The Cue Card

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?

Hi bookworms, I hope you are well. Ugh, we’ve had our first smoky weekend of the season here from wildfires in the north of Alberta and other provinces. I know others in the States are getting plumes of smoke as well. It gives me a headache so we close the windows and turn on the air, and Willow takes a nap next to my desk. When I first started coming to Canada in the summer of 2006, wildfires and smoke weren’t a big problem but just in the past eight to ten years it seems to have become more of a constant. Most of the fires start by lightening in the forests but some are man-made … all spurred on by climate change. It’s sad to see the planet burning … hopefully the world leaders can discuss it when they come for the G7 Summit in the mountains here in Alberta next weekend. It’s going to be an important meeting of various issues but will anything come of it? I’m not sure with the current White House occupant attending and his detrimental tariffs.

Meanwhile I have quite a great library book haul here that I haven’t been able to get to yet as I’m finishing a review for Publishers Weekly and nearing the end of Elena Ferrante’s epic The Story of a New Name. Yesterday I finished the audiobook of Roisin O’Donnell’s novel Nesting, which is my first book on my summer reading list. Whoa, it’s quite a powerful and tense story about a mother of three in Dublin trying to get out of an emotionally abusive marriage. More on that book in my next post. But first, what do you think of these pictured? Have you read any? I’m eager to start a few, but I need to clear my slate this week. Last week was a whirlwind with painters at the house and a slew of golf and tennis activities and summer yard work. Things are in high gear, lol.

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

Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring / Europa / 2024

4.5 stars. I really enjoyed returning to these characters who live in Dalton, Maine, that takes place five years after what happens in her first novel The Road to Dalton. Sadly a suicide in that story leaves a wake on the close-knit residents here in Book 2. Sexually conflicted Greg is in college now and has thinned his fat self down through running but has to work up to telling his father that he’s not interested in working at his hardware store. Nate has stopped being a cop and is working at the lumber mill while caring for daughter Sophie. He and Rose, who’s broken up with abusive Tommy, seem to be edging a bit closer since arranging playdates for their kids. While Nate’s mother Bev and Trudy’s relations hit some bumps after Trudy’s husband Richard, the town’s doctor, suffers a health scare.

Bowring seems like a disciple of Elizabeth Strout in that her handful of cast interconnect with one another and live in a small town in Maine. It doesn’t seem as dark as Strout’s books. The details and bits of small humor make it warm and the townspeople come to life with Bowring’s wondrous storytelling. Is it a bit sentimental? Perhaps a bit but she is a lovely writer and I really look forward to Book 3 titled In a Distant Valley, which is due to be released Oct. 7 this year. I think it will end in a trilogy, so we must see what will happen to these endearing characters. I thought Book 2 was equally as good as Book 1, and I especially loved the little bits of humor sprinkled in. I listened to both read by Patricia Shade who narrates the books wonderfully.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood / Riverhead / 304 pages / 2024

3.5 stars. This novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize so I was eager to get to it. I found the book grim and strange. When I first picked it up, I thought I would like it a lot more — it’s about a secular woman who goes to a cloister in rural Australia to find some solace and refuge from her life and marriage. But the story is full of a mice plague that occurs and her grim musings about bad things that have happened in the past. She’s never gotten over the death of her parents, which is sad, and she comes across a woman she knew in her youth who was bullied mercilessly at her school and she feels guilty to have being involved in.

While there, a nun, who was killed abroad, has bones returned to the cloister. There’s much about the bones, the mice, her lost parents, and the bullied woman. I would’ve backed up the car in the driveway and zoomed outta there when the furry creatures started scurrying all over the landscape… then the woman would’ve saved herself various dark feelings about all the other things she was fretting about. Despite my misgivings, there are some scattered nicely written passages throughout the book, so I’ll give her that.

