (then) fourteen-year-old son, Samori, was eye-opening. It's a book written by a black man about my own age, to his son, who is the same age as my oldest son, and while we grew up within a few hundred miles of each other, studied the same things in college and have worked at writing as a career, our worldviews could not be more different. And Coates would say that this is because he's a black man and I am a white woman. He writes poetically, emotionally, sparely about the experiences of his life. Of his loving father hitting him with a belt. Of being a teenager in Baltimore. Of having college friends shot and killed by the police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He writes of fear and hatred. And the book left me feeling unsettled and fearful myself, finding my privilege uncomfortable and conspicuous. It's a book I'm glad I read and perspective I'm glad I understand a bit more, but not an easy read. If you read it, don't forget to listen to the This American Life piece. They stand as interesting counterpoints to each other-- showing the complexity that lies within each of us.

Book Review: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Book Review: My Name is Lucy Barton
Author: Elizabeth Strout
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a pretty clean read with some oblique references to violence

When Lucy Barton was a young mother living in New York in the 1980s, she developed a mysterious infection after an appendectomy, requiring a long hospital stay. Barton's mother, from whom she had been estranged, came to stay at the hospital with her daughter. That visit provides the central action for this spare book, in which the narrator looks back from the present to that moment and to the more distant past in order to help make sense of their relationship.

Of all the relationships I've known, the mother-daughter relationships in my life have been the most complicated. Now that I'm in my forties and have gone through the transitions from adulation to indignation to separation to judgment and finally, I hope to some grace in how I see my own mother, I'm starting to see the patterns repeat with my daughters. In this week that they spend together, Lucy seems to try to work on that reconciliation to peace with a mother whose way of life she escaped without ever wanting to look back.

My Name is Lucy Barton is a strange little book, without a lot of plot-driven action. It's the kind of book to read slowly, and I would say it's also the kind of book an author can only write when she has made it. The writing is spare, and often feels a little disjointed unless you do the work of making the connections with the narrator. I loved that Barton was an author herself, and her interactions with another established author provided some interesting conversations about creating character and narrative voice. But ultimately, this is a book about mothers and daughters, and learning to make peace with the place we come from, even if it's not a place we would have chosen on our own.

Book Review: Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Title: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Authors: Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a clean read

Before picking up Notorious RBG, I didn't know all that much about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the nine justices who serves in the US Supreme Court. I mean, I knew she leaned to the left, liked to work out, and fell asleep during the State of the Union, all of which made me feel a sense of kinship with her, but I didn't know much about her beyond that. Notorious RBG changed that. It helped me see RBG not as a woman who got where she is in life because she prioritized career over family, but as a woman who delighted in marriage and motherhood, and was inspired by her relationships to fight for the rights of women. When I read obituaries (which I often do), I'm struck by how often the circumstances of someone's life lead them down a particular path. While Ginsburg married right out of college and had a baby on a military base within a couple of years, she also had a uniquely supportive spouse, and his cancer treatments while they were in law school meant that she only had one child for many years. While his condition likely felt devastating to the young family, in some ways they also enabled RBG to give more attention to her career than she may have been able to do had she been raising a larger family. Notorious RBG humanizes Ginsburg, and gives equal weight to quirky things about her private life (she's apparently really good at doing pushups) and the significant achievements in her public life. This is a quick read, and one I enjoyed.

Book Review: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Title: Alexander Hamilton
Author: Ron Chernow
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible

Just like everyone else on the planet, I've been swept up in the fervor over Alexander Hamilton. I was "this close" to making our entire family detour to NYC during our summer vacation so I could go see the play (by myself, because tickets for eight would cost bank). I was so captivated by Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical (and cultural phenomenon) that I finally cracked the book that has been sitting on our shelf for more than a decade, Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I'm not an avid reader of biographies. In fact, I had to create a tag for biographies when I was reviewing this book. But my friend Michelle told me that if I listened to this one, I wouldn't be disappointed. She was absolutely right. While Alexander Hamilton's included the jubilant highs and devastating lows of high drama, the story is putty in Chernow's able hands. He makes the villains (Burr, Adams, Jefferson) and the heroes (Washington, Lafayette) come to life, and Hamilton shines as someone who's as complicated as any central figure in a Shakespearean tragedy. When I started listening the 30+ hour audio version, I was really skeptical, but it took me about a week to power through the story. It's definitely worth a listen, and fans of the musical might just find themselves singing along.

