2Tess_W
My best read was The Beantown Girls by Jane Healey. The fictional tale of three donut dollies during WWII. Although fictional, taken from true accounts.
3vwinsloe
The Chosen and the Beautiful, a retelling of The Great Gatsby with a new kind of magic.
4shearon
I also really enjoyed The Chosen and the Beautiful. It prompted me to reread The Great Gatsby mainly because I did not recall the Jordan Baker character very clearly. The Chosen and the Beautiful tracks The Great Gatsby surprisingly closely given some very different fundamentals. I am drawn to, but don't always like retellings of books I really love, but this was very interesting.
5John5918
During August I was asked to review a book by J J Carney, For God and My Country: Catholic Leadership in Modern Uganda, for a US Catholic magazine, and it turned out to be my best read of the month. An excellent reflection based on five case studies in Uganda, in which he contrasts the public service type of leadership by Christians in Uganda for the common good with the partisan political "culture wars" of many Christian leaders in his native USA.
6TempleCat
My choice is A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.
In this concluding second volume of Chambers' Monk & Robot series*, a tea monk grows weary of their fulfilling but horizon-limited life and takes the road less travelled (literally) instead of following their routine once again. (Those are the pronouns the author used.)
The monk lives in a time when the people of the story had experienced severe environmental decline ages ago, and, in order to save their dystopian society, had divorced themselves from all their technology and had forsworn further development. That had happened so long ago that stories about their lives and machines had taken on the mustiness of myth.
The monk's life takes a new direction when a robot appears in the wilds, says that it sees that society has survived, indeed flourished, and wants to know what people need right now. The pursuit of an answer to that question becomes the force that drives the story's plot to a very uplifting and satisfying conclusion.
*The first volume is A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
In this concluding second volume of Chambers' Monk & Robot series*, a tea monk grows weary of their fulfilling but horizon-limited life and takes the road less travelled (literally) instead of following their routine once again. (Those are the pronouns the author used.)
The monk lives in a time when the people of the story had experienced severe environmental decline ages ago, and, in order to save their dystopian society, had divorced themselves from all their technology and had forsworn further development. That had happened so long ago that stories about their lives and machines had taken on the mustiness of myth.
The monk's life takes a new direction when a robot appears in the wilds, says that it sees that society has survived, indeed flourished, and wants to know what people need right now. The pursuit of an answer to that question becomes the force that drives the story's plot to a very uplifting and satisfying conclusion.
*The first volume is A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
7Maura49
I had recommended Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver to my book group and was pleased to re read it.
Her environmental theme of butterfly migration and the discussions around climate change are right on the button in a book published in 2012.
Moreover her heroine is so multi-textured and all of her characters very layered- no cliches here- that it gave the group a lot to talk about and it turned out to be a positive choice to my relief.
Her environmental theme of butterfly migration and the discussions around climate change are right on the button in a book published in 2012.
Moreover her heroine is so multi-textured and all of her characters very layered- no cliches here- that it gave the group a lot to talk about and it turned out to be a positive choice to my relief.
