The Cue Card

Hi bookworms. I made it to the beach and I’ve been enjoying some peaceful days bike riding and beach-going. I have not been in the ocean yet as it’s been a bit overcast and cool, but yesterday my things got wet anyways after a wave suddenly sent water over the sand incline bank and into the area where I was sitting quite a ways from the shore, argh. My library book got a little wet, which is not good, and my backpack and towel were drenched and sandy. Grrr, what are the chances. Today I’ll be back and prepared, lol, and the day should be nice and sunny and good for a swim. On my evening stroll, I saw this sailboat heading out of the harbor. I’ll be leaving in a few days, so I need to enjoy everything while I can. I’ve visited with my brother, niece, and four-month-old grandniece … who was a thrill to see and I’m hoping they return for a beach day. 

And now I’ll leave you with a few reviews of what I finished lately. These three books were #8, #9, and #10 on my summer reading list. 

Audition by Katie Kitamura / Riverhead / 208 pages / 2025

4 stars. Synopsis: This is about a married middle-aged accomplished actress who’s in play rehearsals for an upcoming premiere in New York. At the beginning she meets a young attractive man in his twenties at a restaurant and you don’t know who they are at first to one another, whether a lover, co-worker, or something else. But later the stranger tells her that he might be her son … which sets things off on an odd, disorienting path.

My Thoughts: The novel (about a family) is split into two parts … which are not completely congruent or linear to one another, so it’s a bit like a puzzle, or a play with the characters playing various roles and you come to see how they fit or not together. Part 1 has the accomplished actress and the young stranger who comes to work as an assistant to the play’s director; while Part II has the actress, her husband and an estranged son moving back into their apartment. I think there are various interpretations of what unfolds and some might see Part 1 or 2 as an unreal fantasy, or maybe just on another different timeline.

Katie Kitamura, whose writing is alluring, keeps your footing a bit on uneven ground with the family of three. But if you like novels more concrete, you might think twice about this novel. I’ve read Kitamura’s other novels A Separation and Intimacies and will continue to read her mysterious and provoking books because for one thing, she writes like a dream. Audition has been longlisted for the Booker Prize … whether it will make the shortlist we need to stay tuned on Sept. 23 when it will be announced.

Tilt by Emma Pattee / Simon & Schuster / 240 pages / 2025

4.2 stars. Synopsis: Annie, a 35-year-old very pregnant woman is shopping for a crib in IKEA when a major earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. She’s gets out from being trapped and sets out on a mission to walk to her husband’s job site to find him. They don’t have much money as he’s a struggling, auditioning actor and works at a cafe, and she gave up being a playwright to earn money as a manager at a start-up company. As Annie ambles through the wreaked city, she has various experiences as she comes upon various people and situations, and remembers earlier days with her husband and when they met 17 years ago. 

My Thoughts: I wasn’t sure about this protagonist Annie at first as she seems sort of harsh or bad-mouthed at the book’s beginnings, but also a bit funny too, sarcastic in how she looks at things. When the quake hits early at the onset, she becomes a survivor and turns quite determined and strong to make it through for her unborn baby “bean” and to find her husband Dom. As she makes her trek across the city, many thoughts run through her head from the past (the loss of her mother) and regrets she’s had when she last saw her husband. She told him not to take an understudy part in King Lear but to continue his job at the cafe for the money.

She thinks over her life quite a bit and talks to her baby while dealing with thirst and rubble, and so you’re stuck in Annie’s head or narration for the whole novel, but it’s a journey you want to see her through. Annie seems to soften a bit as time goes on and tries to help a few others along the way. But the story is sort of darker towards the end than I had imagined it’d turn out, but it also grabs you. So beware: earthquake disasters aren’t for the light of heart. For a debut novel, I was impressed by Emma Pattee’s writing and the many details she imparts. It’s quite a potent short-ish novel that the author seems to pour much heart into. I will look for what she puts out next. 

Heartwood by Amity Gaige / Simon & Schuster / 320 pages / 2025

4.0 stars. Synopsis: After 42-year-old Valerie Gillis, a nurse, goes missing from the Appalachian Trail in Maine, a massive search begins. The novel alternates chapters among various people who know or are searching for Valerie as well as chapters of Valerie herself and her journal. She went on the hike to find herself after dealing with the Covid pandemic and all the deaths while working at the hospital.

