Finding Grace

Hi Bookworms. I hope all is well. Does it feel like we’re racing through March or what? We’ve had much fluctuating weather here with windy 60s as well as falling temps and snowflakes too.

This weekend through Tuesday, I am busy reffing the U12 national tennis tournament here with a team of refs, so I will keep this a bit shorter than usual as I need to get to the site. The event is introducing electronic line calling this year with the benefit of players able to challenge close line calls, which refs will check from a tablet at court side, so I hope this goes smoothly. We have 72 matches to get through today into the evening. And here you thought March Madness was all about basketball, lol. It’ll be a crazy amount of tennis.

Meanwhile here is my latest book haul that I picked up from the library.

• Brawler: Short Stories by Lauren Groff
• Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (novel)
• 107 Days by Kamala Haris (nonfiction)
• A Place of Tides by James Rebanks (nonfiction)

My husband has taken and is reading the Rebanks book, which is said to about the author’s reflections on “a life-changing summer spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway, where his only companion was an old woman who practiced the ancient tradition of collecting eiderdown from birds that nest on this remarkable landscape each year.” Last year Tina at the blog Turn the Page had reviewed Rebanks’ two previous nonfiction books The Shepherd’s Life, and Pastoral Song … and I thought they sounded quite good so I picked up this latest one, which my husband will let me know about.

I’m not sure when I’ll get to the rest of these books as Tina and I plan to start a buddy read later in the week of the novel Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. It came out last fall and was a much talked about epic that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century. Many called it the book of the year last year — giving it 5 stars — so we can’t wait for this one. Carmen liked it a lot and tipped us off back when there was a $2.99 deal for the ebook on Amazon. Yay, it’s hard to get a recent much-awaited book cheap, but it’s good to be lucky once in a while.

In other book news, I see that it was announced that Jane Fonda will take on the role of Sybil Van Antwerp, the obsessive letter writer, in the movie adaptation of Virginia Evans’ bestselling novel The Correspondent. Wow Lionsgate snapped it up pretty quickly, but it’s still in the pre-production phase, so we will wait a bit. Also Liz Moore’s novel The God of the Woods will be coming to Netflix as an adapted TV series with Maya Hawke starring as investigator Judy Luptack … for those who liked the bestselling book. I had to look but yes, the actress is the daughter of Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman.

And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately:

Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild / St. Martin’s / 336 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. This debut novel by a British author came out last summer and I heard about it from Lesley at the blog Coastal Horizons. It’s one of those books you can’t say too much about its premise for fear of giving too much away. But basically it’s about a young-ish family who goes through a horrific tragedy at the start of the book … then you find out that the married couple was going through a surrogate for their second child at the time.

Four years later, Tom — the husband who survives — is raising the second child on his own with some help from his close friends … when he comes across a misaddressed letter that reveals the identity of his child’s egg donor. It’s what he does with this info — in his curiosity to meet the person — that becomes the gist of the story. It becomes a secret … that Tom doubles down on as it goes along.

I found it a good audio listen, though it seemed to go on a bit long for this type of story. I did want to strangle Tom at times as he makes plenty of bad decisions … you both sympathize with him and then are miffed by him. It’s told in alternating parts — with their lives before the tragedy … and then after the tragedy … with Tom’s dead spouse narrating the story. It makes it a bit unique though I came to want the parts in Tom’s present life to know how it plays out post-tragedy much more than the parts pre-tragedy. The story has a couple eye-rolls along the way — and whether you believe parts — still it kept me quite engaged for the duration and raises some interesting issues regarding surrogacy and parenthood.

That’s all for now. What about you — do you know about any of these books and if so, what did you think? Have a great week ahead everyone!