The week has been much more productive than this but these are books I want to talk about. I finished reading "The Star Garden" and it was my favorite of Nancy Turner's books. I loved the other two but this one was best written and didn't meander. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it. It was like Nancy Turner had finally understood her purpose in writing and fully comprehended how to get it down on paper. I guess you could say she had come of age with this last one.
"A Good Woman" is one of the first Danielle Steel books I have read in a long time. I thought it was a biographical fiction at first but there is no Annabelle Wentworth that lived in New York and Newport at the turn of the 20th century. However it was so well written and intertwined with factual dates that you were sucked into the believable world of Annabelle's life. When our daughter's were in High School, my mother had them read Danielle Steel's "The Ghost'. It was one of their favorite books for a long time. It has been a long time in my opinion since Danielle has written a book that quite matched that one. This one does.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog, "Suite Francaise" is about WWII. I was about half way through it and decided that for my sanity I could not finish it. It is not the most graphic WWII novel I have ever read but it was being written during WWII while it was going on. The the writer was taken Auschwitz and eventually she died there. The whole time I tried to read the book, I had nightmares and was waking up with migraines because of the terrible nights sleep I was getting. I decided a good nights sleep was more important than reading a book for book group. It is well written and immediately pulls you in the story but it is as heartwarming as the musical "Cabaret". It is just not for me right now. Maybe there will be a time when I can pick it up and read it again. That time is not now. Oh, the writer was a well known author of the 30's in France and had several books published before the war. She was quite renowned for her writing and I can understand why. She had hoped to eventually make these two books into a 'suite' of five - like a musical symphony has 5 movements -hers would be 5 novellas making one complete novel. A great concept - I wish she could have seen her dream come true. These manuscripts were found in a trunk and just recently published and then translated - they were unknown until just a few years ago.
1 comment:
The last book sounds interesting. It was written during the war? or just after? I will have to look for it when I complete my list. (I finally wrote them down and taped then to the side of one of my bookshelves. oh, dear!)
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