⚾️🏟️🧢🦩💀🦩👞⛵️🐈📚🐲💳 Memoir, Murder, Magical, and Mythical

 

    My mother and her big sister grew up in Maryland in the 1940s and 1950s. This lovely memoir, About My Mother: True Stories of a Horse-Crazy Daughter and Her Baseball-Obsessed Mother by Peggy Rowe, is set in roughly the same time period. The memoir circulates around Peggy and her mother's relationship. It was one of opposites. Peggy's mother only did things the right way, which also happened to be her way. Peggy was horse-obsessed. Her mother never had a hair out of place, and Peggy's fondest desire was to dress as Annie Oakley. Peggy got herself into some funny scraps. What shines through the pages is the love these women had for each other. And how crazy her mother was about the Orioles!

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    Sometimes you need to read a cozy mystery, and I'm finding Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow series to be a balance of murder and mayhem with romance and buffoonery. Book #3, Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos, takes place in a single weekend in Yorktown, Virginia. Meg Langslow is an ornamental blacksmith and native of the area. Practically everyone there is a relative. They are an eccentric bunch. Her boyfriend's mother is the organizer of the annual Yorktown Reenactment of the siege of Yorktown with an accompanying craft fair. Her boyfriend's mother is dedicated to complete authenticity, including having the cannons firing night and day for realism. No wonder there's a murder!

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    Lost Evangeline: A Norendy Tale by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall, is the last book in the series. They are all set in Norendy, a vaguely 18th-century European country where strange, enchanting things happen. Evangeline is a very tiny girl found by her cobbler father in the toe of a shoe brought for repair. The cobbler's wife never takes to the girl, but the father and daughter share a love of the sea and a desire to be sailors. 

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    I have read some historical novels by Kate Quinn, including The Huntress and The Alice Network, and enjoyed them. The Astral Library is a fantasy departure for her from her usual genre. The Astral Library is a place of sanctuary for the disenfranchised. I found it to be a great defense of public libraries. Libraries are one of the few places you can linger without spending money. When my children were young, we would go and use the computers, read stories, and each one could pick out five books to take home. Two of my daughters worked as pages at the library. It was a place we looked forward to visiting every week. Quinn captures the refuge quality of libraries through her main character Alix. Alix has graduated from the foster system she's been in since age eight. She works three jobs and pays rent to live on someone's couch. Her barely stitched-together life is coming unraveled. She goes to her favorite place, the Boston Public Library, and enters a door from the Reading Room she never noticed before. She finds herself in Astral Library and is invited to live in a book of her choosing. The library, however, is under attack. Could Alix be the one to save it?

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⛵️👨‍🏫📝🛝👟📸🦜🏨💌Wrecked by Elizabeth Strout, Warmed by Katherin Center, Enchanted by Kate DiCamillo

 

    I have been reading Elizabeth Strout for a while and looked forward to her latest novel, The Things We Never Say.

https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Elizabeth+Strout

I appreciate how authentic her characters feel and how genuine their emotions and actions are. Reading her novel is like looking at a painting that is slightly off center, by design. The goal is to cause an internal dissonance that heightens engagement with her novels. Loneliness is a central theme in Strout's work. Artie Dam is a compassionate, effective high school teacher who is deeply troubled by the current culture's bending toward casual cruelty and corruption. He is kind to those who are wounded. He receives news that changes his life, and he has to decide how to live with it. So much of the book's action is internal and interpersonal drama, but it feels large. It reminds me of the movie It's a Wonderful Life. It caused me to ponder how much difference one life could make.

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    Katherine Center's romance novels aren't just escapist reading. She wrestles with poignant struggles that women face — aging, changing bodies, motherhood, and beauty culture. I like that she doesn't give neat answers, but instead portrays the complexity of those topics. 

    And she still tells a compelling story with lots of action and humor.

    Lanie is a native Texan and mother of three boys, four and under, who moves to Massachusetts so her husband can pursue his music career. She leaves behind her support system and a life that barely worked, but now doesn't. Motherhood has completely pulled her under. Someone asks how far along she is, and it breaks her. She's not pregnant. Things need to be different, so she starts by joining a gym. It changes things. 

