This month Ill start with a thriller by Louise Candlish, Our House. Fiona Lawson and her husband Bram are newly separated with an arrangement to alternate time in their house to minimize disruption for their children. That goes well until one day Fiona arrives to find a new family moving into the house. Bram, her children and all possessions in the house are gone.
What does love mean and, for that matter, fidelity when the person you love is no longer herself? Those are questions 50-something David and his grown sons face when Davids wife Kate is diagnosed with early-onset Alzeimers and begins to slip away from them. Despite its sad premise, The Half-Life of Everything by Deborah Carol Gang is full of warmth and good humor as the family grapples with the most difficult yet rewarding years of their lives.
All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover is the story of a marriage told in alternating then and now chapters. Quinn and Graham meet when her fiancé and his girlfriend have taken up with one another. The now chapters show their current problems which are stressing a happy marriage, while the then chapter show how they fall in love and marry.
Florence has fallen in the home for the elderly where she lives in Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon. As she awaits being found, her thoughts turn to lifelong friend Elsie. Florence narrates that there are three things to know about Elsie: shes her best friend, she always know how to make Florence feel better, and the third takes a bit more explaining. In fact, that third thing is not revealed until the end of the book. Bound up in the story of Elsie is Florences curiosity about the charming new resident of the home who seems to be someone she thought died 60 years earlier. Despite her flagging memory, she determines to assemble all the pieces to the story. Weaving together the bonds between three senior citizens, lifelong friendship, and the beginnings of dementia, this touching novel should appeal to many.
A book gaining a lot of attention nationally is Heartland by Sarah Smarsh, a fifth generation Kansan. Smarsh broke out of the cycle of poverty her family was mired in. She did this by avoiding the teenage pregnancies common to generations on her mothers side, using the work ethic learned from her family, and utilizing federal grants for first-generation college students. In this book, she uses the lens of her own story to turn her eye on the class divide, the difficulty of transcending poverty, and the common view of the poor as less worthy than others. This insightful book is an Amazon Best Book for September and has likewise received rave reviews in such places as the New York Times Book Review.
