A Word About Awards

THE SILENT PATIENT by Alex Michaelides   Award: Goodreads Winner 2019   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2021   Date Read: November 5, 2023   This thriller was quite good with a twist at the end. Grappling throughout with the psyche and the ways it can betray us, Theo is fighting the good fight for his own healing and others’. More specifically, he wants to help Alicia who is an infamous husband killer and famous artist. Since the murder of her husband, she hasn’t spoken a single word.   Theo embarked on a career in psychotherapy because of his own upbringing and wanted to overcome the trauma from that time. As it turns out, Alicia had a very similar upbringing, although she lost her mom quite young. Theo hunts down where Alicia is being held and doggedly pursues a job there. He is eventually hired.   His one and only reason for taking a job at an institution that’s near collapse is explicitly because of Alicia. You realize he is somewhat obsessed, but in a ben...

LANDLINE by Rainbow Rowell   Award: Goodreads Winner 2014   Date Read: October 21, 2023   I read this on a flight from Barcelona to DC to give some context on the level of difficulty of this one. In summary, a husband and wife’s marriage is on the rocks. When he leaves town at Christmas without her, an old magic rotary phone in her parent’s house gives her access to her husband from when they were falling in love. She subsequently falls in love all over again. A Christmas reunion ensues. You get the idea.   What I liked about this novel was the power the wife had in her career, which was handled well and believably. I like that instead of turning elsewhere, the plot was them recommitting to each other again. I was also pleased that Georgie (the wife), didn’t need to give up her powerful career to reach a resolution with her husband.   What I didn’t like is first and foremost the main character’s name – Georgie McCool. I didn’t swallow it then and I don’t swallow...

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus   Award: Goodreads Winner 2022   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2023   Date Read: April 11, 2023   This a very unique novel, just as its heroine, Elizabeth Zott. Garmus brilliantly brings the worlds of chemistry, love, feminism, cooking shows and pet ownership into a beautiful salad bowl and tosses. What comes out is an empowering and hopeful novel about the bonds of family.   Elizabeth Zott is struggling to find her way through the male-dominated chemistry world. Clearly gifted and brilliant, she lacks the one, most important component: no, not a B.S. – a penis. In the 1960s, women in science were just about unheard of and no one took them seriously. Elizabeth has endured sexual assault, humiliation, demeaning job duties and a general lack of respect, yet she’s determined to remain true to her life love: chemistry.   Winding up at the Hastings Institute, she meets and (despite her stealing his beakers and him barfing on h...

THE MAID by Nita Prose   Award: Goodreads Winner 2022   Date Read: February 23, 2023   The Maid is a detective novel with an unlikely heroine. Molly is a maid at a hotel, which is her entire life’s ambition. She loves the opulence, the uniform, the routine and returning rooms to a state of perfection. She is, most likely, somewhere on the spectrum. Molly has a hard time reading facial expressions and with personal interaction. But she has carved out a life for herself that she enjoys and provides her purpose.   She was raised for her Gran, Flora, since Molly’s mother had died of an overdose. Her Gran gave her the tools to figure out how to live and how to navigate the world. She did not help, however, with figuring out whom to trust. Molly’s once and only boyfriend, Wilbur, ended up stealing all their savings and running off with it. While her Gran was dying, she could never fess up and tell Gran what had happened.   Molly lives off her wages and her tips. The r...

CARRIE SOTO IS BACK by Taylor Jenkins Reid   Award: Goodreads Winner 2022 Nominations: BookTube Longlist 2023   Date Read: February 18, 2023   Carrie Soto, once the world record holder of the most Grand Slams won in women’s tennis, cannot stand that a new crop of players are overriding her record. Already in retirement, she vows to train and reclaim the dominant title. The only problem staring her in the face but she refuses to see – no matter whether she wins or loses, someone will always come up behind her and outdo her record.    The other challenge Carrie faces is that she is a bitch. She is demanding, ungrateful and the tennis world rues her because she is the least friendly player. Yet, I still found myself cheering her on more due to Reid’s talents than the likeability of the character she has created. Although she softens somewhat towards the end, I overall found her loathsome and wish everyone in her life would turn their backs on her.   Carrie has...

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett   Award: Goodreads Winner 2020   Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2021, BookTube Finalist 2021, Carnegie Longlist 2021, Dublin Longlist 2021, National Book Longlist 2020, NY Times Finalist 2020, Women’s Prize Finalist 2021   Date Read: February 3, 2023   Two Black twins with aspirations for a bigger life decide to leave the small town of Mallard for the big city of New Orleans. Although this had been Desiree’s dream forever, once they had actually left home, Stella was the one who was determined to make it. The harsh realities of city life began to wear down Desiree’s dream, but Stella adopted her sisters’ dream and ran with it.   Keeping in mind this story began in the 1950s, the difference between black and white lives were still profoundly different. Not much has changed now except Americans love to say racism is dead while it still happens all around us. I would think it was almost easier back then because you knew what it...

TRULY MADLY GUILTY by Liane Moriarty   Award: Goodreads Winner 2016   Date Read: September 12, 2022   Truly Madly Guilty is another guilty pleasure from Moriarty. Here we have 3 couples, married, middle class and in various stations of happiness in their marriages. They all meet up one fateful day for an innocent barbecue and at first, they are having a great time – perhaps with the exclusion of Erika and Oliver. Vin and Tiffany’s daughter, Dawn, is there as well as Sam and Clementine’s daughters Holly and Ruby.    With great food and engaging conversation, the couples assume the children are being watched over by Dakota, who is a mere 10 years old. Erika is actually the one that finds Ruby floating in a large fountain in Vin and Tiffany’s extravagant backyard. Erika and Oliver perform CPR, which at first doesn’t seem to be working, until Ruby coughs up water. She is airlifted to a hospital and eventually is okay – no long-term impairments.   The long-term ...

