This was a very mixed reading month for me. A few activities got in the way of my reading my typical number of books: Eva stayed with us for over a week, we had a fire scare, and I went on vacation with my sisters to visit nieces and cousins in Washington State. August was full of activities, but reading wasn’t always in the cards.

I read seven books, two of which I thought were outstanding. I also read a couple of books that involved difficult subjects, which I found hard-going, and consequently hard to recommend. Let’s jump in and have me tell you about what I read.

Eleanor of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier is a historical fiction novel that is very highly rated on Goodreads. Set in Provence in the 1300s, Eleanor is a midwife and herbalist with extraordinary skills. She attends to patients in her hometown of Avignon until she meets Guigo de Chauliac, the personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement. She makes a deal with him to become his assistant and under his instruction hones her skills as a healer and even a surgeon. Eleanor becomes the midwife to Queen Joanna, and as the Queen’s pregnancy evolves, the Black Death (plague) comes to Europe. Great tension surrounds the Queen’s upcoming birth and the mood of the populace, who are itching to blame someone (a woman) for the plague upon them. How will Eleanor weather this complicated situation? I think you will really enjoy finding out if you read this book! I really enjoyed it. 4 stars

Red Clay by Charles B. Fancher was one of my two best books of August. This multigenerational family saga is another highly rated book on Goodreads, at 4.47, practically unheard of. The story follows the lives of an enslaved Black family and the white family who owned them. The book begins in 1943 with a frail old white lady knocking on the door of the formerly enslaved family’s home on the day of their father’s funeral. Her opening words to his family are, ” I am Adelaide Parker and a lifetime ago my family owned yours.” She has a story to tell, full of secrets, ambition, power, betrayal, and redemption. I was so swept up in this book; the pages flew by. The characters were so well drawn, and the sense of place was extraordinary. Highly recommend. 4.5 stars

Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell was a change of pace for me after two works of historical fiction. This book is a fast-paced thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The first storyline features 53-year-old Nina Swann, whose husband Paddy’s death has left her recently widowed. She receives a kind condolence note from a man named Nick who claims he was a friend of Paddy’s. He then sends Nina a gold lighter, which he claims was Paddy’s. He insinuates himself into her life and she is soon involved in a relationship with him. The other storyline involves Martha, a florist in her early 50s who is raising her two teenage sons from her first marriage, and a new baby girl she gave birth to at the age of 47. Martha is struggling with her relationship with her husband Al, whose demanding job keeps him on the road half the time. Can you guess where this is going? The lives of all these characters converge in heart-stopping revelations and plot twists you won’t see coming. This was a gripping and intense domestic thriller. 4 stars

I loved The Kite Runner by this author, and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini was the highest-rated book on my TBR list. I decided to pick it up, and I have to say I do regret that decision. The book is very well written, but it focuses on a really difficult and hard-to-read topic: the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The lives of Leila and Mariam are bound together by their marriage to the same man, a despicable creature who treats them both abominably. The novel is an endless telling of the horrific treatment these women endure, and I found it difficult, depressing, and ultimately pretty hopeless. While I appreciated the author’s attempt to explain the history of Afghanistan, and his good writing (which bumped my rating up to 3 stars), I did not enjoy this book one bit. 3 stars, barely

Well. After my last book, I was definitely in the mood for something lighter and ultimately more uplifting. Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell fit the bill. This author is new to me, and I will be reading more of her popular books in the future. This is a book about body image and rebuilding your life when things take a turn you didn’t expect. You see, Cherry is fat. She is pretty much ok with that, because she is otherwise pretty and stylish and confident. When the book opens, we see that Cherry’s husband Tim is in Hollywood making a movie. What people don’t know is that he isn’t coming home. Tim became famous by writing a wildly popular semi-autobiographical webcomic featuring Baby, a heavy-chested, wide-hipped, double-chinned woman based on his wife, Cherry. This did not go over well with Cherry at all. No fat girl wants to be memorialized in a comic strip or on the big screen. Cherry is determined to get over her heartbreak and move on to find a man who never heard of her husband’s famous comic. I enjoyed the book a lot, but the constant mentions of how fat Cherry was, how fat her family was, etc., got a bit old for me. For someone who is supposedly ok with her size, it sure got mentioned a lot. This book also had some fairly spicy sex scenes, but they are skip-overable. Overall, it was a good distraction for me. 4 stars

I regret to say I went back to choosing poorly again. Next of Kin by Kia Abdullah is a book I am fairly certain that not a single one of you will enjoy. In fact, I recommend that you DO NOT read this book. I am sharing it here for that reason. The book wasn’t badly written, and the legal aspects of the story were kind of interesting, but the subject matter was horrendous. The book opens when Leila Syed gets a frantic call from her brother-in-law while she is at work. He had gone to his son’s nursery school to pick him up and found that he had never been dropped off. Leila had been asked at the last minute to pick up her nephew and drop him off at school. She picked him up from home all right, but forgot to drop him off at school. The child was left in the car for hours on a hot day. I will not go into further detail except to say. Don’t read this one.

I hope to redeem myself with this final book recommendation; Kin by Tayari Jones was absolutely wonderful. It was also Oprah’s Book Club pick. Verniece and Annie are two motherless girls from Honeysuckle, Louisiana. They grew up together and have been best friends since their cradle days. Verniece was raised by her fierce Aunt Irene, who was determined to give her a stable upbringing after the tragic death of her mother. Annie’s mother, Hattie Lee, abandoned her as an infant, and she has been raised by her grandmother. Despite the love and kinship the girls share, they are destined to take very different paths in life. Verniece is a good student who gets into Spelman College and ends up marrying very well. Annie, on the other hand, is fixated on finding the mother who abandoned her and, as a result, makes choices that cause her life to take a less auspicious turn. Over the years, the girls correspond and support one another when times are hard. “A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction”. This book is simply excellent.
5 stars

I know my book choices for this month were kind of all over the place. I did read a few great ones however, and hope you will choose from the best of them and enjoy them as much as I did. As always let me know if you read any of these and what you thought.