The chapters include those with: Bev Miller, the Maine official who’s leading the search; and a big guy from the Bronx named Santo who befriended Valerie on the trail; and Lena, a nursing home resident who’s trying to piece together tips she finds online of where Valerie might be. It’s a race against time as most people who disappear in the woods are found alive only in the first couple days. 

My Thoughts: I listened to this on audio and the various narrators do a good job bringing the characters to life. And there’s a heartwarming quality between missing Valerie and her mother, who are close. It also has a pandemic angle to the story — as Valerie, a nurse, is in search of a break to find herself after the covid pandemic and goes to hike the AT — that seemed interesting and relatable after recent hard years. Some of the alternating cast of characters get a bit uneven as the story goes on. I came to like Bev, who’s leading the search quite a bit, but I sort of tired with much focus on Lena, the elderly lady who is following it online. Though it is Lena who finds a key contact online who might know something.

Still, despite some unevenness, the vivid descriptions of the trail and woods and the overall cacophony of people trying to help Valerie — made me want to tramp through the wilderness to help find her too. This novel will make you want to: put on the boots, get the moleskin and the insect repellent and get out there on the trail and search. There’s only a few hours left to find her. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these and what did you think?

Hi all, how has your week been? Last week was quite busy here with sports and yard mowing. I had a tennis inter-club match, 18 holes of golf league, epic field mowing, and a cycling bike ride event a couple hours south of us all in one week, and now I’m resting. I must be crazy, lol. I’m no spring chicken. I should’ve taken a photo at the bike event yesterday, but I was full on — trying to go 50km (31 miles) quickly. It went better than expected and I finished third woman in my 50+ age group. My husband did well biking the 100km (62 mile) longer route. And now we’re taking a breather and it’s good that it’s a bit rainy this morning and we’re catching up on things. I’m adding this happy cow picture to ward off any crazy bad news. 

I’m reminded at times that when I was working full-time in my 20s, 30s, and 40s I didn’t have time for blogging. It was only in my later 40s when I went part-time did I really have or make any time for it. So I’m impressed by bloggers today who somehow find time when they work full-time and/or are moms to young kids. That’s a lot! I think being mostly retired helps (my husband still works), though retirees are pretty busy too. What about you — did you ever blog while you were working full-time? Or did you start afterwards?

In book news, I see that author Margaret Atwood is coming out with a memoir of sorts on Nov. 4 called Book of Lives. Oh yeah, it’s going to be big in Canada. People who are Atwood fans are already aflutter with the news. I learned about the memoir from the Wordfest book festival here, which plans to host Atwood to come speak about it on Dec. 10. So I’ll gear up for it. I have seen Atwood speak before (she appeared like an ant on the stage as I was in a faraway seat in the balcony), but I heard her quite clearly. The two-time Booker Prize winner is always worth seeing and reading. 

Next weekend I plan to post my August preview. Can you believe July is almost over? Ugh. And did you see the New York Time’s article about the man who read 3,599 books and his list?  It’s sort of an entertaining read. He’s way more manic than I am about it, yay.

And now for a couple reviews of what I finished lately.

A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst / Riverhead / 256 pages / 2025

4+ stars. This is an old-fashioned survival tale, based on a true story about a British married couple, who in 1972 set sail from England in hopes of making it all the way to New Zealand. They were a bit of a different couple, Maurice Bailey was an awkward loner type who had a miserable childhood with his family and didn’t know women particularly well. He was 8 years older than Maralyn, whom he met at age 29 through a mutual acquaintance. She, on the other hand, was an outgoing adventurous type who took to his hobbies of long hikes and boating well and surprisingly said yes to his marriage proposal a year later in 1963. They weren’t traditional in the sense of wanting to settle down with jobs and kids in England but wanted to chuck it all to leave and not come back. They wanted a different kind of life. 

