The Woman Upstairs Claire Messud Vintage Nora Eldridge is angry. She’s done pretty much everything expected of her: graduates college, holds her dying mother’s hand, calls her father every day, works a respectable job. Except that she was supposed to be a Great Artist, but instead she’s teaching eight-year-olds. And she’s forty two and single. …
While my reason for visiting Pepin was really to check off a Little House site from my bucket list, I was charmed by the village itself and the surrounding area. Driving in on US 61, I turned onto the Great River Road and drove alongside the bluffs, overlooking the Upper Mississippi. Known as the Driftless Area, …
I have long wanted to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House sites scattered around the Midwest and decided this summer was the time to start with a quick trip to Pepin, Wisconsin—which also, coincidentally enough, is the closest to my West Michigan home. One thing you should know about Little House Wayside, as the Little …
It’s hard to believe that in July 2010 I started writing about books on some new (to me!) thing called a blog. I hit my 100th post hardly even thinking about it, so when I saw the post numbers creeping up this month excitement started to get the best of me. Two hundred is a lot of life, …
I’m almost finished with my summer digital reader’s copies and when I am, man-oh-man, I am diving into this shelf of real, honest-to-goodness print books as soon as I can. I’ll breathe that thick paper and glue smell deeply and bookmark my pages with an honest-to-goodness dog-ear, not a wimpy little icon inserted at the …
What reader doesn’t like reading about books … or bookstores or libraries or authors, for that matter? I’m surprised, really, at how many I’ve read over the past year or two: A.J. Fikry, Small Blessings, Mill River Redemption, The Bookman’s Tale. Here are two recent releases, one about a powerful book and the other about …
A Million Miles In a Thousand Years Donald Miller Nelson Publishing Most people assume that as a teacher, I’m the one who instructs. And it’s kind of implicit in the teacher-student relationship, I agree. But as I move into my twenty-third year of teaching (good heavens!), I find that dynamic is often flipped, and it’s my …
The Truth According To Us (NetGalley) Annie Barrows Random House The charm of writer Annie Barrow’s Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is legendary, especially in the book club world. How many modern “literary societies”, I wonder, have read the novel since its publication in 2008? I know it had everything I love in a …
The One I Was (Abovethetreeline) Eliza Graham Lake Union Publishing Rosamund Hunter has a secret—that much we know. A hospice nurse, she all but freezes as she stands in the vestibule of the imposing manor Fairfleet, home of her next patient, “trying to accustom [herself] to being at Fairfleet again.” And we’re off on a …
Whiskey & Charley (NetGalley) Annabel Smith Sourcebooks Landmark Twins Whiskey and Charley were identical in looks, but couldn’t have been more different in temperament. Whiskey, the first born, was athletic, brash, and daring as a child. As an adult, those same qualities served him well as an ad executive and his successes were many. Charley …
This is my symphony 