August reads

I read six books in August, with one of them being one of my very favorite reads of the year!

1) The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine: Amber was discontent with her life and decided that she deserved to be a rich and powerful woman like socialite Daphne Parrish.  Amber arranged for them to literally run into each other where Amber conveniently dropped a magazine that was about cystic fibrous. Daphne questioned her about having the magazine and Amber told her that she had a younger sister who had died from it. Which was a lie, but Amber had done her research and knew that Daphne's younger sister died of it.  So that's how Amber began their friendship. She quickly insinuated herself into Daphne's life.  And eventually into Daphne's husband Jackson's life.

I'll say no more, other than it was a good story with some nice twists to it!  It would be a good book club read!

2) Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan: This was on my radar for a long time, and I finally picked it up.  I'm very glad that I did.  It is a novel based on a true story from Italy during World War II.

Pino Lella was a young, carefree teenager until his home in Milan was destroyed by Allie bombs.  He began working for the resistance, helping to lead Jews to Switzerland.  His parents feared for his life doing this work and made him join the German Army hoping that he would be safe during the war. However, Pino was injured and at the age of eighteen was recruited to be a driver for General Hans Leyers, Hitler's leader in Italy.

This afforded Pino the opportunity to spy on the Nazi occupation and pass information on to the resistance.

This is certainly the short version of this long book! The novel is very readable and gripping.  The author became friends with the real Pino and his son who helped him with important details for writing the book. It's a great read!

3) I needed something light after reading the above book, so I picked up On The Island by Tracey Garvis Graves: This was a rather interesting read. Thirty-year-old Anna was hired to tutor sixteen-year-old TJ at the family's summer home on a tropical island. The two of them boarded a private plane to meet TJ's family at the island when their pilot had a heart attack and the plane landed in the ocean.  The pilot was dead, but Anna and TJ were able to make it to shore, but quickly found that no one lived on the island that they were on.  They had to learn survival on their own. 

It was a quick, but interesting read.

4) This is another book that had been on my radar for a long time and I finally dug into it.  The novel is The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne.

The novel began with a young sixteen-year-old girl living in a small Irish village being shamed at Mass by her parish priest, and sent away on a bus by her parents, told to never return.  Her sin? She was pregnant. She boarded a bus to Dublin, wondering what she do, where she would live. 

After she had the baby, she gave him to the nuns to place for adoption.  His parents were Charles and Maud Avery, and Cyril grew up being constantly reminded that he was not a "real Avery". His adopted parents were quite uninvolved with the young boy as he grew.  He met a young man at boarding school.  JulianWoodbead had been to Cyril's home once when they were young and  Cyril never forgot him. They quickly became best friends all through school until they were a bit older and Cyril unexpectedly left Ireland and over the years learned who he really was as a man.

This is a huge book that covers from the 1940s to today. And I loved it.  I haven't read such an interesting and well-written book since I read A Little Life. It will certainly be in my top five favorite reads for 2021.  Maybe my favorite!

5) I finished The Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen.  It seems that I have been reading it forever because I would only read one "Spiritual Imperative" per day for my spiritual reading. This book is called Fr. Nouwen's "secret journal" that he kept when he was going through dark times after the loss of a beloved friendship.  I found it mostly quite helpful with my journey.  Sometimes one of the Imperatives didn't seem to reach me, but most did.  I would recommend this book for those who want to go deeper into their journey.

6) Lastly, I re-read The Book of Lost Names by Kristen Harmel.  I just read it last winter, so the only reason I read it again so soon was that it is the chosen book for the library's book club that meets here. The book club is tomorrow, but I don't have much expectation that anyone will be there.  There was another book club that met at a different time and day at the library and I went to that, and no one came, other than the librarian monitor of the club. She said that since  COVID began, people began to quit coming to that one, but the one scheduled for tomorrow has had people coming sporadically, so I am giving it a try.  I blogged about this book on the 5th of December 2020 if you want to read my review.  It's a good book!