So the Baileys had a 31-foot yacht — the Auralyn — built. But for their journey Maurice decided not to have a radio transmitter onboard … he wanted to travel by the stars and be on their own. Maralyn, for her part, couldn’t even swim. Still they didn’t seem too concerned. They were eager to set sail in 1972, making it to Spain and Portugal and the Canary Islands before eventually crossing the Atlantic Ocean and appeared to be having quite a time, but it was later while trying to cross the Pacific that things took a fateful turn. And what an epic ordeal it turns out to be. 

I don’t want to say too much of the particulars to give it away, but how had I not heard of this couple and their predicament before?! As a kid of the 1970s in California, I recall Patty Hearst and the Manson murders all too well (but not the British Baileys) and later I became well-acquainted with survival tales of the most direst of circumstances from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s and the other polar explorers’ to the 1972 airplane crash in the Andes (Alive), to Chris McCandless going Into the Wild in Alaska. But in particular, the Baileys’ ordeal reminded me slightly of Lauren Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken about the true tale of Louis Zamperini whose plane crashed into the Pacific in 1943 during WWII leaving him stranded on a raft for a long time. Poor Louis, I felt his agony in the open ocean on every page that I turned. And now I’ve added the Baileys’ story to my collection. 

I think because of the book’s title I had thought it would be a survival tale that disintegrated their marriage while at sea. But I assumed wrong. In fact, their marriage is something uplifting in their ordeal that helps and binds them together. Maralyn turns out to be mentally strong and optimistic, whereas Maurice has spells of throwing in the towel and despair. Their yin-and yang combination helps their will to fight. And their tactics are a bit illuminating should you ever become in trouble. 

The author, journalist Sophie Elmhirst is interested in this marriage angle of the Baileys’ story: how they fit and worked together — two sort of oddball people and what they manage to do. It kept me engaged with it. And for squeamish folks, it’s not for the light of heart, since raw seafood is fair game when you’re all alone with dwindling supplies in the vast Pacific Ocean. My only quibble with the book … is that the writing style is short and simple and somehow made it feel a bit muted at times. Still I consumed the book quickly, lapping up every detail and committing it to memory — the odd history of the Baileys. Some of it is sort of sad, even later, or kooky, and other parts inspiring. See what you think. It was on my summer reading list as Book #6. 

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight / 304 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. This is a coming-of-age novel — a genre I often like — about a Canadian girl (Penelope known as Pen) who goes to her first year at university in Edinburgh, Scotland. There she falls in with a group of friends as they navigate young age, school, independence, and their love lives.

She also gets in touch with a friend of her fathers’ — aristocrat Elliot Lennox, a mystery writer — in hopes that he might know something about her divorced parents’ past — what happened with them and what they seem to be not telling her. The Lennox family lives in an old mansion on a rural estate, where Pen is soon visiting as she befriends the entire family, including the swoon-worthy son, Sasha, whom she begins to dream about. 

This is a promising debut by a 36-year-old Canadian author … and there was much to like. The author has a lively style with a good vocabulary, and Pen is an empathetic, young protagonist whom you feel for as she’s learning the ropes around school, going out with friends, but not being fully sure of herself, or confident in the love department. Then she meets Sasha who seems dashing and worth it, but is he available or not? She’s curious too about finding out a secret about her parents’ past, which by the end she figures out from her visits with the Lennoxes. And it’s a doozie of a secret. 

So I liked much of it, though it’s a novel perhaps a bit too chock full of its varied cast and their particulars. Pen’s best friend Alice comes to narrate some chapters about her affair with a rogue professor, which I didn’t think was really necessary. And Sasha’s mother Christina is delved into quite a bit. To me, it was Pen’s journey and so, I would’ve streamlined these other distractions and plotlines and expanded hers a bit more. Still I think it was promising enough to want to see what Emma Knight will write next. This was Book #7 on my summer list of 15. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these and if so, what did you think? 

Hi Bookworms. How has your past week been? Coming back from hitting golf balls at the range yesterday, I was looking for the perfect picture of the yellow canola fields and I took a number of shots. In case you’re wondering: the Canola Council says that “canola oil is one of the healthiest cooking oils available, with zero trans fat and the lowest amount of saturated fat of all common cooking oils.” These yellow flowers develop into pods, sort of like pea pods that contain tiny black seeds. Once harvested, canola seeds are crushed to release the oil contained within the seed. It seems like so far the Canadian canola industry has weathered the recent tariff storm with the U.S. and China, though much uncertainty about the market remains. Still it’s one of this areas’ biggest agricultural exports. 