Book Review: Between You and Me by Mary Norris

Title: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Author: Mary Norris
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some mild swearing

There are some kinds of books that simply don't lend themselves to being made into audiobooks. Comic books and math textbooks, for example, have such important visual components that the transition to an audio format would require extra descriptions, and a lot would still be lost in the translation. You might not expect that a memoir would suffer from the same fate, but Mary Norris's Between You and Me is definitely a book where the audiobook feels like a pale imitation of the original. Yes, it's true, there are lots of places where Norris tells engaging stories about her life as a copyeditor for The New Yorker. The book is completely irreverent, and she tells hilarious stories (the story about her obsession with #1 pencils was my favorite). However, there are lots of places where she's talking about how the printed word appears on a page. When she talks about the placement of commas, for example, this listener was totally lost. Although I'm an editor, I'm much more a big-picture (or is it "big picture"?) kind of person, and I tend not to care much about the minutae of grammar. In that sense Norris's book felt both pedantic and like I finally started to understand why some people care so dang much about when to use "who" and when to use "whom." If you pick this book up, you'll probably enjoy it, but listening to it often left me frustrated and confused, which is not the feeling you want a reader to have when attempting to demystify grammar.

Book Review: Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

Book Review: Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)
Author: Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: this is a VERY adult book, readers spend a lot of time inside the mind of a serial killer, possibly the most disturbing book I've read in a long time

Career of Evil, the third tale of private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, begins with Robin opening a package containing a woman's severed leg. Press coverage surrounding the event threatens to sink the business, and Strike becomes convinced that someone from his past sent the leg to exact revenge. With no other cases on their docket, Strike and Ellacott, follow the paths of several men who used to know Strike, in hopes of finding the killer before he hits closer to home.

I recently listened to an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour in which Barrie Hardymon interviewed JK Rowling about writing the book. The episode is worth a listen (it's pretty short), and it touches on a lot of the things I felt while reading the novel. First of all, we spend lots of time in this book inside the mind of a serial killer, which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. I don't get icked out by much of what I read, but there were times when I wondered if I wanted to finish this book. Ultimately, I'm glad that I did, because I'm a firm believer that we expand our worldview when we learn about points of view that are different from our own, but this was a very difficult book to read sometimes. Also, I was glad that Hardymon and Rowling talked about the sexism in the book. The side story in the book deals with Robin's upcoming wedding, and if you've read either of the first two books, you probably recognize that Matthew, Robin's fiance, is someone she's with more out of comfort and a sense of duty than because she really wants to spend the rest of her life with him. Rowling talks about Matthew's subtle sexism, but I'm equally interested in Strike's subtle sexism. Career of Evil is fast-paced, expertly plotted, and really thoughtful, and while it was definitely for me, I know that it's not for everyone.

Book Review: After You by Jojo Moyes

Title: After You (Me Before You #2)
Author: Jojo Moyes
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: sex and language

Remember Louisa Clark, the heroine of Jojo Moyes's Me Before You? When After You opens, months have passed since Lou helped Will, her quadraplegic employer (and the man she was hopelessly in love with), commit suicide, and she's floundering. She doesn't know how to redirect her career and is working at an awful bar. She's still too in love with Will to date, and she's drinking too much. When she falls off the roof of her London apartment building and narrowly escapes death, she realizes that she needs to make some serious changes in her life in order to keep living. So she reluctantly agrees to join a support group, meets a difficult teenager who needs some help, and everything starts to fall in place.

I loved Me Before You. It was one of those books that made me sob. It felt both completely heartbreaking and unfair, and beautiful and right. I wouldn't say that After You is quite as emotional as its predecessor, but it felt very real. Someone in Lou's position probably would struggle after the experience she went through, and in this way, it was nice to see what happens after "the end." And while the highs and lows weren't as high or low, they were sweet and meaningful on a smaller scale. There's a lot of redemption in After You, and it's lovely to see Louisa grow into womanhood in this novel.

