Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson is a hilarious and mildly disturbing book taken mostly from her blog, The Bloggess. Lawson starts with her early life, growing up poor in rural Texas with a taxidermist Dad and the stories are laugh out loud funny at the same time as they are truly unsettling.

Lawson goes in for shock value each chapter and I was getting a bit tired of it by the end of the book, but still found it one of the funniest things Ive read in a long time.

The Last Anniversary

The Last Anniversary, is an early novel by one of my favorite writers, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty always weaves a good tale full of interesting characters and keeps the reader in a bit of suspense waiting to find out what happens.

Set on tiny Scribbly Gum Island, just off the coast of Sydney, Sophie inherits a house and becomes part of a family mystery about parents who left their newborn baby and disappeared without a trace. As Sophie's biological clock is ticking and she desperately hopes to start a family of her own, the truth about the Scribbly Gum baby might just be coming to light.

An entertaining read, although not nearly as good as her later books.

Quiet Until the Thaw

Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller is a novel about life on the Lakota reservation for two Native American cousins who choose very different paths. Fuller captures the wisdom and humor, as well as great sadness and injustice experienced by the Lakota on the reservation.

Fuller is one of my favorite writers and I still much prefer her non-fiction, but this is an engaging debut novel worth checking out.

The Woman Next Door

The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso is a novel set in South Africa in a neighborhood where two older women, one black, one white, live next door to each other. They have both recently lost their husbands and circumstances bring them together even though they have always hated each other.

Omotoso's writing is so subtle you hardly realize you are unearthing the deep pains that reside in a country so long fractured by apartheid. Powerful, funny, incisive and honest. A great read.

Radio Girls

Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford is historical fiction about some of the first women in radio, specifically Hilda Matheson of the BBC. 1920's London, after WW1 when there were beginning to be fascist rumblings from Germany, Matheson was not only a director of the Talks programs at the BBC, but also a spy.

The BBC was one of the few places women could work, and Stratford does a wonderful job of exploring the early days of radio, and what life was like for women who wanted to work and not just get married. A great read.

Faithful

Faithful by Alice Hoffman is a novel about a 17 year old girl who gets in a car crash that leaves her best friend almost dead and in a coma. Shelby, the one who walks away, is devestated and can't forgive herself.

Hoffman is one of my favorite writers; in this book, we travel with Shelby through her breakdown, grief, self destruction and eventual path back towards life, love and happiness.

Beautifully written, a worthwhile read.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a beautiful book about a very intelligent 12 year old girl and a 54 year old concierge in an apartment building in France that no one notices, because she seems unremarkable, although in truth, she is also quite brilliant. The chapters switch between these two characters as they observe life in the building around them, until a new tenant one day brings them all together.

Beautifully written, full of observations about life and love, art and movies, music, books, cats, Japanese culture, and the inner workings of the mind and heart. Funny, sad, philosophical; I fell in love with this book and the characters and was sad to see it end.