Meanwhile we’ve been having a lot of rain this summer, which is sort of good to douse smoke and wildfires and it’s also sort of bewildering since the area in the past is usually so dry. We had more than four inches of rain in June and we might hit another five inches by the end of July. Wow will we be swimming soon? It’s been a bit hard on the activities, but it’s keeping things green. Maybe it’s good for book reading, though I didn’t finish any this week. I’ve got three books going: Sophie Elmhirst’s nonfiction survival tale A Marriage at Sea (print); Emma Knight’s coming-of-age novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus (on audio); and a novel for Publishers Weekly (in print), which I can’t divulge, coming in the fall. So I think I’ll be done with these soon and can review them. 

It appears since it’s mid-July we are more than halfway through the year and people and sites have been putting out some lists of book favorites so far (see the NYT’s list here). I’ve read some good ones and it’s a bit hard to choose my favorites yet. Recently Roisin O’Donnell’s debut Nesting and Clare Leslie Hall’s novel Broken Country were strong to me as well as the nonfiction A Marriage at Sea could be a contender. Here are three good smaller reads (pictured above), which may be going a bit under the radar. They are little gems. Fifteen Wild Decembers (2023) by British author Karen Powell is the story of the Bronte family from Emily Bronte’s perspective. This fascinating novel peeks into their lives — the sisters who became famous authors — and the tough childhood they endured due to the loss of their mother and two other sisters, yet Charlotte, Emily, and Anne still rose above their meager and trying circumstances to write beloved novels. This is how it unfolded.  

Next is A Family Matter by Claire Lynch (June) about a family torn apart by a long-ago custody battle in a small English village. This novel starts out quietly about a father and daughter in later life (2022) but then goes back 40 years earlier (1982) to recount a time things changed in their family. By the end, it packs a bit of a wallop to the heart. I don’t want to say too much, but the story draws you in as it goes along. 

Then there’s The Scrapbook (June) by Heather Clark about a Harvard college student in 1996 who gets involved with a German exchange student and their romance hits some bumps as they navigate a long-distance relationship and grandfathers who fought on opposite sides of World War II. The girl finds a scrapbook in her family’s attic of her grandfather’s time during the war that makes her want to find out more, and her boyfriend takes her around to visit some European sites. It’s a bit unsettling and you have to wait till the end to see if they will stay together or what will happen. Will love win out, or will the pains of the past and history be too great? This provided some interesting self-discovery and discussions over the war and guilt and responsibility.

So that’s it for this week. I’m sure you’ve also found some small hidden gems to read this year … and if so, what were they?

Hello Bookworms. I’m sorry to be behind on keeping in touch and visiting blogs from last weekend. I just got home from a week of reffing a couple provincial tennis tournaments north of us. It was long days from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. so I’m resting up now and it’s nice to be back home. The tennis was mostly played on outdoor courts, but one afternoon we had some rain and the competitors played inside this bubble (pictured). It went fairly smoothly, and the kids seemed to get plenty of matches to play, though I didn’t get much reading in, lol. 

In book news I was sad to hear of the recent passing of author Paulette Jiles, who wrote News of the World and other historical fiction. I remember being transported by her 2016 novel about the 400-mile Texas wagon journey that Captain Kidd, a veteran of the Civil War, takes with a 10-year-old Indian-kidnapped girl who needs to be returned to her family.

According to The Washington Post’s obit of Ms. Jiles: she had lived for the past two decades “in a one-room cabin outside a Texas town called Utopia. Looking out on the 30-acre ranch where she lived alone with her dogs, cats and horses, she wrote novels with the lyricism and precision of a longtime poet, channeling the rugged beauty of the Hill Country and the Sabinal River that flowed nearby.”  Wow she lived on 30 acres with her animals by herself. I’m sad to see her go. I will have to pick up another of her novels sometime. 

And now I will leave you with a review of what I finished lately. 

