Book Cafe Summer Reading
"Beside the pool, on the beach, in your own back yard" ...
Summer
Books are little worlds we climb into- a slight crack in the universe that allows us to connect across the great divide of humanity. A good book by the pool, at the beach or in the back yard is a summer pleasure that allows you to go places without leaving your own backyard. We've got the recipe for a relaxing summer, with 7 books that run the gamut, a bit of the old thrown in with the new, the supernatural, true to life...add tall glass of summer drink. Enjoy!
A Thousand Suns
Without A Map
My Happy Life
The Truth: I'M 10, I'm smart and I know everything
Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (Bantam Books 2006
) |
Brashares' first novel written for adults, plays out mostly in one of these small towns, Waterby, a quiet, village where everyone knows everyone else, and the kids grow up together, hair bleached and soles blackened from endless days on the beach. Beach life is as constant as the ocean itself, always moving but never changing, lulling the islander into a languid complacency. The novel focuses on two sisters, 24-year-old tomboyish lifeguard Riley, and her younger sister, 21-year-old Alice, a beautiful dreamy girl always struggling to keep up with Riley and her best friend, their next door neighbor Paul. After a lifetime of summers spent together, Paul disappears from the island for three years...
Khaled Hosseini's second novel
tells the story of burka clad Afghanistan women and the turmoils of their lives over the last turbulent thirty years. It's an intoxicating story that gives a voice to women who are treated differently from men in Afghan Society. Brought together by the fall out of a bomb blast, the two women protagonists, (young girls, really) Mariam and Laila must deal with life in a world where everyday is a struggle to survive and also with their brutal, much older husband, Rashid. Hosseini's novel captures the human side of people in a struggle to find freedom, fulfill their dreams and have a decent life against a backdrop of war and despair. Hosseini manages to get inside the mind of women and reveals a poingant and moving story of life, hope and love...of people who want more than the shards of the existence handed to them. Hosseini's' tale of two women is painful, tragic, dark and hopeful at the same time. - D.P.
Back in 1965, when such things happend, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl is shunned by her New Hampshire community, made to feel ashamed, kicked out of her mother's home, shipped off to live with her father and forced to give up her baby for adoption. Hidden away in her father's house, she finishes out high school at a nearby boarding school. Feeling the emptimness of giving up the baby and the lack of empathy and support from her parents, Hall hits the road at 18, where she begins a "without a map" vagabond life, living on a boat, wandering mostly penniless, and eventually ends up alone in Europe and the Middle East. Years later, she settles in Maine, gets married, has more children and eventually meets the boy she gave up, but never quite forgot - counting his birthdays as the years went on. Hall's a woman haunted by her past of giving up her child, but he never quite leaves her heart, and instead she wanders aimlessly trying to fill the emptiness in her heart. Meredith Hall's honest memoir quietly tells of her agony in achingly beautiful prose, yet it's not a tale of self-pity but one of forgivness, extricating one's self from the past and embracing life. - D.P.
When I wasn't busy eating Lydia Millet's latest book alive, I spent some time musing over Anne Horowitz's cover art. The bottom of the book is a deep soft rose, the color of thin clouds at sunset, reflecting the day's last hurrah before nightfall. Gently it fades from pink to eggshell white at the top. In the bottom right quarter of the book, a baby, soft and also pink, is curled up sleepily. The title, My Happy Life, steps gently across the cover in thin, unobtrusive letters.
You can read Barbara Becker Holstein's latest effort in one sitting. Written in simple, girlish language, the girl's voice could be anyone. And The Truth could be yours. Let her take you back to your girlhood when you thought you knew everything, and yet everything was a wonder as you looked at the world with high expectations. This book is for every woman, including teenage girls, as we all will be able to relate to the issues of self-esteem, first love, friendship and all that comes with coming of age. It vividly captures the young girl's imagination through her diary entries and shows the hilarity and innocence of when we were young. It also captures the wonder and certainty with which we looked at the world when we were unseemingly unafraid to dream and were still unjaded by life and all of the other in-betweens. Embrace the little girl within you and reflect on your own truth that may have slipped away so long ago. It's a refreshing trip back to recapture those once precious memories and feelings. - D.P. 
This book is one of the great, sink in your chair riveting kind of reads that's just meant for a long summer day.
Intricately weaving the past and the present, it tells the story of a divorced, 42-year-old school teacher Kate Cypher, who goes home to Vermont to visit Jean, her ailing mother. Her first time back in New Hope, since her best friend Delores Griswold was murdered 31 years ago, Kate is drawn into reliving those events when another young girl is murdered after her arrival. That leads to the questions. Are the two murders connected? Along with her high school sweetheart, Nicky who's also Delores' brother, she delves into figuring out the mystery, which leads to supernatural and ghost-like events taking place. With unforgettable characters, including the coming of age, spirited Delores Griswold, Jennifer McMahon's first novel is a pleasurable page turner. - D.P.
A UPS package arrives with a red sneaker full of ashes and a note. It brings together five women, whose friend Annie Freeman's died of Ovarian cancer. Her final request is to have a traveling funeral. These strangers - Katherine, Laura, Rececca, Jill, and Marie scatter Annie Freeman's ashes across the country. Each stop, a special place to Annie, brings many surprises and life lessons, and they learn a few surpries about their spirited friend. Their journey forges bonds of sisterhood between the very different women, who have only
Annie in common. As they open their hearts, share laughter and stories, they realize that their own struggles, dreams and triumphs are part of every woman's passage into life. Together, they find strength, courage, understanding and comraderie that's inspiring as well as empowering. Annie Freeman's Traveling Funeral is one of those books that'll have you wishing that you were hitting the road with your best girlfriends. There are a lot of memorable lines that attest the strength and resilience of women such as, "I've had a world of loss dropped into my hands... but we're women and we deal with it and we do it in a way that somehow becomes a gift." This book is a gift, as well as a celebration of life. - D.P.