Our Quiet Growing Time

This is the second post for a readalong of Stephen King's 11/22/63 hosted by Grace . Today we are posting about the last three sections of the book. My previous post on sections 1-3 is here . SPOILERS! King knows how to write some good foreshadowing:           1. Jake is not a crying man.           2. Sadie is accident-prone.        3. As Jake writes his memoir, he has on the loafers Sadie gave him because "some things are meant to keep." My eyes popped open at 4:00 a.m. one morning when I was half-way through 11/22/63 and it all came together in one lucid moment. I knew Sadie was destined to have an accident and that Jake would become a crying man. He'd be forced to return to the future, leaving behind his One True Love in the smoky Sixties. In 2011, he'd travel to a Texas nursing home or a hospital to visit an elderly--yet still beautiful--woman who he had once lo...

Twenty-two years ago Detective Frank Mackey's heart was broken on the night that he thought he was going to run off to England with his childhood sweetheart. But Rosie never showed. Instead, she left a 'Dear John' letter for him and disappeared out of his life forever. Frank never went back to his home on Faithful Place, unwilling to face his dysfunctional family without Rosie just a few houses away. Now Rosie's suitcase has been found in a derelict house on Faithful Place and 41-year-old Frank is on the trail to discover what happened, finally, to the love of his youthful life. His trail leads him back to Faithful Place, the street so filled with memories and demons that he hoped he'd never have to return.  Faithful Place shows Tana French at her best, back in the groove after the somewhat disappointing The Likeness . Frank was introduced in The Likeness as Cassie's boss from Undercover. He is a renegade. His moral code as a cop is pretty skewed; he...

A diminutive, eccentric, brunette waitress at a shabby cafe in a tiny English town and a slick business executive who pursues extreme adventure on the arms of statuesque and shallow blondes aren't likely to cross paths. And if they ever did cross paths, they'd quickly un-cross them, because not only do Louisa Clark and Will Traynor have nothing in common, they live life by two totally different scripts. He's cultured and adventurous and snobby; she's flighty and unambitious and timid. And then Will, in the prime of his life, is injured in an accident, leaving him a quadriplegic and plotting the end of his life via assisted suicide. And Louisa loses her job at the cafe and is hired by Will's mom to be his companion, as a last-ditch effort to help her son see that life is indeed worth living. Me Before You is the story of two radically different people who come into each other's lives at just the right moment, to change each other's hearts forever. Lo...

A long long time ago in a little Polish village, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, there lived a girl so beautiful that she was called Anielica, because her face was that of an angel's. And there also lived a boy who was called the Pigeon, because his nose was as beaked and ugly as the bird's. The Angel was as kind as she was beautiful and the Pigeon, while not handsome, was smart and resourceful, confident and brave. In order to stand out from the scores of suitors who sought Anielica's hand, the Pigeon told her father that he would renovate their family home for free. Over the next months, the Pigeon became a fixture in Anielica's family, crafting furniture and cabinetry with his hands, befriending her brother, and slowly and sweetly finding a way into Anielica's heart. The love story of the Angel and the Pigeon is juxtaposed with the story of their granddaughter who, decades later, moves from the village to the big city of Krakow. Krakow is bustling with the free...

Ancilla Trent is a governess and a spinster at the ripe old age of 26. Miss Trent has successfully suppressed any youthful romantic dreams she may have had and has instead made the education of her young ward her life's purpose. Never has she felt even the faintest stirring in her heart for any man... until she meets the Nonesuch. The Nonesuch, as he is called, is Sir Waldo Hawkridge, a confirmed bachelor, who is touted for his athletic achievements, wit, handsomeness, and his overall masculine perfection . Indeed, that is the very definition of a nonesuch : unrivaled, an ideal, a paragon. Despite her attempts at remaining aloof, and much to his own surprise, Miss Trent and the Nonesuch find themselves perfectly matched in intellect and humor, and find themselves in love. But in true Regency romance fashion, the road to happy-ever-after is hampered by social gaffes, trivial misunderstandings, and a tangled web of snooty meddling characters and their affairs. I've made an...