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

Hi bookworms, how are you? Happy Memorial Day weekend for those in the States. Are you going to the beach? Summer is about upon on us now in this hemisphere, yay! We’ve been dodging rainstorms here and have been out gardening, mowing, planting, and putting in the annual vegetable patch. It’s still very green outside, which is great to see.

Recently when I was in California, I battled a maze of traffic to get to downtown Los Angeles to the Central Library and paid for a nonresident library card. Woohoo, this is great to have. It allows me a broad access to reserve ebooks and downloadable audiobooks from afar, which I can’t get here since we live rurally outside the city limits. I can get print books at my city’s library but not audios or ebooks due to something they say about copyright.

So I’m now actually a paid member of four libraries (!) — two of them are local to me in Canada and two are in the States. The Houston library is phasing out nonresident memberships so that will expire in December. As we all know library access is essential since it allows us less reliance for books on Amazon or Audible (both owned by Jeff Bezos), though it’s still good to support indie book outlets when possible. I rely on the library more since we have collected too many books over the decades.

And now it’s time to reveal my 2025 Summer Book List for the reading challenge put on this year by Emma at the blog Words and Peace and Annabel at AnnaBookBel. I had over 30 books that I was considering for my list and then cut that down to 15. I decided that I would pick recently released books for the list and move my backlist reading to the fall. I chose 13 novels and 2 nonfiction and I tried to pick books that would be highly readable and less dense for summer. I aimed mostly for page-turners that you could read at the beach. I hope to read these from June until September. So here it is …. drumroll please …

• Atmosphere — is a novel from the popular author of Daisy Jones & the Six that is coming out June 3 about a woman who gets involved in the space program in the 1980s and finds unexpected love too.
• Broken Country — Set in a small English farming community in the late 1960s, this novel is said to be a doozy that involves a love triangle that unearths a couple of twists and deadly secrets from the past.
• The Death of Us — is a crime novel about a London couple that struggles with the aftermath of a violent crime and an upcoming trial.
• Tilt — is a novel about a pregnant woman’s journey across Portland, Oregon, in the aftermath of a major earthquake.
• Juice —is a survival tale set in a future Australia devastated by climate change where two fugitives — a man and a child — take refuge at an abandoned mine site but they are not alone.
• The Lion Women of Tehran — is a novel starting in the 1950s that chronicles the decades-long friendship of two Iranian women whose lives are upended by their country’s political upheaval.
• Heartwood — is a novel about the search and rescue that ensues after an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
• The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus — is a poignant coming-of-age story about a woman who while attending the University of Edinburgh in 2006 is taken in by an enigmatic family as she discovers secrets about her own.
• So Far Gone — is a novel about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren in an increasingly divided America.
• Nesting — is a propulsive novel about a Dublin-based mother who, after years of emotional and sexual abuse, decides to leave her husband.
• Rabbit Moon — is a novel about a young American woman in Shanghai who ends up in a coma after a hit-and-run … and her estranged parents and close sister who become involved.
• Dream Count — is a novel about four African women and their joys and disappointments over time on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Audition — is a novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man as they struggle to grasp who they are to each other.
• A Marriage at Sea — is a nonfiction true story (coming out July 8) about a young couple shipwrecked at sea, which is said to be “a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits.”
• The Last Secret Agent — reveals the untold story about the last surviving World War II spy operating in Nazi France and her time as a secret agent.

So there you have it. I decided to go with 15 instead of 20 to leave a little wiggle room in case I meander with other books. It’ll keep me busy. What do you think of these picks? Do you see any you might like?

Cheers. Talk to you next week.

Hi all. How’s your week been? I arrived home from California on Tuesday evening and have been trying to get back into things here though the weather has been pretty rainy. You can see in the photo it’s making everything green on our street, which is great, especially for the drought. We will start planting our vegetable garden this coming week once the sun peeps out again. Leaving California was a bit bittersweet, but my Dad’s work friends put on a nice life celebration for him and there was a good-sized gathering. I’m not sure I will be visiting the Golden State as much anymore, though I still have two siblings who live there so I’m sure I will visit sometime.