11/22/63 by Stephen King   Awards: Goodreads Winner 2011, LA Times Winner 2011   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2013, New York Times Finalist 2011   Date Read: April 23, 2022   I am in shock and awe over this book. The level of detail. The complexities of King’s working and understanding of time. Of the repercussions of moving one thing in the past and the impact that has on the future. I can only say that I think he’s a genius. Then again, over the last several years, I have heard King remark on current events and I think he’s brilliant at breaking down the hypocrisy that dominates our current political discourse and my opinion of him has only risen. Now it has gone stratospheric.   Jake is a teacher with a divorced alcoholic as his ex-wife and not a lot of ties to the community. You can tell from the get-go that he has a good soul and his heart is in the right place. Out of the blue, the owner of the diner Jake likes to eat at urgently summons him and out of cur...

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr Awards: Carnegie Winner 2015, Goodreads Winner 2014, Pulitzer Winner 2015 Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2016, National Book Finalist 2014, New York Times Finalist 2014 Date Read: February 16, 2015 This is only the second novel I have ever picked up by my own steam that happened to receive any awards, The Goldfinch being the first. This gem of a novel occurs during WWII in occupied France. The protagonist, a blind French girl named Marie-Laure, lives with her widowed father, who dotes on her and takes every opportunity to enrich her world through Braille books, puzzle boxes and a precise miniature model of their neighborhood.  Parallel to this narrative is an orphaned German boy, Werner, who repairs a broken radio, creating a lifeline to the outside world, with a science program broadcast from France being his favorite. As the war progresses, Marie-Laure and her father flee to the coastal t...

AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED by Khaled Hosseini   Award: Goodreads Winner 2014 Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2014, Dublin Longlist 2015   Date Read: August 18, 2013   I absolutely loved this novel and I find Hosseini’s work insightful and his use of language is poetry. I could read his novels again and again and still find something new.     “Aghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister, Pari, live with their father and stepmother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Abdullah, Pari – as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named – is everything. More like a parent than a brother, Abdullah will do anything for her, even trading his only pair of shoes for a feather for her treasured collection. Each night they sleep together in their cot, their heads touching, their limbs tangled.   One day the siblings journey across the desert...

GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn   Award: Goodreads Winner 2012 Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2014, Goodreads Finalist 2012, Women's Prize Longlist 2013   Date Read: July 3, 2012   Flynn creates on one of her darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed that her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit and deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn.   On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages ...

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami   Award: Goodreads Winner 2011 Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2012, Dublin Finalist 2013   Date Read: February 5, 2012   When 1Q84 first came out, I grabbed it right away and began feasting, loving Murakami with a beating passion. That passion was somewhat diminished by the end of this tome, never seeming to drive home any point. Regardless of the misfire here, my love remains undiminished.   “A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 – “Q” is for question mark. A world that bears a question. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.   As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this s...

DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth   Award: Goodreads Winner 2011   Date Read: April 5, 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “Cliques writ large take over in the first of a projected dystopian trilogy.   The remnant population of post-apocalyptic Chicago intended to cure civilization’s failures by structuring society into five “factions,” each dedicated to inculcating a specific virtue. When Tris, secretly a forbidden “Divergent,” has to choose her official faction in her 16th year, she rejects her selfless Abnegation upbringing for the Dauntless, admiring their reckless bravery. But the vicious initiation process reveals that her new tribe has fallen from its original ideals, and that same rot seems to be spreading… Aside from the preposterous premise, this gritty, paranoid world is built with careful details and intriguing scope. The plot clips along at an addictive pace, with steady jolts of brutal violence and swoony romance. Despite the constant assurance that Tris is coura...

GO SET A WATCHMAN by Harper Lee   Award: Goodreads Winner 2015   Date Read: September 5, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “The long-awaited, much-discussed sequel that might have been a prequel—and that makes tolerably good company for its classic predecessor.   It’s not To Kill a Mockingbird, and it too often reads like a first draft, but Lee’s story nonetheless has weight and gravity. Scout—that is, Miss Jean Louise Finch—has been living in New York for years. As the story opens, she’s on the way back to Maycomb, Alabama, wearing “gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers,” an outfit calculated to offend her prim and proper aunt. The time is pre-Kennedy; in an early sighting, Atticus Finch, square-jawed crusader for justice, is glaring at a book about Alger Hiss. But is Atticus really on the side of justice? As Scout wanders from porch to porch and parlor to parlor on both the black and white sides of the tracks, she hears stories t...

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins   Award: Goodreads Winner 2015 Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2017   Date Read: April 19, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she’s only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins’ chilling, assured debut, in which the line between truth and lie constantly shifts like the rocking of a train.   Rachel Watson—a divorced, miserable alcoholic who’s still desperately in love with her ex-husband, Tom—rides the same train every day into London for her dead-end job, one she unsurprisingly loses after one too many drunken outbursts. Continuing her daily commute to keep up appearances with her roommate, Rachel always pays special attention to a couple, whom she dubs “Jess and Jason,” who live a seemingly idyllic life in a house near her own former home. When she sees a momentary act of infidelity, followed soon after by news that Jess—who...