The Paris Seamstress

By Natasha Lester
Mar23-29, 2019

Wow, I loved, loved, loved this book. So totally unexpected and just what I needed right now. Two separate love stories that were not the least bit schmaltzy, but truly powerful and heart-breaking. What I thought going in was going to be a story mainly focused in Paris during WWII, was instead about a dress designer fleeing Nazi invasion. And so much more.

Something really cool was that some of the characters actually existed. Lester took liberties with their pasts to incorporate them into the story and it worked out beautifully. None of the outcomes were overly-predictable or outrageous, just satisfying resolutions to the endurance of love. The character development was so complete that my feelings for each one was powerful. Overall just great.

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Educated

by Tara Westover
March 10-23, 2019

It somehow seems wrong to judge a person's memoir. But that's just about what I am going to do. I understand that there are definitely people out there that live sheltered, unfathomable lives. But this one was eye-roll inducing. The first issue I had was with the "I think it happened this way; so-and-so thinks it happened that way." None of her memories are truly clear. There were too many footnotes like this that reduced some of the credibility. All of her memories are of horrific accidents and injuries and yet not one person died from these events. Her mother makes tinctures that save lives. Let's get the Cleveland Clinic to knock on their door...it's a miracle! Second, the timeline was disjointed at best. At one point the book jumps from Y2K to September 11. Tsk-tsk for an author with a PhD.

Which leads me to the "Educated" portion. If your delusional, government-fearing father is so anti-education, and you live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, how do you even know you want an education? And once this education begins, Westover somehow becomes like the Forrest Gump of college – being afforded insanely generous opportunities to BYU, Cambridge and Harvard. And somehow there's enough money and scholarships for this to happen.

I understand the someone so cut off from society could truly be ignorant to the ways of the world. But,

"Was I pregnant? I wasn't sure."

This naiveté did not evoke empathy, just annoyance. COME ON. You are at BYU. Google it for goodness sake.

The memoir did start to come together more for me towards the end, but by that point, I just wanted to finish it. I know I'm in the minority on this one, but I'm just tougher to please these days. (A- on the cover design though.)

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Ohio

by Stephen Markley
Feb 18-Mar 10, 2019

I'm going to find it hard to put my review into words. So many thoughts and emotions swirling through my brain as I finished this book only an hour ago. I was nearly ready to give up on it after the prelude, but like a pas de deux, I continued to dance with my partner, this book, until the coda. I'm so glad I did. What a complex, challenging, heart-breaking book.

Complex: Attempting to keep all the characters straight and comprehending the political aspect of Bill's character. Challenging: I found myself looking up several words I had never heard of – verisimilitude, threnody, senescence – and yet there was not an ounce of pretension in the author's voice. Heart-breaking: At times, the graphic depictions of war, rape and self-mutilation were unbearable, but I realized that they were absolutely necessary.

As we all know, the way memory works is that the sweep of your life gets explicated by a handful of specific moments, and these totems then stand as narrative. You must invent the ligature that binds the rest.

And the draw was so familiar and comfortable, because, well, Ohio. Every mention of my happy places from Cleveland to Akron to South Bass Island, made me feel like home. While I'm not native to our great state, it's still my home.

“Johnny Appleseed. Ever heard of him? Ohioan.”

It seemed to take forever for me to finish, but I realize it was only short of three weeks. Worth every minute and with a payoff no reader could ever see coming. In an interview at the end of the book, Markley is quoted as saying,

"You just want those last forty pages to shock the shit out of you and yet feel totally inevitable in retrospect."

Absolutely. Poetically lovely, and absolutely relevant.

"And they were gone, these infinitesimal creatures, walking the surface of time, trying and failing to articulate the dreams of ages, born and wandering across the lonesome heavens."

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The Girls at 17 Swann Street

by Yara Zgheib
February 9-16, 2019

Super quick read that takes the reader into the mind of an anorexic. The author (whose credentials are eye-poppingly impressive by the way) succeeded in not only writing a book that made me understand the anxiety and mental struggles of anorexia, but also made it so engrossing I couldn't put it down.

It's amazing that as Anna was down to a mere 88 pounds, the people she loved allowed it to happen. While they admitted their mistakes, it's just a fact that people see what they want to see and think they are being protective. It's also fascinating how two people remember stories completely differently. Anna remembers wonderful times and fun trips and her husband remembers her fainting and having to force her to eat.

The writing style and lack of punctuation could be a little distracting at times, but overall the sentences flowed at a rapid pace and the ending leaves the reader cautiously hopeful.

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