After my little burst of frenzy-like reading, I hit a bit of a slowdown and was pretty sure there wouldn’t be a Reading Roundup to submit to our editor this week. I had started a Jodi Picoult, one of my favorite authors, who is famous for writing stories through multiple characters’ points of view. Much of the time, her chapters alternate between narrators. In this one, she shifts several times within the chapters, and it took me a bit to settle into the rhythm and start forming an idea of who these characters are. There are many of them, and it almost would have been helpful to have a map.
As I slough through the gettingto-know-this-world Picoult created, I am finally starting to get glued to the pages. I can’t wait to share it with you all, but there was no way I was going to fast-forward through it like my last couple of reads. Luckily for me, and any Reading Roundup fans out there, Barb Kinny, one of my favorite North Shore readers, wrote in to share her summer reads so far.
Kinny has had a busy summer but is thankful she found some time to read. The recent smoke situation has given her more indoor activity time, and reading helps her take her mind off the “heartbreaking result of the forest fires.”
Last I heard from Kinny, she was reading The Calamity Club, which she reported she finished a few weeks ago. She chose to listen to the audiobook due to the length and feels you have more opportunities to listen than sit down and read.
As she mentioned, she felt she had to call out that she didn’t physically read the book; I had to laugh. I tell people the same thing if I listened as opposed to read. As if I cheated and had to confess.
She feels there is a “bit of the stigma attached to not holding the book and turning the pages,” but added, “I’m from the camp that says it doesn’t really matter, but some do disagree. Your imagination is working in either scenario.”
Kinny described Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club as similar to The Help but in a good way.
“Like an old friend with new stories to tell,” she said. “I felt it deserved a 4-star rating. Kathryn Stockett is a master at capturing personalities, and this book was full of them.”
It’s a favorite genre for Kinny, the South, especially in the 1930s.
“The juxtaposition of gentile civility to the inhumanity of racial bias and economic inequality is so pronounced,” she said. “Kathryn Stockett occasionally makes me uncomfortable with the norms and beliefs she highlights in her main characters. She always pulls me in to love the seemingly naive ones. Meg, the child protagonist of the story and the glue that holds it together, is so lovable. I was emotionally drawn in and hated to end the book.”
I enjoyed reading The Help and felt that same uncomfortable squirmy feeling from reading how some of the main characters behaved. It was a good book, an important book, and one that sticks with me. I felt the movie was well done and well cast. I’ve now added The Calamity Club to my TBR.
Kinny recently finished Ann Patchett’s Whistler. I was delighted to hear we shared another favorite author. I still have a lot more Patchett to read, but the most recent was The Dutch House. It was a great book and it made me want to delve deeply into her extensive work.
It sounds like I might be able to move Whistler toward the bottom of my list, however, based on Kinny’s review.
“I love Ann Patchett and will read anything she writes, but there was a little too much ‘hype’ for me on this book,” she said.
She described the novel as the story of a woman who briefly reconnects with a stepfather who shaped her life in quiet but lasting ways. That short encounter when she was nine set the course for many of her choices. Eddie Triplett’s love of books sparked her own love of reading and eventually led her into teaching literature. Kinny also noted that Eddie influenced how Daphne came to understand and care for her birth father. Buddy had seemed to abandon his daughters early on, but the story reveals a more complicated man who becomes an important presence in Daphne’s life. Daphne’s childhood trauma strained her mother’s relationship with Eddie, though the book later uncovers deeper reasons for that distance.
Kinny saw a love-but-misunderstood dynamic between Daphne and her mother, and said that a chance meeting years later helped Eddie give Daphne a clearer view of who her mother really was. Much of the novel explores how Daphne learns to navigate loss, revise her assumptions, and ultimately build the relationships she deserves with her father, Eddie, and a second stepfather.
“Although a good book and I did get emotionally involved with the main characters, it seemed to lag in places,” Kinny said of the book that she gave 3.5 stars. “I didn’t always make the connections of the importance of some of the story lines. Maybe I missed some of the points.”
She added that she felt “bad I didn’t love it more.” She, like me, would love to hear what others thought of it.
Kinny is awaiting her turn to read Theo of Golden, but while she waits will go back to We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter. She admits this isn’t her usual genre, but she was willing to try it as it was recommended. I can’t wait to hear what she thinks of both of them.
North Shore readers, I know you’re out there. Be The Help we need before this turns into the Calamity Club of a column. Let me know what you’ve been reading this summer, or what your favorite summer read is. What authors do you go back to time and time again, no matter the season? Anything book-ish is welcome. I’d love to be a happy Whistler as I write up future Reading Roundups when I get emails from you North Shore readers. Please write to sarahwritesnsj@yahoo.com to be featured in an upcoming edition. And always remember to look for books we mention at your lovely local bookstores and libraries!