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    The Hotel Balzaar: A Norendy Tale by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Júlia Sardà, is the second Norendy tale. The characters from the first book, The Puppets of Spelhorst, don't appear in the second book, but the stories are from the same universe. They have the same magical, anything-can-happen feel. A young girl, Marta, lives in the Hotel Balzaar where her mother works as a maid because Marta's father, a soldier, never returned from the war. Marta's job is to be a mouse: quiet, unobtrusive, and not talking or being noticed by anyone. Then a mysterious, elderly countess with a beautiful green parrot arrives and notices Marta. She tells Marta seven stories that reveal Marta's greatest wish. Extraordinary.

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❤️📖🏞️🐕❤️🎧🐺👑🦉Two Sister Stories and a Romance

 

    The Secret Book of Flara Lea by Patti Callahan Henry is historical fiction. It jumps back and forth between the early 1940s and the 1960s in England. Two sisters were sent from their home during Operation Pied Piper, where the children of London were evacuated to safer locations during the Blitz. Older sister Hazel and little sister Flora are taken in by Bridie and her teenage son, Harry. Hazel, fourteen, takes her responsibility to protect five-year-old Flora seriously. Hazel creates a magical world through stories that she only tells to her little sister. It's called Whisper Wood. Flora tragically disappears. Twenty years later, Hazel finds a book entitled Whisper Wood, by an American author. Is it her sister? Even though this book isn't attributed this way, it felt like magical realism. It kept me guessing through its plot twists. 

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    I do like a bit of romance. This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum is a best friends trope. Benny and Joy are long-time best friends and famous podcasters. Their podcasts feature different scenarios where someone survives a life-threatening situation. One of them knows how, and the other has to guess. It's humorous and heartwarming. Joy has narcolepsy, and she has found herself in several life-threatening situations. The book opens with Joy cryptically passing Benny a note as they record their podcast. The next day, she disappeared. As Benny searches for her, their backstory is revealed. Crum has several I-didn't-see-that-coming moments. I also learned a lot about narcolepsy. It doesn't sound fun. I found the book to be creative and twisty.

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    Kate DiCamillo is a magical author. At the recommendation of a granddaughter, I read The Puppets of Spelhorst: A Norendy Tale. It is part of a trilogy that is made up of short novellas. I read an interesting review that talked about passive protagonists in children's books- think Pinocchio- and it made me consider this book from a child's view. Children can perceive themselves as having no power, but large desires. The five puppet characters in this book, a girl, a boy, a king, an owl, and a wolf, aren't magical. They don't come to life. They can only talk to each other, but DiCamillo enlivens them through conversations, observations and by believing in their purpose for being created. She also captures the interaction between the two sisters who receive these puppets. This is a fantastic book, and I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy. 

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🐄🥵💸🐏🐮🐖📰📝📚Some Big Books!

 

    The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett was highly recommended by my sister. We both had enjoyed Stockett's previous bestseller, The Help. I was excited to read this historical fiction novel even though it was 656 pages long. Stockett writes beautifully about her home state of Mississippi in the early 1930s, and she does so with both eyes open. She doesn't gloss over the racism, misogyny, or eugenics of the time. The story centers around two misfits. An eleven-year-old orphan named Meg, trapped in a truly awful orphanage, and Birdie, an unmarried, plain woman who is the sole provider for her mother and grandmother on the family farm. Things get so tight that Birdie is dispatched to beg for money from her younger sister, who has married into a wealthy, social-elite family living in the university town of Oxford, Mississippi. As Jafar wisely says, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." Things do get very desperate. The plot is well-told. The setting--the heat, the clothes, the food, the flowers, the cars--was evocative. You feel you're there. It pits the condition of the rich against that of the poor, the haves versus the have-nots, and what society considers valuable. The characters are what elevate this novel from good to substantial. Birdie and Meg are memorable and authentic. It was worth the time investment.

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    After the intense read of The Calamity Club, I needed something soothing and cozy, like All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot. This is the second book of the series. James has married and is living in an apartment at the top of Skeldale House, treating animals large and small. He is also negotiating life in the 1930s, however, in the Yorkshire Dales of Great Britain. World War II is on the horizon, but that's in the third book.

