VACATION BOOK BYTES (FEBRUARY 2016)

Bonjour! 

Yes I am basking in the sun in Martinique.....no one speaks English, which is fine....Wifi was just restored after being kaput for several days. So before it goes on vacay again, here's what I've been reading...

THE GUEST ROOM By Chris Bohjalian... Timely topic...Would make a good Lifetime movie....Borrow it.

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by Elizabeth Strout......Don't miss it  (Scroll down for reviews)

THE PAST by Tessa Hadley....Skip it

THE EXPATRIOTS BY Janice J.K. Lee.... Predictable but enjoyable. (Scroll down for review)

THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES  by Alice Hoffman...Moving story by an astonishing author...Buy it

I'll be back in a few days with more book news!  Au revoir!

AN EMAIL FROM LIZ...(JANUARY 2016)

Look who sent me a letter..my BFF Elizabeth!  What a coincidence!  Just started her new book.....

Dear Joyce, My Name Is Lucy Barton was a different kind of book for me, and writing it surprised me. While I hope for all my books to provide the reader with a kind of intimate experience this one seems particularly available for that, I think.

My Name is Lucy Barton To re-invent the self has always been a terribly American idea, and I was interested in this, and I was also interested in class lines in this country. And so Lucy begins her life in real poverty, as an outcast, and moves through life until she is arguably an upper-middle class woman living in New York City. How much, or how little, she has really been able to escape, is a question for the reader to think about. It came to me recently that I always write for a reader who “needs” the book at whatever time in their life it arrives. And readers will always—and should—bring their own story to the story they are reading, and so it becomes, essentially, a different book for every reader. I hope you enjoy My Name is Lucy Barton, that it gives you a momentary vision of life perhaps larger than what you had before. Elizabeth Strout

NEW FOR 2016 (JANUARY)

    

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is debuting a new book January 12th...hopefully as good as her others. I loved Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, both illuminating and extraordinary reads...(See, I'm not always negative) 

Hopefully MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON will be a cause for celebration.

REMINDER: Get a copy directly from this blog. Click on the Amazon Search Box in the Sidebar.

Here's what Goodreads.com said.....

My Name Is Lucy Barton

by Elizabeth Strout

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration. Her bestselling novels, including Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, have illuminated our most tender relationships. Now, in My Name Is Lucy Barton, this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all—the one between mother and daughter.
 
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. 
 
Praise for Elizabeth Strout
 
“Strout has a magnificent gift for humanizing characters.” —San Francisco Chronicle 
 
“What truly makes Strout exceptional . . . is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling.”—Chicago Tribune 
 
“[Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion.” —USA Today 
 
“Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force.” —The New Yorker 
 
“[Strout’s] themes are how incompletely we know one another, how ‘desperately hard every person in the world [is] working to get what they need,’ and the redemptive power in little things—a shared memory, a shock of tulips.”—People (less)

Hardcover, 208 pages

Expected publication: January 12th 2016 by Random House (first published January 6th 2016)

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