 In which The Librarian , LindszerWest, and RachelKiwi continue the reread of the gothic classic. The Librarian asks and I answer: 1. Women and illness. So often in this book women are called ill when in reality they're just really emotional. But then, sometimes there seem to be real symptoms of sickness such as the Lintons getting sick and dying from Cathy's fever... What's up with that? Just a viewpoint of weak women's constitutions of the time or is Bronte saying something more? Did you know that the words uterus and hysteria come from the same root? When a woman was called 'hysterical' it meant she was suffering from a 'woman's issue,' the source of her malady being her uterus (naturally!). So I think this view of women as 'ill' is just an example of the cultural and historical views toward women that existed centuries before and decades after the writing of WH . But if anyone deserves the mantle 'hysterica...

There is so much to love about this book that I don't know where to start.  Thisby is a tiny island somewhere off of the coast of Scotland or Ireland or England. This is where the water horses--the capaill uisce* --live. And every October they emerge from the ocean onto Thisby’s shores and they prowl, carnivorous and hungry. And every November first, the very brave or the very foolish run these savage horses across the beach in a bloody and dangerous race. They are man-eaters. They are magic. Their magic may dim after years spent on land, but every November 1 st , the magic of the sea pulls at them as they race on the beach. The depths call to the monsters within them, and these horses would just as soon dismember and eat their riders than carry them safely across the finish line. Sean Kendrick is the four-time Scorpio Races champion and is something of a water-horse whisperer. He’s a quiet boy, a loner, and he feels most comfortable on the back of Corr, the water-h...

Book Club of Two presents Wuthering Heights. The Librarian and I decided to do a re-read of Emily Brontë's only novel for the month of November. The Journalist (LindszerWest)  decided to join us and has become an honorary member of Book Club of Two, swelling our numbers temporarily to three. The Librarian and I each posed three questions to the group about Chapters 1-8. Go here if you'd like to see the full reading schedule. It's not too late to join us on the moors! The Librarian Asks and I answer: In this section we see explanation for Heathcliff's personality...But what about Cathy? How was her mean girl attitude formed? Does the lack of explanation point toward Joseph's religious belief of women's innate wickedness? Or do you see circumstances that caused Cathy to be such a b*tch? Madame Librarian, I'm shocked. Such language! Truthfully, there is no other word for Cathy. It's the word that pops into my head everytime she a...

Prior to this moment in my life, I've had a strict no re-reading policy. My motto has always been "So many books, so little time," so clearly, I have no time to waste for rereads. I had a sweatshirt sporting this slogan that I wore exactly once to school in sixth grade. That's all the further I'd like to go with that story; the pain is still raw. ;) But I'm glad I revisited Gone with the Wind . You get a lot more out of a book when you're 27 than you did when you were 13.  You know the story: it's the tale of how one Southern woman survives the turbulence of the Civil War and the years following. What struck me this time was that Margaret Mitchell wrote an epic 1000+ page tome with a protagonist who was detestable. Name a bad character trait: Scarlett's got it. She's lied, cheated, stolen, committed adultery in everything but the final act, wished death upon others, hated, and murdered. She's cruel, greedy, selfish, mercenary, manip...

"She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches." Sarah Addison Allen calls her style of writing "Southern-fried magic realism" and it is as delicious as Southern-fried cookin'. Her use of magical realism appeals to the whimsical in me. She creates such beautiful, vivid worlds that make me think that maybe--just maybe-- magic could happen in my own ordinary world, too.  Have you ever seen a low-hanging cloud that inexplicably clings to a hillside or just one end of a street? In Garden Spells , Claire is so consumed by unconsummated passion that when she showers, a fog shrouds her neighborhood, produced by the cool water hitting her heated skin. Now we know what's happening--or not happening--to explain that clingy fog you see sometimes. (Read this book and you will find explanations for other everyday phenomena.) The Waverley women all possess c...