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid / Ballantine / 352 pages / 2025

Oh yeah, this novel captures the life of Joan Goodwin, a professor of astronomy at Rice University, who’s accepted by NASA to train to be an astronaut in the 1980s. Alternating chapters go back and forth in time following her journey through the space program, and to a current unfolding disaster with a space shuttle mission in 1984. 

Both storylines make for enticing reading. The current situation is played out pretty grippingly … as it’s a bit reminiscent of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from 2003. Not exactly, but it’s hard not to think of that along with the Challenger disaster in 1986. The other past storyline of Joan’s journey at NASA is equally intriguing as she becomes friends with the other trainees, faces up to the sexism of the day, and helps with her young precocious niece Frances since her sister is a single mom. I can’t say too much more, but there is an illicit relationship with a pilot in the program that seems to transform Joan along the way. She faces quite a bit adversity with her family, her job, and in her personal life, but she seems quite capable, generous, and accepting of who she is. And the ending with the space disaster is quite dramatic. 

In various ways the novel seems like the popular book of the summer. It’s received more than 27,500 reviews on Goodreads with a high rating of 4.44, and the author was on the cover of Time Magazine. And like Helen at Helen’s Book Blog, I thought it was Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best novel so far. I have read two of TJR’s other books and they didn’t really come close to this. 

Atmosphere reminded me a bit of a Kristin Hannah novel if you like those … maybe that’s  because it’s a similar kind of read as Hannah’s novel The Women from last year. That one was about female nurses in the Vietnam War and this one is about female astronauts in space, but they’re both popular kind of fiction reads about women going through a seminal era. Also Hannah’s novel was narrated by Julia Whelan for the audiobook who also narrated Atmosphere. Both novels seem to explore their environments without going too overboard deep. Atmosphere gets into the space techie lingo and training but didn’t get too weighed down into nerdy space science … not say like Andy Weir’s novel The Martian does. It’s just an entertaining summer read with action and drama and seemed resonant of what many career women in that era went through. I was pleased it was on my summer list. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read this and what did you think? 

Hi Bookworms. I hope you all had a good holiday week. Though now it’s very sad to hear about the flood victims in Texas. I’ve been thinking of those caught in the disaster. I will keep posting some happy animal photos to help try to deal in hard times. This deer was right by me on the golf course this week. It was sitting in the shade near the cart path and didn’t seem bothered as our group of four golfers went by. Some of the deer on the course seem pretty tame, and this one just wanted a shady rest break.

This past week we had Stella’s 13th birthday, which I think for a big dog in human years is equivalent to around 91. She’s an amazing girl — still swimming on hot days — and likes to boss us around. We give her lots of love and she’s doing okay though her legs are a bit wobbly. She’s a big eater and would’ve eaten the whole pie we got for her, but we gave her just a sliver of a piece. It was banana cream pie from the Country Store here. She was happy about that.

Meanwhile, I will be away this coming week reffing the provincial tennis tournament up north of us. It’ll be long, hot days on the tennis court watching teenagers compete and viewing whether the ball was in or out of the lines. You might have seen a bit of Wimbledon going on, so it’s a bit similar but not exactly that level, lol. Speaking of sports, my husband and I plan to watch the Tour de France race via streaming this month (July 5-27). So it’ll be my July in Paris contribution. It’s amazing to see the cyclists ride over mountains and all the countryside they pass by. They’re phenomenal athletes.

And now here is a photo recap (above) of the books I finished in May (the bottom row) and the ones I finished in June (top row). They were all pretty good books and three of them were on my summer list: The Last Secret Agent, Broken Country, and Nesting. It’s a bit hard to pick my favorite out of these, various ones were strong, but I’m able to pick three that I think I liked less than the rest: Something to Look Forward to (short stories), First Lie Wins, and Stone Yard Devotional. The others were solid and held me throughout. And I was pleased to make it through the long, modern classic Ferrante’s Book 2. I’m pretty sure Ferrante must have kept a detailed notebook of everything she did and remembered in life from a young age, lol. It seems pretty autobiographical, but that’s just a guess since she wrote the books under a pseudonym.