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I think Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, by Alexandra Ault (Editor), National Portrait Gallery, London, was a gift from my Dear Husband. The book contains mini biographies of authors, mostly British, their portraits or photographs, and a photo of a draft of something they've written, usually in their own hand. It is divided into five sections depicting authors at different times in history, but also in different places in their writing journeys: on the road to success, facing censorship and secrecy, fame, and writing to change the world. Seeing their faces and handwriting humanizes them. They become less "Famous Author" and more human beings. 

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👵🏻🏠👓👽🛸🪐Memoir and Science Fiction? Yes, Please!

 

    I have a Little Free Library outside my house, and someone put this lovely book inside it. Thank you! Oh No, Not the Home: Observations and Confessions of a Grandmother in Transition by Peggy Rowe reminds me of Erma Bombeck's book. They are full of observational humor about herself and people in her orbit. She makes jokes about the fun of getting old. I found her books warmhearted and giggly. I want to read some of her other books!

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    I picked up Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorne because a review said it was similar to The Murderbot Diaries. It is similar, but not the same. Thorne does a great job of creating a space world with interesting problems. On a space station, the artificial air adversely affects some inhabitants. The only cure is to live on a planet with good air; however, the only planet close to Space Station 13 does not want the station inhabitants. Our hero, Torian Raznor, has one remaining family member, her older sister, who is slowly coughing herself to death. Torian works for smugglers to earn money to buy her own starship. It is an abandoned alien spaceship covered in moss, but it is also what she can afford. Torian is a likable, caring character who needs a break to save her sister, get accepted to the sole planet in the solar system that can support life, figure out her alien starship, and forget about her non-romantic partner, former captain Amelia. I liked the cozy vibe of the book. It had a balance of action, character development, and relationship advice for alien spaceships with abandonment issues.

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🐝🦀🦦🌳🗡️📔🐐📖🐝 Three Very Different Fantasy Books

 

    The Everlasting by Alice Harrow has been popping up everywhere, highly recommended. I had it on hold for several weeks and was excited to read it. It started slow. So slow, I almost gave up on it. Then, strange things started to happen. This is a book about time travel, destiny, fate, agency, and true love. What can we do? What can we make others do? Every story needs a villain, and this one has a deliciously conflicted villain. Do they want what's best for their beloved country and its inhabitants, or do they want to be the supreme being? There are two protagonists. A nerdy historical scholar with glasses named Owen Mallory. He is an expert on his country's greatest hero and the other protagonist, Sir Una. They were born a thousand years apart, yet they feel like they know each other. I liked the story because it was an intriguing play on the problems and solutions time travel can engender. The main characters, mostly Owen, were an authentic mix of cowardice and bravery. There was a lot of sex, and I found it a distraction from the plot. It felt like an editor said to add some steamy stuff. 

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    I read the first book in this series, https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/2026/02/light-hearted-aussie-and-serious.html, and put Heretical Fishing 2 on a wait, then forgot about it. I ended up borrowing it twice to finish it. It was twenty-five hours as an audiobook! It is a gently paced. It is litRPG, but it focuses on cultivation, meaning much less fighting and much more leveling up, farming, fishing, and creative skills. The main character, Fischer, is awakening more animals and people to become Cultivators. The capital, also known as the enemy, is becoming aware of the growing threat to its lock on the country. This is not a challenging book at all; it totally has the don't-worry, be-happy vibe, and I enjoyed it for what it was.

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    I have read several Kate DiCamillo books lately. She is an amazing author. I find her witty, heart-warming, and inventive. One of my granddaughters, a joy to my life, recommended The Beatryce Prophecy to me, and I loved it. It is YA and a short read. DiCamillo sets up contrasting characters and situations. Two orphaned young people trying to find their way in the world: who helps and who harms; a boy versus a girl, a monk versus an elderly village woman, selfish ambition versus selfless love. It gives the plot good tension and highlights light by placing it against the dark. So good.

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💰👓🪙🐄🐖🐑 A Week of Rereads! Which Gatsby was the best: Redford of DiCaprio?

    This has been a week of previously read books. At times, I struggle with insomnia. Something that helps is listening to a familiar book, especially one that is calm and soothing. That is James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small. I like his whimsical way of telling the story of his adventures as a young, new veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales. He is a city boy who badly needs a job. A lot of his practice involves large-animal work — cows — and farmers, two things he initially knows little about. It is a coming-of-age story and a love story about the Dales. I learned my husband read the series when he was deployed for Desert Storm. 

