Tag: America

The Almost moon by Alice Sebold

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About the book

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. And as this electrifying novel opens, she steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. But while her act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a lifetime’s buried desire. Over the next twenty-four hours, her life rushes in at her as she confronts the choices that have brought her to this crossroads.

Reviewed by The Olive Tree

Extremely well devised story of a dysfunctional family. Explores all kinds of self but unexpressed feelings around family and life generally.

Star rating: ****

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Of mice and men by John Steinbeck

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About the book

The childlike Lennie is lost without his guardian, George, who feels his slow-witted friend has been delivered into his keeping. Bound by their fragile dream of owning land where they will ‘belong’, their paradisial future is soon shattered

Reviewed by The Accidental Book Group

This book proved a great trigger to discussing social problems which are still relevant today.

Star rating: ****

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That Old Ace in the hole by Annie Proulx

Gilbert3 Comments

About the book

Folks in the Texas panhandle do not like hog farms. But Bob Dollar is determined to see his new job as hog site scout for Global Pork Rind through to the end. However he is forced to face the idiosyncratic inhabitants of Woolybucket and to question his own notions of loyalty and home.

Reviewed by U3A Group 1

Enjoyed by all. Wonderful evocation of the deep South – people and places and a fascinating story.

Star rating: ****

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The Good father by Noah Hawley

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book cover

About the book

America is rocked by the shooting of a presidential candidate and the young man arrested for the crime is Danny, the child of Dr Paul Allen’s first marriage – news which sends the family down a harrowing path of no return. Even if he is the only man in the world who believes in Danny’s innocence, Paul is determined to prove it.

Reviewed by Everton Reading Group

A well planned, well written but sad tale. This really pulled at the emotions and empathy for Dr Paul Allen and his experiences. It held the readers’ attention to the very end. A powerful book! For once we can believe what it said on the dust cover!

Star rating: ****

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Thirteen moons by Charles Frazier

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About the book

At the age of 12, under the Wind Moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone to the edge of the Cherokee Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home.

Review by Petersfield U3A Reading Circle 1

This book gives a fascinating insight into the life of the Cherokee before their forced move further west. We hadn’t realised the extent of their prosperity and commercial success, even to the extent of owning plantations and slaves in Carolina, before the government took back their land. It was a slow moving but at times poignant account of a long period if American history. It would probably have benefitted from being somewhat shorter – it took time to read. It is however beautifully written and was enjoyed.

Star rating: ***

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The last runaway by Tracy Chevalier

Gilbert5 Comments

About the book

When Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol with her sister, she is fleeing heartache for a new life in America, far from home. But tragedy leaves her alone and vulnerable, torn between two worlds and dependent on the kindness of strangers, and life in 1850s Ohio is precarious and unsentimental.

Review by Oliver’s Battery WI

We really enjoyed the storyline and characters in this book. Not only was it a plausible plot but educational too. We’re all thinking of taking up quilting this winter! Pick up a copy, hope you enjoy it too.

Star rating: ****

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The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

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About the book

From the author of ‘Blonde’, ‘The Falls’ and ‘We Were the Mulvaneys’, this new novel takes in the themes of race, immigration, family and social mobility, and is Joyce Carol Oates at her storytelling best.
‘The Gravedigger’s Daughter’ tells the tale of Rebecca Schwart, born in the late 1930s to an immigrant family from Nazi Germany, just as they are arriving to America. The family settles in a small, bleak town in upstate New York, where the only job the father can get is as the town gravedigger and caretaker of the cemetery. Soon the town’s prejudice and the family’s own emotional frailty results in unspeakable tragedy. In the wake of this loss, and in an attempt to put her past behind her, young Rebecca Schwart moves on, across America and through a series of listless marriages, in search of somewhere, and someone, to whom she can belong.

Reviewed by Museum Book Group:

A dark book which is not an easy read. Difficult to know characters that one cannot know in depth. A storyline with an unsatisfactory ending. One member would read another book by this author. The rest found this a cold and difficult book.

Star rating: *

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The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

Gilbert3 Comments

About the book

It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine’s young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, “the Widow Bride of the Falls,” begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to this plain, strange woman. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family–a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which they were thrown together begins to shadow them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder.

Review by The Olive Tree Reading Group:

Generally liked, but was criticised for its length, failure to examine the outcome of the ‘love canal’ scandal vis a vis the people who suffered as a result. A good read if sometimes repetitious.

Star rating: ***

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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

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About the book

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Reviewed by Littleton Book Club:

This is an absorbing book, full of life and colour and fascinating characters; beautifully written, a real eye-opener into black American culture evoking sympathy and admiration for its people.

Rating: ***

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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About the book

‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’
A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior – to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

Reviewed by New Forest – Waterside U3A Theatre and Waterside

A story, gripping from first to last with its eternal themes as important now as in 1960. Our group members were all able to visualize Maycomb and identify the spread of characters. Most had monochrome memories of Gregory Peck but these did not detract from their literacy assessment of this brilliant novel. It generated ninety minutes of wide ranging discussion.
Star rating: ****

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