Archive for the ‘Motherhood’ Category

MY WIFE’S AFFAIR by Nancy Woodruff

If you’ve got a hot work project with an overdue deadline, a soccer game that you simply must attend, or any “must do” commitments in the next couple of days, whatever you do, DON’T pick up this book. It will grip you, entice you, and place you under its spell. And in the end, it just may break your heart.

July 22, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Motherhood, Real People Fiction, United Kingdom

THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE by Josephine Hart

What can one say about Irish writers? Deep into this book, here’s what Josephine Hart says: “A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we’re teachers, missionaries.” And then, a few pages later, as a character summarizes a reading experience: “When I finished the book I thought, language–that’s his real subject, not history.” When you read sentences like these, in a book like this, you sense you’re on to something special. The Irish writers take themselves seriously. They are bent, as noted above, towards the mission–with style.

February 21, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Contemporary, Literary, Motherhood, World Literature

BLOODROOT by Amy Greene

Somewhere, in the darkest and most remote part of Tennessee, lie hollers, ridges, and knolls. Set among them is a place named Bloodroot Mountain, home to Myra and her granny. The mountain gets its name from the bloodroot flowers that grow there. These flowers are so toxic that they can cause death. They are also so curative that they have amazing healing powers

January 21, 2010 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, Literary, Magical Realism, Mental Health, Motherhood, US South

OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout

Big-wristed Olive Kitteridge is the imposing, even frightful, over-sized woman at the center of this novel. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine, where traditionally people keep to themselves, living out lives of granite-like individuality. She trucks no silliness, has little patience for people she does not care for, which is virtually everyone, and has no problem speaking her mind, in fact seems genetically predisposed to it. She is a retired high school math teacher, who, her adult son tells her, was the “scariest teacher in the school.” She is one of those individuals you meet and wonder, how does a person get this way?

January 19, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Contemporary, Motherhood, NE & New York, Pulitzer Prize, Reading Guide, Short Stories, Small Town

LYING WITH THE DEAD by Michael Mewshaw

LYING WITH THE DEAD by Michael Mewshaw is a novel about a dysfunctional family but it is also much more than that. It is a Greek tragedy, a morality tale, a story about the conflicting and diametrically opposed emotions that grip us all, and a novel about sibling love. The novel unfolds in chapters told from the points of view of each of the children – - Quinn, Maury and Candy.

January 14, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Motherhood

ANNA IN-BETWEEN by Elizabeth Nunez

ANNA IN-BETWEEN is a novel about an unmarried, Caribbean woman in her late thirties, Anna Sinclair, who begins to understand herself as she comes to understand her parents. The novel explores issues of caste, race and culture in a moving, deeply poignant tale of mother and daughter. Anna goes back to the island of her birth as she does every year, but this time she stays for a month to spend more time with her aging parents…

November 14, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Caribbean, Class - Race - Gender, Immigration / Diaspora, Latin American, Literary, Motherhood