Hi Bookworms, I hope you had a good week and a Happy 4th. We had a nice Canada Day last week and now have some hot weather in store for us after a deluge of rain in June. Luckily we didn’t get the sweltering heat wave that the East Coast did.
As you can see, I’m not posting my July Preview this week as things have been busy the past weeks — with new kitchen countertops, a bathroom renovation, yard work, golf, activities, dog care, etc. — and I haven’t been on the ball about gathering all the info on new releases lately. Maybe next week? The summer days are going by quickly and there’s much to do. Yesterday we participated in a bike ride “Gran Fondo” event with 1,500 other cyclists in the Canadian Badlands area a couple hours away. I biked the 32-mile route and my husband pedaled 62 miles. It went well and it seems my new knee is holding up. It doesn’t bend as much as it should but at least I can still pedal a bike, yay.
On the way home we passed various yellow canola fields, which are common to see this time of year. Meanwhile it’s time to look back and see what I read in May and June (see photo below). My reading took a plunge and I only got to three novels in each month. It’s a bit strange but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I got tied up with a PW project and went down a rabbit hole, but I feel I’m back now that it’s July, yay. It’s hard to pick my favorite among these — there’s good things about each — but Whistler and Kin seem neck and neck for top honors.
- The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff — A broken family saga that deals with the father’s alcoholism (a 2025 debut novel).
- Yesteryear by Carol Claire Burke — One of the most talked about novels of the year. It’s a doozy … with some bedeviling twists (a 2026 debut novel).
- Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su —A twenty-something girl is going through a rough patch until she finds a blob organism that offers her something new (a 2025 debut novel).
- American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee — A long epic having to do with the obsession of Koreans with education, and one family’s fate after having to start over from scratch (an upcoming novel by the acclaimed author of Pachinko).
- Kin by Tayari Jones — Two life-long childhood friends in the 1950s go off on two different life paths … until their journeys cross once again.
- Whistler by Ann Patchett — a 53-year-old woman reunites with her stepfather after many decades and recalls an accident they went through in 1980.
And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout /Random House /207 pgs /2026
4.35 stars. I’m glad that Elizabeth Strout is back with a new standalone novel after her popular series with Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Over the years, I have read all of her novels except two — Abide With Me from 2006 and Anything Is Possible from 2017 and she has never disappointed. Seemingly she can get into the heads and hearts of everyday people — perhaps like no other and can put you in their shoes lickety-split. Often her characters face grim realities: deaths, suicides, accidents, abuse, trauma, neglect, pandemics … whatever it is, her characters have lived it. Her novels can be dark and they can be heart-rending. And this latest one was no exception.
High school history teacher Artie Dam, age 57, is her latest protagonist. He has a kind sense about him and an empathetic moral compass. He lives with his wife Evie in a nice house along the Massachusetts coast and has a grown-up son Rob who is very dear to him, along with his colorful students who like Mr. Dam a lot. But lately Artie hasn’t felt the spark for living. He sees things around him that take the wind out of his sails so to speak … and one day he has an accident in his beloved sailboat that jolts him and his family.
Then later Artie learns of a family secret … which he isn’t sure he’ll make it known that he knows it. Poor Artie, he lives with the secret but struggles a bit with what to do with it. In the backdrop, the recent presidential election has happened … the political divides are apparent as are the spoils of what is happening under the current administration. Artie is happy that his son Rob and daughter-in-law Francesca leave it all behind to move overseas though he also misses them a great deal.
The novel is set during current times and tells it like it is, which is brave. We’re not living in a vacuum here. Strout puts it out there … and shows how the political turmoil envelops us these days. It’s a bit like Strout’s novel Olive by the Sea did about the pandemic. I found it enriched the plot and that her characters’ concerns felt right on to me. I was immersed in Artie’s world for a while and felt for his predicament. I could relate in ways. Even without her well-known characters Lucy or Olive, Strout is still a master of interior details.
That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these books above and if so, what did you think?