*Also I got an email note back from author Flynn Berry that said her last two novels (Northern Spy and Trust Her) are a duology, so not a trilogy series. I had asked her whether her sister characters of Tessa and Miriam would continue, but sadly no. Still those novels were great.

And now here are a couple reviews of what I finished lately.

So Far Gone by Jess Walter / Harper / 272 pages / 2025

4 stars+. This was my first Jess Walter novel and it was a bit of a hoot … about an old codger named Rhys Kinnick, a retired environmental journalist, who’s been living off the grid for about seven years in a cabin in the woods north of Spokane … trying to fend off some hungry raccoons from taking his food. He’s been a bit estranged from his family ever since he sort of accidentally punched his son-in-law Shane during an argument over one of Shane’s ridiculous conspiracy theories.

But then Rhys’s grandkids Leah, 13, and Asher 8, come to his door saying their mom has taken off with a note to go to his house. But before he can get to know them too much, two goons arrive from Shane’s Army of the Lord militia, knocking out Rhys and taking the kids to a church compound in Idaho. Uh-oh.

Not to be out-done, Rhys stages a mission to get the kids back engaging the help of an old flame from the newspaper (Lucy); a manic retired police detective (Chuck); and a Native American friend named Brian. Rhys also later gets back in touch with his daughter Bethany about the kids and after spending time together they eventually resolve various issues they’ve had from long ago.

The plot is a ruckus, endearing funny thing, mainly because of luddite Rhys, the dialogue in it, and the offbeat partners he teams up with. He’s a good guy that comes to see the error of his ways of cutting off his family and tries to make amends to them. The novel speaks a bit to the divisions and political shenanigans happening in the U.S. And there was one passage in particular I noted:

As a journalist. As an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency. Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.
At some point, you look around, and think, I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of this.

It has some true aspects to it and I got some laughs out of the novel. Thanks to Jess Walter for making this lovable old-school character in Rhys Kinnick.

The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines by Pippa LaTour with Jude Dobson / St. Martin’s / 304 pages / 2025

4+ stars. You got to love nonfiction books like this … authors who tell of their remarkable secret lives when they’re 102 years old … right before they pass away. Pippa LaTour did this. She was living in New Zealand ready to go quietly into the dark night, but then her kids found out on the internet that she (Phyllis then) might have been someone back in WWII. Oh yeah she was. So Pippa finally decided to come clean and tell her story.

She was born in South Africa in 1921. Her parents died early on, and she was left with her father’s cousin in the Belgian Congo. Then she was sent to boarding school in Kenya, later France, and then onto England in 1939 at age 18, where she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Since she was fluent in various languages she was recruited to be a British agent in the (SOE), who came to work as a radio operator in France giving secret info about German troops to her British superiors.

All this is laid out in her book. And Pippa tells it like it is. I was most curious how she trained to be a paratrooper and secretly parachuted into Orne, Normandy in May 1944. Once there, she assumed the role of a Paris schoolgirl selling soap, a disguise that allowed her to move between various hidden radio sets. She was questioned by the Nazis several times — and even apparently was raped before the perpetrator was shot by another German soldier — but she was never found out in relaying 135 coded messages to SOE headquarters in London.

During that year of war, she witnessed various executions and saw many dead bodies and was traumatized and exhausted by the end. After the war, she never visited France again and moved to Africa and later Auckland, New Zealand to live, where she never told her husband of her WWII service, and her kids only found out late in life.

Her book is quite a candid, courageous account. It’s jumps around a bit and moves quickly, not going into too much depth. Still the danger behind enemy lines felt imminent and I was on my toes with Pippa’s story. I listened to the audiobook narrated superbly by Jilly Bond.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these pictured and if so, what did you think?

Hi bookworms, how are you doing? This post is named after a book title so I’m just putting that qualifier out there, lol. I know it’s been a particularly difficult news week with the tragic Air India flight and the awful news out of Minnesota … in addition to the political strife and the Middle East developments, so I’m hoping to keep things on a lighter note with more happy dog photos.

