What I read in February

As promised, I am catching up on my blogging! I read four and a half books last month.  I had a DNF (did not finish) on one of them. The other four were good, however!

1) Lucy By The Sea by Elizabeth Strout: This was my number one favorite book for 2022. I re-read it for my book group! It was even better the second time and wonderful to have a great group of people to discuss it with! For my post on it go to my post in October 2022.

2) The Truth About Magic by Atticus. I have long loved Atticus' poetry and was lucky enough to come across two of his books at a used bookstore that I had never read. If you haven't read his work, I urge you to try it!

3) The Weaver's Legacy by Olive Collins. This book is the second of a trilogy by the author. I had read The Tide Between Us which was the first book and liked it enough to get the second book. The first book was about the O'Neill family coming to America for a new start out West.  They traveled with other Irish families to start an Irish community in the West. This book continues the O'Neill family story. This book is from 1865 and 1937.

Goldie O'Neill was nine years old in 1865 when her family traveled West with others to form an Irish community. They had to deal with the Indians as they traveled and as they lived. One day, the Indians came while Goldie, her brother, and her baby sister were out playing in the woods. Her sister was taken by the Indians and never returned to the family.  Goldie carried her guilt with her for all of her years.  She had made friends with a Lakota Indian boy who vowed he would help her find her sister.

Years later Goldie adopted her brother's daughter, Lucy, after her parents died and she had been placed in an orphanage. Lucy grew up in the community that had been built up by the Irish, but then married and moved to New York City, coming to visit Goldie often. She returned there after Goldie died and as she was there, her "dead" father turned up. As Lucy learned more about the family's past, she decided that she wanted to learn more. 

It is a good story and I hope that the author continues with the trilogy.

4) Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger: This was the best one of the best Cork O'Connor mysteries yet! I found it quite different from the others that I have read (I still am only about halfway through them). In this one, Cork is asked by his ninety-year-old something friend, Henry Miloux (an Ojibwe medicine man) to find his son who he had never met but came to him in a vision. Cork, Henry, and a friend travel up to Canada and there Cork began to unravel Henry's past and locate his reclusive son. Then an attempt was made on Henry's life and that leads to another mystery. 

I liked this story so much because it mostly was focused on Henry and his past, which hadn't been revealed in earlier books.  

5) The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth: This is the book that I did not finish.  I had read over half of it and I just never felt connected or cared about any of the characters. I felt that I gave it a good try, so I didn't feel bad about it. And, also, it was from the library, so at least I hadn't paid for it!

January books I read

 Yes, I know that it is now March...I am still determining where the time has gone since we moved back to Illinois.  We love every moment of all of our family time! I apologize to my followers for being so behind on my blogging!  I hope to catch up on all of it this weekend!

January was filled with good reading! I really liked all of the books that I read! Let's get to it!

1) I re-read The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris because my book group I used to belong to before we had moved to Alabama was reading it for January and I had been dying to have someone to discuss this book with.  So I drove the 2 1/2 hours to go to book group! This is such a good book.  There are several stories taking place in this book, with two main stories. This novel takes place in Georgia a little after the Civil War had ended. George and Isabelle Walker had recently learned of the death of their only child, killed fighting in the War. Two freed Black men, Landry and Prentiss who were brothers, left the plantation where they had been enslaved, and landed on the property next door, hiding in the woods.  They were discovered by George Walker who owned the land and they were offered a job to help him develop a peanut farm on his land.

The parallel story running through this novel is the story of two Confederate soldiers who had been involved with each other before they had headed off to war and were reunited after the end of the war. They would meet in the woods for their rendevous and were discovered one day which resulted in a murder that shook their small town. The aftermath of the murder changed everyone and everything. 

A hauntingly beautiful story.

2) The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin. I had wanted to read this book for a long time and finally picked it up. It is based on a true story that took place in January 1888 in the Dakota Territory. Two sisters were teachers at the time, one in her hometown and the other had moved to teach north. The day was an unusually warm day and the schoolchildren went off to school without their usual heavy coats. As school ended for the day, a blizzard blew in with no warning and resulted in a total whiteout.  One teacher realized that her children could not see well enough to try to make it home and kept them at school, while the other sister sent her pupils off into the blizzard. 

The book is based on oral stories/histories of the survivors. It is quite a story and very interesting to read. 

3) Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen. I found this book a little hard to get into, but I could tell that there was more to the story than I learned from the first part of it. I was glad I stuck with it. It was worth the read.

Zoey had finished high school and traveled across the country to take ownership of her dead mother's apartment in a small town in South Carolina.  The apartment was one of five and each apartment had its own secrets. One tenant was found dead the morning after Zoey moved in. She quickly began to meet her neighbors and learns their stories as she shares hers. It is a lovely book and quite touching.

4) All the Broken Places by John Boyne. I am a big fan of this author and I loved this book!

This novel takes place during two different time periods. Gretel Fernsby was a ninety-one-year-old widow living in London in the same apartment she had lived in for years. When a family with a young boy moved into the apartment building, Gretel was faced with the biggest secret she had. She had always kept her painful past a secret, especially the part about her father being a Nazi commandant at one of the extermination camps. And she especially never shared her guilt of being complicit.

As the Allies were coming, twelve-year-old Gretel escaped Nazi Germany with her mother. They had gone on to live in France for a number of years. Eventually, Gretel went to London, married, and lived a quiet life. When the young family moved in, Gretel reluctantly began a friendship with the young son Henry.  When she witnessed Henry being abused/neglected, she was faced with saving him or facing her past in a very public way.

It is a stunning novel and I didn't realize that it was a sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which I had never read.  So my next read was:

5) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. I can't believe that I had never read this book. At first, I was a bit taken back by it, feeling that it was so simply written, but soon I realized that it was told from the little boy's perspective.

If there is anyone out there in the reading world left who hasn't read this book, it is about a small boy in Germany who had to move when his father got a new job as a commandant at a camp. He, his sister, and his mother were housed in a small modest home that was quite a downgrade for them. There was no one around to make friends with. There was only a camp that was barricaded with barbed wire. One day the little boy went out for a walk and came across another little boy who was behind the barbed wire.  They struck up a friendship, which had to be secret.  And I can't tell anymore of the story. Only to say that I was so deeply struck by the ending, it still hurts.