The Land Beyond the Sea

My knitting buddy, Dar, particularly likes this author:  Sharon Kay Penman.  So I bought several of her books to read via audible.  And Dar is right!  This lady writes in such a very engaging way.  This book is about Europeans living in Jerusalem during the period of the Crusades. And even though it is not a subject that I know about nor am even particularly interested in, I find that I look forward to turning the audible version of the book on each evening.  The story is about a young boy who inherits from his father the throne of king for this kingdom.  At the part of the book that I am reading now is seems that Baldwin (the young king) is learning that he has leprosy.  This disease is probably the worst thing that can happen to a person in this time period in this place.  And yet Baldwin is shown to be courageous and intelligent and "made of the right stuff".  The book is very entertaining.

I thought tonight:  "Is this book really based on true history?"  and I did a google to find out.  Here is the blog post that I read:

https://shereadsnovels.com/2021/01/06/the-land-beyond-the-sea-by-sharon-penman/

 

The Book of Lost Friends

Louisiana, 1875: in the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest. For heiresses Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery's end, the pilgrimage westward reignites an agonising question. Could her long-lost family still be out there? 

Louisiana, 1987: arriving in Augustine, Louisiana, first-year teacher Benedetta Silva finds herself teaching students whose poverty-stricken lives she can scarcely comprehend. The town is impossibly set in its ways, suspicious of new ideas and new people. But amid the gnarled live oaks and ancient plantation homes lies the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey and a hidden book that could change everything.

A heart-wrenching novel inspired by little-known historical events, based on actual 'Lost Friends' advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones, lost to them when their families were sold off.

I liked this book a lot.  Hannie Gosset was my favorite character by far.  I looked forward to turning on the book and picking up my knitting!  I read via audible.

 

Tidelands

 

I read this book on the recommendation of my daughter, Sarah.  And I did really like the book.  But I got to the end of the book and I just couldn't finish it.  I could not think of a way that the heroin was going to be ok.  And so every night I wanted to turn it on, but I couldn't.  But tonight I gritted my teeth and turned it back on.  And it ended about as good as it could end.  Here is the official synopsis:

England 1648. A dangerous time for a woman to be different . . . Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.  

Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life. 

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands. 

The Unseen World

 

Synopsis:

The moving story of a daughter’s quest to discover the truth about her beloved father’s hidden past.

Ada Sibelius is raised by David, her brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single father, who directs a computer science lab in 1980s-era Boston. Home-schooled, Ada accompanies David to work every day; by twelve, she is a painfully shy prodigy. The lab begins to gain acclaim at the same time that David’s mysterious history comes into question. When his mind begins to falter, leaving Ada virtually an orphan, she is taken in by one of David’s colleagues. Soon she embarks on a mission to uncover her father’s secrets: a process that carries her from childhood to adulthood. What Ada discovers on her journey into a virtual universe will keep the reader riveted until The Unseen World’s heart-stopping, fascinating conclusion.

I actually liked this book.  I am not sure that I would call the conclusion heart-stopping.  But I do understand that the author was offering an interesting idea about who really wrote this book. 

The Dutch House

 This book was suggested by someone in our knitting group.  I liked it a lot.  

The review on Amazon includes these words:

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.

The son of Cyril tells the story.  To spite the evil step mother, Danny's older sister (who has mothered her brother since their mother left the Dutch House when they were young) makes Danny become a doctor as about the only thing the two have been left from their father's estate is money for schooling.  But Danny spent many hours with his father collecting rents and watching his father fix anything and everything in his rental properties.  And he only wants to following his father's footsteps to make real estate his life as well.  

You will like the book.

Conjure women

This is a good one!  I started a book last night about a door....and wasn't enticed to read more tonight.  But after five minutes of listening to this book tonight, I know it is one that I will finish,

'Til the Well Runs Dry

 

This book is a change of pace for me.

This has been a difficult book for me.  The politics of Trinidad are too hard,  The characters' lives are too hard,  But I turned it on tonight.  I had to write down .....hmmm....what is his name....Farouk....his mother comes to visit him in prison. She says that "they" have asked her to come.  And he looks at his very pretty mother and wonders why his father was able to "Win her as a wife" ....and it comes to him,  Her difficult personality cause her parents to just choose anyone who would  "take her away".....she is from an Indian family.  And the main character who is her son is thinking that she may have married below her family's wealth and her beauty.  It is an interesting thought.

The book continued to be too hard for it's entirety.  But I could not leave it unfinished.