Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

 It has been a while since a book seemed so destined to fall in my hands at just the right time. Tom Lake is a small community in Michigan with a very active community theater. Years ago, Lara Nelson played Emily in a production of Our Town there opposite Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. Now it is 2020 and Lara and her husband own a cherry orchard not far fromTom Lake. Her three daughters have returned home to wait out the pandemic and help harvest the fruit. In the hours spent picking cherries, the four women revisit, question, examine the time Lara spent at Tom Lake.  As I regret not having asked my parents or grandparents questions about their life before me and ponder if there will be a time when my own children have those same regrets, there is the question of what would I share and what I would not. What record do we leave behind? What are the defining moments in our life? I loved every moment spent with this family - the story, the writing, the connection - all of it.

Kill Switch by Adam Jentleson

 Subtitle: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

 Simply put, the Kill Switch references Rule 22 which was devised to bring a filibuster to an end. Back in the day when being a Senator carried with it a responsibility to reasonably debate and debate and debate..., it kept the southern group from blocking Civil Rights legislation through the filibuster. It comes with a need for a super majority (currently 60) to end the filibuster. In a ferociously divided Senate, whose job it seems to be just to keep the other side from getting what it wants, it means that just a small few can keep something from even being voted on - even if the country has made it clear that they want something done. It is what  kept universal background checks from being passed after the Newtown shootings. 55 Senators wanted to vote yes but not 60 - not enough to stop the filibuster.  It never came to a vote.  There is a lot of fascinating history about the Senate and disturbing revelations about the current cast of bad actors. It is frightening but Jentleson does offer some hope for a fundamental change.

Hello Beautiful

I understood that this book was intended to pay homage to Little Women. And it kinda does - there are four sisters who are very close and one does die. There is a male who disrupts the equilibrium of their relationship. There is a father who adores them but it is his hapless nature that forces their rigidly Catholic mother to demand that each one go to college to be self supporting. When one of them becomes pregnant with no father in sight and is determined to keep the child - well it all starts to drift far from Little Women at some point. It is a story of family and how it can become dysfunctional - although not all family members or readers would agree on where the dysfunction lies. It came highly recommended and led to a good book group discussion about family in general and Louisa May Alcott in particular but most of the group considered it an elevated kind of chick lit.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

 First of all, kudos to anyone who can keep the characters in Greek mythology straight! All those names made the reading of this book a little clumsy until I got comfortable with the fact that I didn't really need to keep them all correct genealogically to understand their anger, jealousy, revenge, etc.  This is Homer's Illiad and Odyssey from the women's perspective. I particularly enjoyed the snarky voice of Penelope (abandoned wife of Odysseus).  The absurdity of war, men's senseless need for "victory", the god/mortal (read fate/freewill) struggle, the profound mother/child connection - all here in more readable prose than Homer for sure. The Afterward is an entire curse in Greek Literature and history. Kudos to you if you read that as well. 

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

 I had to read this book twice to really appreciate the writing since I was so caught up in the story. A never named, brilliant, but often hapless black author is on a book tour to promote his novel, Hell of a Book. Believed to be plagued by an overactive imagination, he struggles to account for the appearance of a young boy - so black he is called Soot - beside him in cab rides, in his hotel room, out of nowhere. Meanwhile, the lead story in the news of the day involves the death of a young black male - one of many victims of the senseless racist nature of today's society. How are these three individuals connected? Is it important that we know? Sometimes funny, sometimes intimate, it is mostly a meditation on what it means to be black and male in America. In an interview, Mott indicated that he kept waiting for someone to write the kind of book he thought needed to be written about the topic. When no one did, he decided to write a hell of a book.

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

 Hazel and Flora Lea are just two of the many children sent into the English countryside to escape the London Blitz in WWII. As the older sister, Hazel takes her job of protector seriously but at the same time entertains Flora Lea with the imaginary world of Whisperwood where they can be heroes in the adventures Hazel creates. And then Flora Lea disappears. Believed to be drowned in the nearby Thames which they often referred to as a river of stars in their stories, Hazel is devastated. Twenty years later Hazel comes across a beautifully illustrated book entitled Whisperwood and the River of Stars. Believing this to be too much of a coincidence, Hazel embarks on a journey to see if her long lost sister could in fact be alive.  There are quirky characters and a bit of a surprise in the end but mostly a warm, hopeful read.

The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

 This is the story of the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt, who would eventually be the First Lady of the USA, and Mary McLeod Bethune, whom Eleanor names as the First Lady of the Struggle.  They met in 1927 at a formal luncheon hosted by Franklin Roosevelt's mother. When many of the white women in the room refused to sit down with Mrs. Bethune, Eleanor is awakened to the realities of being black in America. This story of their friendship continues through 1945 following President Roosevelt's death and the beginning of Dr. Bethune's career as special consultant to the US delegates preparing to sign into existence the United Nations. In between we see their very public friendship demanding a hard look at the absurdity of segregation, encouraging logical discourse to move the needle on inclusion to various New Deal programs as well as the military, and promoting integration at the highest level of government hoping to shine a light on the need of change everywhere. But it is also about two best friends sharing the hardest parts of their lives as they try to correct some of the worst of American social policy.  It is historical FICTION so Benedict and Murray draw from their own intense conversations to give the conversations of these two very important women true voices. They were names I knew a little about from my pathetic knowledge of history but names that deserve so much more credit for our move toward a truly inclusive society.