Here it is the first Monday in November
and my list of books that I read in October.
Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer
I like the stories that Thayer writes. They are easy reads and
always have a happy ending. This book is about a rich girl and a poor girl
who become friends when they are five years old.
The friendship is a happy one until it isn’t.
Affairs of the heart get in the way and there are misunderstandings and drifting apart.
But true friendship finds its way back and when a friend is needed she is there for you.
After I’m Gone by Laura Lippman
Two women love the same man and he loves them.
One he marries one he keeps.
One he has children with one he doesn’t.
He leaves both of them and disappears.
What happens to the women after his disappearance is the story.
It was a good book. Kept my interest. Not too many surprises but there were some.
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
After WWI, a mother and daughter who were once rich and now are not
take in a young married couple as lodgers.
A love affair develops and the lovers try to find a way to be together.
Someone is accidentally killed and everything gets complicated.
The author spends two-thirds of the book setting up the story then
seems to rush through the last part of the book.
it was okay.
There is no great excitement in this book but it is a very good book.
A long married childless couple, a judge and a professor, have a mid-life crisis.
The judge has a case in her court involving a teen who is refusing medical treatment.
She must decide whether to allow the boy to refuse treatment or order the procedure.
The professor wants to have an affair with a young colleague
and asks the judge, to understand that he loves her but needs this last fling.
It’s a good character study with real emotions and pain and few answers.
Just like life.
I liked it.
Angels Watching Over Me by Michael Phillips
At the end of the Civil War, a plantation owner’s daughter and a slave meet
and help each other cope with unbelievable violence and tragedy.
They become unlikely friends who must grow up too quickly.
The story is told by the slave girl when she is an old woman.
This book is the first of a series and I liked it but I don’t know
if it has made me want to read the rest of the books.
If God Is Good by Randy Alcorn
This has taken me an age to read.
It is a very good book and I will write a review this week.
All I will say here is that this is not easy reading
and I think it would best be read in a study group.
It is not light reading and discussion would have helped me
wade through some of the deeper stuff.
So, that’s it for my October reading list.

Nancy Thayer is one of my “go to” for beach vacation reads. Finished Tiger Tail Soup by blogger Nicki Chen. Really good story set in wartime China. Also read The Book Thief which is about a child in WW2. Maybe I am in a war streak.
I saw the movie The Book Thief. I liked it a lot. Books are usually better than the movies so maybe I will read this one. I sometimes get on a theme when I read.
I thought the book was better but the movie was good too.
I haven’t come across any of these but have read Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan.
I am reading The Stovepipe, a memoir about children in foster care, by a Canadian, Bonnie E. Virag.
How is the book? Is it encouraging or depressing? I don’t think I would have fared well if I had been a foster kid.
I don’t understand how people can be so cruel. They take the kids for farm help and for the money they earn for taking them. Barest necessities are not supplied.
We are having terrible problems with our system in this state. Children are dying from abuse and/or neglect. It’s tragic.
Children never deserve such treatment. Breaks my heart.