Tag: Fiction

Quick Thoughts on The Painted Girls and Calling Me Home

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 28 Comments
The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Publisher: Riverhead
Publication Date: January 2013
Categories: Literary, Historical
Source: Library
Description:
1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir.

My Quick Thoughts:
Ahh, historical fiction. When you are done right I LOVE you with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns! The Painted Girls is done right. Paris, poverty, alcoholism, ballet, theater, prison, love, sisters, Edgar Degas! A seriously fantastic read that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: February 2013
Categories: Contemporary Women, Historical
Source: Library
Description:
Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. It’s a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drop everything to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. With no clear explanation why. Tomorrow.

Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own and curious whether she can unlock the secrets of Isabelle’s guarded past, scarcely hesitates before agreeing, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives.

My Quick Thoughts:
I enjoyed when the book took me back to Isabelle’s youth in the 1940’s. While I was reading Dorrie’s present-day tale I just wanted to get back to Isabelle’s past. This subject matter has been done, and done better. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading Calling Me Home but take it for what it is: a decent read.

Have you read either of these? Do you plan on it?

White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 16 Comments

White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse
Publisher: Viking
Publication Date: January 2013
Categories: South Africa, Apartheid, Literary
Source: Library

Description:
In apartheid South Africa in 1976, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa. When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land.

Like the African terrain that Alice loves, Morse’s novel is alternately austere and lush, spare and lyrical. She is a writer of great and wide-ranging gifts.

My Thoughts:

First of all I have to thank Belle for recommending this book. It was stunning and intense and WOW! The only way to describe my thoughts and feelings about this book? Gifs baby!


In short? READ THIS BOOK.