It so happens that Memorial Day weekend is coming up and that means summer is around the corner. I noticed I put out my Summer Reading List last year on May 23, so I’ll be thinking this week about which books I want to read this summer and if I want to make my 2025 list 10 or 15 books. I usually sneak in several other books during the summer, so I don’t want to load my list up too much. Last year I read 11 out of 15 on my list, so I’m leaning towards a list of 10. What about you — do you like summer reading lists? And do you plan to make one? This year Emma at the blog Words and Peace and Annabel at AnnaBookBel are hosting the Summer Challenge, so see their blogs if you want to sign up. Many are going for a 20 book list! It’s always fun to see what others have on their lists and to make one’s own. Stay tuned next weekend when I reveal mine.

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon / Doubleday / 448 pages / 2023

4.3 stars. This historical novel was on my summer reading list last year and I’m glad I finally got to it. Some call it biographical fiction since it’s about the real life of midwife Martha Ballard in 1789 Maine and how she gets caught up in a murder trial and investigation. The storytelling captured my imagination and was as easy to get into as ice cream on a hot summer day. It didn’t take long before I was a part of its small town and saw the river that was frozen the day Joshua Burgess’s body was pulled from it.

Midwife Martha, age 54, hasn’t lost a mother in all of her days delivering babies but now she’s dealing with a pompous new male doctor in town who’s wrong about his diagnoses and circumstances that tell her that Joshua Burgess, accused of a recent rape, was hanged before he was thrown into the water. Burgess and his friend Judge North were accused of rape by Rachel Foster months earlier, whose injuries Martha saw and tended to. But these crimes still need to be figured out and their perpetrators brought to justice.

You’ll need to settle in for this enjoyable slow-burn read as Martha goes about life with her family, her job delivering babies around town, and trying to connect the dots about who the guilty are. Martha is a likable character, a mother of five (and sadly more deceased), and is a strong lady for those times. Her horse Brutus gets where she needs to be, while husband Ephraim is a supportive partner, and her own kids might know more about the accused than she wishes.

Also a bit of Martha’s backstory is revealed intermittently in chapters, while chapters in the present deal with the ongoing murder case and the tough lives of women back then. You might not want to birth a baby for a while after this story, lol … but the storytelling delivers a compelling tale surrounding midwife Mary’s life. The Author’s Note at the back is interesting too to note how she came across this historical figure and which parts she wrote were real and which fiction. I look forward to seeing what the author writes next. Her books are mostly biographical/historical fiction and I’ve been digging those lately.

Trust Her by Flynn Berry / Viking / 304 pages / 2024

4+ stars. This suspense novel takes place three years after what happened in Flynn Berry’s earlier book Northern Spy … in which the two Northern Irish sisters Tessa and Marian Daly barely escape the IRA for informing. Now they’re living secret lives in Dublin until one day they’re discovered and an IRA member comes knocking and wants info from Tessa and for her to turn her previous MI-5 handler, or lose everything. Uh-oh. All the while, Tessa’s a divorced single mom trying her best to keep her four-year-old son Finn’s life out of this and safe. Then her sister goes missing on a hike and things turn topsy-turvy.

I liked this one considerably better than Northern Spy. It has more action and more twists and turns. It’s downright scary near the end. Trouble certainly finds these two sisters! You’ll want to shake them and second-guess their decisions. It’s squirm-worthy whether they can get out of the mess they find themselves in… caught between the IRA, Tessa’s former handler, and a police detective determined to uncover something. It didn’t feel certain whether lies or the truth would help Tessa better keep them out of danger …. and death always seems imminent. Kudos to the author for this lively dilemma and plot, which I listened to as an audiobook. I gather this will not be part of a trilogy with the Irish sisters but just a sequel. Still I’d be curious what happens to the sisters next … should the author change her mind for Part 3.

