The Turner House
A stately house in Detroit is all but abandoned, but the
thirteen children who lived there with their parents are determined to save it
in spite of the value. The dwelling is
the center of the story of the siblings, their parents and a snapshot of life
in modern Detroit. ChaCha is the oldest
of the siblings and is determined to find out if his haint (apparition) is
real. The youngest sister is a portrait
of the struggle to be an adult and face the consequences of your own
actions.
A Man Called Ove
Give the curmudgeon in your life a second look. Maybe he’s soft and squishy on the inside or
at least worthy of the effort to befriend.
Ove is cranky, holds a grudge and likes things just so. He's not the first cranky old man we've read about but he may be our favorite.
Girls & Sex
The seven of us think we are pretty aware of how things go
these days when it comes to sexual awareness and experiences of women. However, we learned a lot while reading this
study of young college aged women and their sexual interactions. The first take away for us was that the
sex-ed classes we got in the 1980’s hasn’t changed much, it is very focused on
the male sexual response, and reproduction.
Sounds good right, but no one talks to girls/women about their sexual
response, what they can and should expect?
Sex Ed for girls still has a shame factor and has lots of repercussions
as girls turn into women who have sexual interactions with others (or
themselves).
We were shocked to read that many of the women interviewed reported that they
used oral sex as a way to end a date with someone they didn’t want to have sex
with. WHAT!? How is that better?
The discussion over dinner went on and on and on, and when
our hostesses’ family came home the teenagers ran for the safety of their own
spaces and their dad joined us for a brief moment before realizing we were in
deep on topics that weren’t really meant for mixed company.
This book has been characterized by us as a horror
genre. We clearly have a lot of work to
do to help our own daughters as they grow up.
The Sellout, Paul
Beatty
An alternate version of the modern day inner city community
as told thru the voice of a black small businessman who somehow becomes a slave
owner in an attempt to save his corner of Los Angeles. The language is uncomfortable, the story
telling is humorous and awkward, but the lens Mr. Beatty uses to explain this
“fake” world says more about how we live today than an academic study of racism
or poverty.
The story has an arc, but each chapter is a contained exploration of a thought,
experience or topic the author wants to explore. It isn’t always easy to see where that
chapter might lead, but we were happy to go.
Station Eleven, Emily
St. John Mandel
A sweeping plague, survivors and actors oh my! If you set aside the extreme unlikeliness of
survivors having being connected (even tenuously) in the pre-plague world this
is a fantastic book. The concept is dark
to be sure, how could it not be with the majority of people on earth being dead
but unlike The Walking Dead, or Camus’ The Plague, or even Blindness the worst
of humanity is not the primary result of all the loss. Ms. St. John Mandel finds hope and connectivity
as our band of survivors make their way to Station Eleven. There is loss, there is the brutal reality of
what one might need to do to survive but it is not a lord of the flies
situation.
Little Failure, Shteyngas, Gary
A humorous look at the life of a Russian immigrant. (Have to admit – didn’t finish it. This was not a failing on the book, but a
lack of time management.)
Inside the O'Briens
by Lisa Genova
Because we loved the book Inside Alice we gave this novel a
try. She so adeptly explored early onset
Alzheimer’s that the impact on a large family when the father’s Huntington’s
disease progresses.
For the most part, we all finished the book and had a robust
conversation about the story, the characters but our discussion revolved around
the difference in the story telling between Alice and the O’Briens. Inside Alice really brought us into the
headspace, fear and uncertainty of Alice as her illness progressed, the story
of the O’Briens was far more focused on the family and their relationship with
the father than the impact of the illness.