Book Review: The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

Title: The Masqueraders
Author: Georgette Heyer
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read

When I was growing up, I knew a family with several sons and daughters. The sons in the family were all petite and small boned, while the daughters were tall and broad. In The Masqueraders, Prudence Tremaine and her brother Robin use the same situation to their advantage. Since their father played a part in the Jacobite revolution, they've had to change their identities, with Prudence becoming Mr. Peter Merriott and Robin assuming the role of his sister, Kate. They ingratiate themselves into London society, and the ruse works until they fall in love and are accused of murder, and somehow, they have to use all of the skills of trickery they learned from their father to come out on top.

The Masqueraders is a really interesting book on several fronts. First and foremost, I love Heyer's portrayal of Prudence/Peter and her love interest, Sir Anthony Fanshawe. Fanshawe admires Peter, and grows to love Prudence, not despite the fact that she's been disguised as a man, but for her strength. Instead of rescuing her, Fanshawe and Prudence work together to help her get through the situation she faces. I also adored the twist that comes late in the book when the Tremaine's father appears. It's genius. The Masqueraders is really fun and funny. It feels a lot like a Regency-era Shakespearean comedy, complete with mistaken identity, cross-dressing, and multiple marriages at the end.

Book Review: Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig

Title: Last Bus to Wisdom
Author: Ivan Doig
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read

When Donal Cameron's grandmother needs to have surgery and no one on the ranch in Montana can care for him, he boards a Greyhound and heads east to Wisconsin. He has adventures to spare along the way, and gets plenty of signatures for his autograph book. At the end of the journey, he meets his cantankerous Aunt Kate and her husband Herman, and Donal's life is changed by this strange summer of new experiences.

Ivan Doig died in April, and this book, his last, was published in September. In many ways, Donal's life reflected Doig's own. Both lost their mothers when they were young and were raised by grandmothers who worked as ranch cooks. While it's impossible to read Doig's fiction and not fall in love with Montana, or at least with the idea of Montana, this book was also different from his other works in many ways. It was a little bit more rambly and ruminative. I loved the three principal characters, and Doig did a lovely job weaving characters into and out of the journeys to and from Wisconsin. While I'm really sad that Doig is gone (he's one of those authors where sometimes I'd say, "I'm in the mood to read an Ivan Doig book") the good news for me is that I came to him late enough that there are still books to be discovered. This, like everything I've read in his body of work, is a real treat.

Book Review: Why Not Me by Mindy Kaling

Title: Why Not Me?
Author: Mindy Kaling
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: language

You know how you sometimes fall in love with a character on a tv show, and then you're disappointed that they don't exist in real life? Well, I have sort of the opposite feeling for Mindy Kaling. Kelly Kapoor, her breakout role on The Office, was someone I never really connected with (and I haven't watched The Mindy Project yet, but it's on my list), but somehow I ended up reading Kaling's first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and I fell in love with it, and with her (and isn't it nice when the real person behind the character is so much cooler than the character?). So I had high expectations for Why Not Me? and Kaling surpassed all of them. This book is funny (of course), but it's also really honest and open, and not just about interesting but superficial things like how to get your clothes tailored so they fit your body perfectly, but also about deeper things like how she decided sorority life wasn't for her, what it's like to work in Hollywood when no one else looks like she does, and how she credits her success to lots and lots of hard work, and not simply to being in the right place at the right time (and her resume attests to her work ethic). She reads the book herself, and has perfect delivery, and she finally answers the question about what is going on with her and BJ Novak. Even though Kaling's a little loose with the language, I heartily recommended that my teenager daughter give the book a listen, because let's be real, a girl who works hard but also loves great shoes is a pretty good and realistic role model.

Book Review: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Title: Fates and Furies
Author: Lauren Groff
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: sex

Today the National Book Awards are being announced. I've read three of the five finalists (you can see my reviews of The Turner House and A Little Life), and Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff would be my pick if I were judging. I was captivated by the first page of the book, which opens on the day Lotto and Mathilde, seniors at Vassar, elope after two weeks of dating. Lotto, the scion of a wealthy Florida family, struggles as an actor, and when he finds success as a playwright, he credits all of it to Mathilde, who loved him and made his work possible. First, we get Lotto's view of the marriage, and after his death (about midway through the book), the point of view switches to Mathilde, whose outlook on the relationship was more pragmatic and less rosy.