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

Hi all. How’s your week been? Things are ramping up now with spring and the nice weather. I am in California for a long weekend for a celebration of my parents today. I’ve been walking around and biking. It’s nice to see people swimming in the Pacific even after 5 p.m. when this photo was taken, but so far I have not stuck my toes in yet. It’s too cold and the waves have been a little too rambunctious, lol. I am waiting for a warmer, calmer day.

In book news, you might have seen that Percival Everett’s novel James won again … this time for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last week. I admired the novel last year when I read it, which also won the National Book Award in the fall. It’s one of the rare novels that have won both awards. Here are the eight other novels that have won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award:

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Rabbit is Rich by John Updike
The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
A Fable by William Faulkner
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

What do you think — have you read any of these? I have read The Shipping News and The Color Purple, which I admired quite a long time ago. I’m not sure why I never got to The Underground Railroad, but there’s still time to read others on this list. Meanwhile congrats to Percival Everett once again for his novel James.

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

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy / Flatiron / 320 pages / 2025

4.0 stars. There’s plenty of drama, trauma, and eco-concerns amid the backdrop of a beautiful wild island in this novel set in the remote southwest Pacific Ocean. Dominic Salt and his three kids whose mother has died are caretakers on Shearwater Island that holds a seed vault to regrow plants in case of the apocalypse. A group of researchers used to be there too studying plants and creatures, but they’ve since left as the waters are rising and storms are wreaking havoc.

Soon Dominic and his family will be leaving as well after eight years or so … but before that happens an injured woman (Rowan) washes up from a shipwreck. Over time they become more attached to her and she to them, but both sides have secrets that they aren’t sharing about what’s up.

It crossed my mind that the plot seemed a bit contrived but I went along with it. It’s fairly entertaining and visual as you begin to latch on to Rowan and what her deal is coming to the island. Her husband Hank used to be a researcher there so it appears she’s trying to find out where he is or went. But there’s some graves on the island that need explaining among other things. I thought the story was alluring in its mysteriousness and the setting on the remote island with all the elements, and Dominic’s three kids too make for enticing characters you come to know, though the story turns a bit crazy towards the end and a late twist seems to stretch its believability.

I’ve finished all three of McConaghy’s novels (2 by audios, one in print) and have liked them for their eco-settings and concerns about the planet and wildlife and for being visual, adventure plots. Her books often have broken people as the main characters living in a world with more intense climate change, ones who’ve suffered hard traumas or much loss. And this one was no exception. Rowan and Dominic’s family have had their share of heartbreak and adversity. While sympathetic, I tire at times a bit of this aspect … so I thought the tale had some hits and misses for me. Still I was entertained enough traveling to Shearwater Island. Of McConaghy’s, I think I liked her first novel Migrations best … maybe because it was a bit new and potent back then. But they all share some similarities. I plan to keep reading her.

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston / Pamela Dorman / 352 pages / 2024

3.75 stars. This author has written a clever plot line that features a sharp protagonist in Evie Porter, aka Lucca Marino and enough twists and turns to make for a topsy-turvy experience, but did I hang on for the ride? Just barely. I got lost a couple times — no fault of the audiobook, but I retraced my tracks to get back onboard. Lucca is doing illegal missions for her mysterious boss Mr. Smith in which she always gets a new identity and needs to assimilate into a new neighborhood. But then she gets introduced to a woman who has her own name and must figure out if her boss is setting her up, or if the woman is trying to expose her and why.

When something happens to the woman and Evie’s later arrested on an outstanding warrant for a mission that happened years ago, Evie has to decide whether to trust the boyfriend she’s taken up with whom she’s been investigating — along with her techie friend Devon to help her get out of the situation. It’s a bit convoluted, but I was mostly onboard with what Lucca has to unravel. Still I was thoroughly exhausted by the end. I know a lot love these cat-and mouse kinds of benders … but I think I’ll need to leave town if ever a Evie Porter or Lucca Marino moves to my neighborhood.

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