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     I read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school in the early 1980s. In my teenage mind, it was chosen because it was so short and sad. It felt like a life to young hopeful teenagers. Beware what you trust because the game is rigged. Rereading it as an adult has been a revelation of how complex and nuanced the plot is and how multidimensional the characters appear as they reflect and play off each other and the times. There is much packed into this short book. Even though it was first published 100 years ago in 1925, its themes of wealth, privilege, casual cruelty, the desire to be and own more feel timely. This is the July book club pick, and, I think, the discussion will be great. 

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❤📚 ❤ ❤️🛳️👰 💔💔💔 Two Romances and a Memoir of a Divorce

    I like Katherine Center's romance books because she is committed to the genre and the good things it does. The Shippers is a romance book, but also a story of self-discovery and finding the courage to say hard things. JoJo Burton is about to get married to a disinterested man in his mother's appalling wedding dress. Her best friend from childhood, Cooper Watts, shows up at the last minute. And then guess what happened? This is a fun book, but it doesn't avoid painful topics: abandonment, defensiveness, men behaving in predatory ways, balanced with men quietly caring for those they love without seeking credit. 

~Chose love over fear~

Katherine Center

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    To me, a good memoir is one where someone is willing to be vulnerable about their experience and has processed it enough to reach some conclusions. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden is that kind of memoir. Her husband leaves her and their children at the start of COVID. They lived and worked in New York City and chose to move to their house on Martha's Vineyard. Belle's story was an old one; a phone call informed her that her husband was cheating. He left his newly 50-year-old wife for someone younger. She never saw it coming. Devastated, she tries to piece together a new life. This memoir is not a revenge piece. I found Belle's account generous toward her husband, as she explored and sought to understand why. It was sad, but also hopeful. The divorce was a brutal one.

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    I found Meet Me in the Margins by Melissa Ferguson on a list of books with books in them. This was a fun Rom-com. It reminded me of the movie You've Got Mail. The main character, Savannah Cade, is an assistant book editor at a small publishing house in Nashville. She has many problems in all areas of her life. Because rent is so high, she lives with her overachieving, bossy sister and her fiancé, who is also Savannah's ex-boyfriend. Her direct boss at work doesn't like her and only gives her the toughest clients. Savannah’s hope is to get her own book published and a romance editor is interested, but her novel needs revision. A mysterious someone found her manuscript unattended and started to edit it. Savannah is incensed and also intrigued. Hijinks follow.

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☘️💧🇮🇪🦡⚔️😈 Maggie O'Farrell's Latest

    Land is Maggie O'Farrell's latest book. Maggie O'Farrell is another of my favorite authors, who, like Anne Patchett, gives me mixed feelings when I start a book written by them. I know I will read impressive prose, clever plots, and authentic, human characters. That's the problem. In Land,  the humanity of the family forged from the brutal remnants of the Great Hunger. Father and Mother, Tomás and Phina, are their family's sole survivors. It shapes their lives and choices, leaving them with fears and loneliness that affect how their four children navigate the world. Even as I was reading, I sensed that each child, imbued with personality and vividness, was also representative of Irish culture: a priest, a musician, a steady, silent worker, and a loyal, hardworking daughter. Another great novel.

Reviews of other Maggie O'Farrell books: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Maggie+O%27Farrell

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    The Village of Noobtown by Ryan Rimmel is the second in the series that I have read. I gave the first one three stars on Goodreads, and I will give this one the same. I'm surprised that it has a four-star rating. The concept is classic LitRPG. A human finds himself in an actual video game scenario. They need to figure out what is happening, level up, and stay alive. Our hero, Jim, does those things with a lot of fart jokes, crazy companions, and inadequate character development. The author gives a lot--maybe too much-- technical detail. It reminds me, I'm not the target audience. The series reads like video game fan fiction. I have been reading LitRPG because of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. I think he's exceptionally talented. 

