🌊🛶🏝️The Wayfinder

 

    The Wayfinder, by Adam Johnson,  is probably the longest book I'll read this year. It's over 700 pages and Adams uses all the pages to tell this complex, intricate story. The book contains multitudes of characters, plots, and ideas. It is historical fiction set in Polynesia during the Tu'i Tonga's reign. To remain emperor and rule a vast number of people in any place, one must be ruthless, scheming, and focused on power. I found this book to be like Wolf Hall and Shogun. There are characters who rise by crunching the bones of others beneath them, and those who rise because they sacrifice for others. Adams employs magical realism or mythical realism to embody aspects of life. There is a talking parrot, a fan that contains the breathe of life, and special powers granted to royalty. The story is told by multiple voices: a young woman, whose name means story who seeks to find a way to help her starving people, a second prince who is being trained as a navigator, a second prince who was sent to war to keep him from becoming a threat, but now he's returned, and the most powerful female in the kingdom. This book is sweeping in its scope, but it also feels granular in its level of engagement with those who dwell in the lower levels of society. 

🌊🛶🏝️

👙☀️🩱Sunny Florida💀🐾🗽NYC Death Doula, and 🌪️🤖💻⌨️💨Dystopian AI

 

    Every time I read Katherine Center, I feel buoyed up in a sea of troubles. I come away thinking the novel was more than a romance. Her characters in this book are Katie, a video producer making a recruitment video for the Coast Guard featuring rescue swimmer Hutch. Sounds straightforward, right? It's not. It's quirky, uplifting, and insightful. It has sun, water, dogs, hunks, and a bathing suit phobia. 

Other reviews of Katherine Center books: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Katherine+Center

👙☀️🩱

    The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer reminded me of Frederik Bachman's book A Man Called Ove in spirit, though the details were quite different. It started slowly, building the case that death doula Clover Brooks is merely existing, not living her life. She has one friend, three pets, and lots of regrets. The regrets aren't all hers. She keeps three notebooks, Advice, Regrets, and Confessions, filled with the words of those she's served as they died. Reading the novel was similiar to watching a baby grow from unaware newborn to bright and interactive adult. I would classify it as a feel good read.

💀🐾🗽

    There are many sci-fy novels about Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence by Thomas R. Weaver is a good addition to the ouvre. Sci-Fi is good place to work out questions. The novel explores a planet on the edge of climate collapse and desperate for solutions. So desparate that the world has voted to create a dictator with the specific purpose of saving humanity. One of the candidates is an AI construct named Solomon. Investigative journalist, Marcus Tully, suspects things are being manipulated, but who is pulling the strings? The plot is fast-paced and surprising. It reads like an action movie.

🌪️🤖💻⌨️💨

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Three Five-Star Books in One Week. A Great Start 2026!

 

   The first book club for 2026 is Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston. I've read this book before because it is a classic, and I want to be well-read. What benefits me about book club is I dig deeper into a book and find so much more than I realized as I zoomed by. Set before World War 1 in Florida, Janie Crawford carries the weight of being the granddaughter of an enslaved woman. Raised by her nurturing grandmother, she is married at 16 to a potato farmer. Her grandmother is seeking to break the cycle of abuse, but in reality, perpetuates it. Janie is loved, but valued for work. Mules are a symbol of beast of burdens that depict Janie's life of having to carry both race and gender.

🫏👀🍐

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

    The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is my first five-star book of 2026. I felt a strong connection to this book for many reasons. It is set in Annapolis, Maryland, and many of the landmarks mentioned were familiar. Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer living alone. She reads voraciously, and her days are spent between her garden and her correspondence. She writes everyone--authors she's read, her childhood pen pal, her neighbors, the dean of English at the University of Maryland, her brother in France, everyone. Grumpy, stodgy, set in her ways, with deep hurts, and yet caring deeply for those around her, Sybil is my favorite type of character, a ball of conflicting emotions and actions. 

✍️🐦‍⬛📬🐦‍🔥💌

I have a love loathe relationship with with Lily King's novels. She writes about women who are intelligent and aware, but also conflicted and fragile. They have experienced things that give them grit, and make them mistrustful others. These women are frequently caught between two men. Heart the Lover follows this same pattern, exploiting the tension of this triangle. Jordan life trajectory changes when she meets Sam and Yash in her English Literature class. They are honors students that operate on a different level of thinking, writing, and conversing. She is drawn in and becomes enthralled with writing. Twnety years later, her current cozy life is interrupted by a visit from her former lover. King writes kind wisdom capturing first love, the anything can happen early life, and the costliness of forgiveness.

💔🎓❤️‍🩹

🛸🎄👽🎄🛸 Christmas is OVER!

I love rereading this every Christmas. A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis is a compilation of 12 short stories with a Christmas theme. Many have aliens. Beings not from Earth come to visit us, not all with benign intentions. Willis celebrates carols, Christmas letters, holiday movies, and family dinners. So good. It's a mini break to read or listen to the story, performing the many Christmas tasks that are a joy and a burden.

🛸🎄👽🎄🛸

 

    Connie Willis is one of my top authors. She excels at what appeals to me: quirky characters, humor, and well-researched. In The Road to Roswell, it is obvious that she has been to the locations she describes, in Roswell and Las Vegas. The voices of the UFO enthusiasts are earnest, knowledgeable, and slightly unhinged. She pokes fun at them, while at the same time, she has an entire book exploring the fun of aliens among us. Because it is set in the southwest, she also celebrates the heyday of Western movies. A common thread in her novels is misinformation and assumption, and she uses that deftly here. Her writing is intriguing and complex enough to enjoy rereading it. 

👽👾🛸🤠

   It's a Love Story by Annabel Monaghan was a well-crafted romance novel. I wanted something very not Christmas, but not too intense.  Its enemy-to-friend plot, set mostly in LA in August, was spot-on. Jane is a former child TV star who now works for a production company that has discovered a script she loves. She works to get it greenlit, but it's not commercial enough--no big names, no explosions. The smoldering, cinematographer who only lacks a man-bun to complete his aesthetic thwarts her efforts. Sparks fly.

I have read another book by Monaghan, Nora Goes Off Script, and liked it. Here is my review:

https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Nora+goes+off+script

🎞️☀️❤️