Last week I posted a photo of our 4.5-year-old Labrador Willow, so this week it’s Stella’s turn. She’s a happy dog and proud as you can see after a swim in the river. We took the dogs on a hot evening last Monday and they are always so happy around water and swimming. Stella is our wonder dog. We got her as a puppy in 2012 and on July 3 she will turn 13, which in dog years is like 91. She’s been an amazing dog and part of the family, and we hope to give her a big birthday party on July 3. She deserves a little ice cream and cake, lol. But she’s nuts about any kind of food in general.

In book news, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced on Thursday and the debut novel The Safekeep by Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden won. I was glad to see it win since I had liked the novel and felt it was a pretty powerful story set in postwar Netherlands. It beat out Elizabeth Strout’s novel Tell Me Everything and Miranda July’s All Fours among others.

In nonfiction the book winner went to British doctor Rachel Clarke for her book The Story of a Heart about an organ transplant between two children. Tina over at the blog Turn the Page had great things to say about the book in her review.

Also the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was announced and English writer Andrew Miller won for his novel The Land in Winter, which is set in a remote English community during the long, hard winter of 1962/63. Apparently it’s about two couples whose lives begin to unravel during this particularly harsh winter. Miller’s book beat out Kevin Barry’s novel The Heart in Winter and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep among others, so that’s saying something. I have not read the author before but requested that my library get a copy since it’s not in their collection.

And now I’ll leave you with reviews of what I finished lately. Both of these novels below were on my summer reading list and both made for pretty gripping audiobooks. The protagonists in each are flawed individuals who go through much emotional angst and take you along with them.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall / Simon & Schuster / 320 pages / 2025

4.3 stars. Brief Synopsis: In 1968, Beth and her husband Frank are living life on their Dorset farm caring for sheep with the help of Frank’s brother Jimmy, but are still missing their nine-year-old son Bobby who died in an accident two years earlier. Then an old flame of Beth’s — Gabriel Wolfe, a famous novelist, returns to town with his son Leo and Beth reconnects with Gabriel, over his son who reminds her a bit of Bobby and things begin to turn dicey.

The novel follows timelines in the past about how Beth, Frank, and Gabriel came to know one another during their schooldays, and in the present with their current relations … as well as chapters of a murder trial, which takes a while to piece together who’s died and who is on trial. But soon enough it all becomes clear and the consequences for all weigh heavily on the line.

Oh what a weaved web it becomes, and towards the end there’s a couple of twists that might surprise you. Perhaps there might be one turn or twist too much near the end, but it still felt feasible. The story is told from Beth’s perspective and you feel for her, though she’s flawed and you wish she had more of a backbone to her on what her actions are going to set off and to make better decisions. It’s a bit of an intense love story but clever in ways it comes together and is well told. It could be up for: the page-turner of the summer … as it has a bit of romance, a bit of violence, and much sadness and regret but also a bit of latent hope.

Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell / Algonquin / 400 pages / 2025

4.5 stars. Brief Synopsis: In Dublin, a pregnant woman with two little girls flees a controlling, volatile husband, who pretends there is nothing wrong and that he provides well for them. Ciara is at the end of her tether with Ryan, who she decides to leave after another incident. While he’s at work, she leaves with the girls in their beater car and goes to the homeless shelter, which is full up, that sends them to a rundown hotel. She tries to make a new life for herself and the girls, but Ryan is besieging her with texts to come home and that if she doesn’t he will sue for full custody and win.

The novel, told from Ciara’s perspective, is truly squirm-worthy as you follow her daily struggles just to get by with the girls, and how she will navigate Ryan’s manipulative ways. Her anxiety and fears are palpable, and she’s unable to go to her family’s in England as the law forbids it without her husband’s permission, (ugh), which he bars.

A court case looms for custody of the children, along with the baby she is about to have, that is a nail biter along with the months after the trial. At times, I wished Ciara was much stronger in facing up to her husband and not giving in to his demands, though in some ways I gather it was a bit of a realistic portrayal of a person who’s been psychologically abused for a long while … who is unsure of the path forward and thinks appeasement might work. This is an intense novel but also the writing makes it quite a notable debut.

So these first two books on my summer list turned out to be winners. Both are a bit emotionally intense, but if you don’t mind that, you might be gripped by them as well.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these and if so, what did you think?