I read an NPR review of the book that says that Lotto's perspective represents the fates (the gifts) while Mathilde's represents the furies (the vengeance), but I think it's a lot more complicated than that. Lotto and Mathilde enter the marriage as nearly complete strangers, and while they do love each other and stay married for a long time, they (or at least she) still keep parts of themselves secret. I love the epic nature of this book (how could it be anything else with a title so grounded in Greek mythology?), and the focus on the minutae of marriage. Lotto and Mathilde are gorgeous, fully-rounded characters, and one of the things I loved best was that they still had the capacity to surprise each other, in good ways and in bad, even years into their marriage. Fates and Furies isn't only a love story, or the story of a marriage, because Mathilde's story is also a lot about childhood trauma, grief and resolution. Although the subject matter is difficult at times, it was a really engaging read for me. I wanted to gobble this book up, and then I was sad when it was over.

Book Review: Home by Marilynne Robinson

Title: Home (Gilead #2)
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read

Home is the second installment in Marilynne Robinson's trilogy about Gilead, Iowa, although it takes place concurrently with Gilead. I read it third, and probably loved it the most. Glory, one of the youngest of Reverend Robert Boughton's many children, has left her job as a schoolteacher to care for her ailing father. Shortly after Glory returns, her brother Jack, the lone prodigal, also comes home. The two siblings, the spinster and the rake (as their father sees them, and as they've come to see themselves) have to sort out problems in their own lives and shepherd their father through his final days.

For me, Home is all about the assumptions people make in families and tight-knit communities-- Glory and Jack have known each other all their lives, and it's hard for anyone to see them in new and different ways. Glory can never tell anyone about the fiance who turned out to be married. Jack never opens up about what it means to be in love with a black woman and the father of a biracial in the American South in the 1950s. Reverend Ames, a much more prominent character in Gilead and Lila, the other books in the trilogy, never learns to see Jack as anything other than a ne'er do well, even though he's gone through transformative experiences with people in his own life. The ending of this book is both profoundly beautiful and sad. Robinson's beautiful writing and thoughtful Christianity make Home a book to be savored.

Book Review: Rising Strong by Brene Brown

Title: Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.
Author: Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A little bit of swearing

I had never heard of Brene Brown until a few weeks ago, when shout-outs for her new book Rising Strong started showing up in my Instagram feed. Without knowing anything about her or what the book was about, I decided to use my September Audible credits to buy it. I trusted those friends that much. It turns out that Rising Strong is the companion book to Daring Greatly. In Daring Greatly, Brown encourages people to take risks and be vulnerable, and in Rising Strong, Brown talks about how to emerge from the inevitable failures of life.

I'm a little torn on the audio version of Daring Greatly. On the one hand, I think there's so much to be gained to hearing this book in Brown's voice, because her enthusiasm is infectious. On the other hand, I wish I had a hard copy of this book to mark the heck out of. I wanted to underline things so I could come back to them easily. So I would recommend and old-fashioned paper copy of this girl. I love the way that Brown practices what she preaches here and examines her own failures. She looks into the failures in her life (and in the lives of people around her) and shows how we grow when we're willing to admit when we're wrong and take the consequences for it. I've already ordered Rising Strong and I'm eager to immerse myself in that one as well.

Book Review: The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Title: The One and Only Ivan
Author: Katherine Applegate
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read, perfect for family road trips

Ivan the gorilla lives at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall, where he's the star attraction. Or at least he once was, back when he was little and cute. These days, the mall is struggling, and Ivan, along with Stella, an elephant with a painful foot infection, and Bob, a dog, are sort of neglected by day, then trotted out several times a day for a show. When Ruby, a baby elephant, shows up at the mall, the trio soon discover that she was poached, separated from her family and secretly shipped out of Africa. This scenario reminds Ivan of his own childhood, and he becomes determined to find a better future for Ruby, doing his best to communicate with the sympathetic humans around him. The One and Only Ivan shows that big dreams are sometimes rewarded with big payoffs, especially when they're motivated by love.

Honestly, it's a little bit difficult to get comfortable in the mind of Ivan the gorilla. Part of the reason is because he's depressed and unhappy after spending many years subject to the whims of Mack, the man who raised Ivan after he was separated from his family and treated him as part of the family until he grew too big. But I persevered with this story, and found it sweet and heartwarming. Ivan does what we would all do for our families-- he sacrifices and tries to make their lives the best they can be. Although I really enjoyed listening to the story, apparently the paper version of the book includes illustrations (Ivan's big dream to save Ruby is an art project) and I think that having them would have been beneficial to the story.