March was a surprisingly good reading month for me, especially since we had guests throughout the month (it was so much fun!)! A couple of books really surprised me with how much I loved them!
1) Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood: a surprisingly good novel! This is the story of Paul Graves and his family after surviving a tornado in their small town. The story takes place in 1925 in Marah, Illinois. Paul's house, family, and lumber business were all untouched by the tornado. Everyone else in the town was affected by losses from the tornado, including deaths. The story tells of the year after the tornado and the emotions that Paul (and his family) goes through as being an untouched survivor. It is a story of gratitude, guilt, confusion sadness, and love. I found this to be a slow-going story in terms of life. That does not really make sense, but there is no big plot, etc. It's just a nice easy-going, but a hard read, in that I found it very interesting that I kept talking to my husband about the book. I rarely do that and I realized how much the story was affecting me.
2) Lost Boy Found by Kirsten Alexander: This was a fascinating story based on a true story. In 1913, young brothers went off into the woods in a small Louisiana town and came back without their four-year-old brother. They thought that he had already returned home, but he hadn't. After two years of vigorous searching, the boy was found in the company of a tramp. Soon, people were divided...was he really the missing boy, or was the tramp's story true that this boy was the son of a young woman who had asked him to keep her son for a month? The tramp was arrested and put on trial. Both mothers fought for the boy. The ending is shocking and incredibly sad. I want to read about the real case to see if the book followed true
3) The Storyteller's Secret by Sejal Badani: I quite liked this book, probably because it was one of learning of gone ancestors' lives. Jaya was a journalist in New York when she learned that her grandfather was gravely ill in India. He wanted to talk to Jaya's mother who he had been estranged from for years, but the mother refused to go. Jaya was recovering from her third miscarriage and her marriage was crumbling. She decided that she would go to India to learn about her mother's life there and meet her grandfather. Sadly, the grandfather died before Jaya arrived, but her grandmother's long-time servant, Ravi, met her at the home and agreed to share the story of her grandmother's life in British occupied India. As Jaya learns about her grandmother's life and her secrets, she began to experience her own resilience and strength. She also began to understand her mother's life in India and why she had treated her as she had. I found it to be a good story about women-grandmother, mother, daughter.
4) Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry: This is an older book, written in 2008, and as it turned out, it is the second book in a trilogy about the McNulty family from County Sligo, Ireland. This book is the story of Roseanne Clear McNulty and it begins when she is about to turn one hundred years old. She had been in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital for the past seventy years. The hospital was about to be torn down and a new one built. The head of the hospital was to decide who should go to the new one and who would be able to exist on their own. He had not really interacted with Roseanne over the years but had to at least interview her to make a decision on where she might be placed. As he began to spend more time talking to her, she shared her story with him about her past before she had been placed in the Hospital. The doctor became enamored with her story and began to do some research to discover more about her. This was such an intriguing story and the ending was absolutely stunning! I've never been as surprised by an ending (twice) to a book as I was with this one.
5) The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin: A nice easy-to-read book about a young lady in 1939 England. Grace Bennett had been orphaned and left to live with an uncle who did not seem to care for her at all. When she and her best friend were invited to come live in London with her mother's best friend, it was a dream come true for both of the girls. Grace got a temporary job at a bookstore and soon began to enjoy her work there. She had never been a reader, so in order to better serve the customers, she began reading, taking recommendations from a handsome young man who frequented the shop. You can probably see where this is going.
6) And lastly, I read The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry. This book is the first of the McNulty trilogy. I had a bit of a hard time getting through it. I didn't find it all that intriguing, but rather a sad story. But I have ordered the third book in the trilogy, so I am not giving up on the McNulty family! Eneas was kind of the black sheep of the family, never quite finding himself and not able to return home after an incident there. He kind of wandered the earth, not really knowing what exactly he was looking for.
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