Review of the first in the series: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Noobtown

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🐎🗽👴🏻❤️‍🩹💀🕯️🕵️‍♀️🛤️🫆The Lastest Ann Patchett, Fantasy and a Murder Mystery

    Ann Patchett's latest book, Whistler, reminds me of building with Magna Tiles. There are squares and triangles of different sizes with magnets embedded on the sides. They click together, and you build with them. Here is a quick YouTube video to demonstrate: s2jFeogTEgQ. The tiles have jewel tones that remind me of stained glass. When I am building with my fellow engineers, my grandsons, we start with a stack of unimpressive shapes and create cathedrals that glow. It's amazing. Every writer uses words and sentences--Magna Tiles, but Ann Patchett creates glowing cathedrals with hers, and she gets better with each book. I think Whistler is her best book. It is a good book to read after her essay collection, These Precious Days, because it contains her essay exploring her relationships with her three fathers (her birth father and two stepfathers). Whistler's plot centers on a woman in her 50s, Daphne, who accidentally bumps into her former stepfather, Eddie. He and her mother had been married for slightly over a year when Daphne was eight, and when they divorced, she never saw him again. They had been very close. The woman starts to untangle the knot of what happened to the marriage and why. It pulls deeply on the father/daughter relationship. Ann Patchett shines at showing how complex that relationship can be, intertwined with love, disappointment, expectation, longing, safety, so many things. Whistler is excellent. 

Previous reviews of Ann Patchett's books: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Ann+Patchett

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The Thirteenth Child by Erin A. Craig was recommended to me by a daughter. It had several things I liked in a fantasy novel. The premise was that Hazel is a rare thirteenth child, which made her coveted by the Gods. Her father promises her to Merrick, the Dreaded End, the god of death. His will is for her to be a healer, a very famous healer, and he gives her the ability to see what is wrong with her patients and to know how to heal them. However, not everyone can be healed. Some patients are marked for death, and in fact, their deaths are required. I found this to be an interesting plot, with creative world-building and surprising story paths. It felt like it took a long time to tell the story; the pacing could have been faster. The story proposed that some people needed to die to keep more people from dying. They had to die for the greater good, but when using the God-Eye, Hazel could see all of a person's possible futures. I found the book's internal logic inconsistent, which bugged me, but not enough to stop reading. Craig is a captivating storyteller.

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    Last week, I read Sulari Gentill's Woman in the Library and liked her creative approach to plotting a mystery, so I read Five Found Dead. This murder mystery takes place on the Orient Express! Bold move. The story is told in the first person. Meredith Penvale has suspended her job as a corporate lawyer to help her twin brother Joe, a successful mystery writer, as he fights cancer. To celebrate his survival, the two book a trip on the famous Orient Express. In the cabin next to theirs, a murder occurs. The door is locked, the room is splashed with blood, but there is no body and nowhere to hide. Or is there? This book was also clever. It could have moved faster, but it was a fun read.

(https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/2026/06/mysterymagical-ya.html)

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🫆🕵️‍♀️🦞Mystery!🦝🕯️👻Magical YA

    I saw The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill on a list of Books Within Books. Intrigued, I picked one on Libby, and this was available. It starts with four strangers at a table in the Boston Public Library scoping each other out. A woman's scream rings out, startling everyone. These strangers begin to talk, trying to unravel the mystery, and become friends. One of them is a murderer. This was a fun, twisty book. The protagonist is a mystery writer, Freddie — short for Frederica — who uses the unexplained scream as the impetus for her new mystery novel. The other three at her table, Freud Girl, Handsome Man, and Heroic Chin, become characters. There are several mysteries unfolding. An avid fan of Freddie's is allowed to read and comment on each chapter, but this fan seems too avid and decidedly odd. What's happening there? Where is the screaming woman? Is she tied to the three strangers around the table? I found this novel an intriguing peek at the writing process, while debating modern novel plots, and keeping things hopping. I think I will read more by Sulari Gentill.

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     I don't know why Ferris by Kate DiCamillo isn't more well-known. It is a YA book, but it brought tears to my eyes. The main character, Ferris, has a notable family. Her little sister's goal in life is to be on a wanted poster. She works hard to make that happen. Her uncle lives in the basement, painting a history of the world, missing his hairstylist wife, who kicked him out. Her father is convinced that there are raccoons in the attic. Her grandmother, Cherise, and the dog are both seeing a ghost. Then things get weird. The book is entertainingly zany, yet it explores death, grief, and uniqueness in touching, sensitive ways. I found it magical.

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