More Summer Reading...

A quick update on what I've read and what I'm reading...

"Nantucket Nights" - Elin Hilderbrand
I strongly recommended Hilderbrand's "Barefoot" in an earlier post...it is a title I've recommended to a few friends, who also really liked the book. "Nantucket Nights", however, was a different story--I was really disappointed by this read.

There were twists and turns in the plot - enough so that I did stay with and finish the novel. However, I found the three main characters (Kayla, Antoinette & Val: middle-aged women whose only true common bond appears to be sharing an annual tradition started twenty years before as summer housemates in Nantucket) to be shallow and I didn't believe these three very different women would have sustained a friendship. Tough to really get into a book when you don't like the main characters; or, more accurately, just don't see these characters keeping company or find them at all believable. Their Labor Day tradition takes veers dangerously off course when Antoinette is swallowed up by the water. Did she drown? Did she disappear?

Having read it, I do know the answers...which is why I'm telling you to SKIP this one!


"American Wife" - Curtis Sittenfeld
This is our current book club pick and I'm enjoying it so far. It's loosely based on Laura Bush's life so I've learned a few things about our former First Lady that I hadn't known. Alice Lindgren is the main character purportedly inspired by Laura Bush and this is very definitely her story, charting her journey from small-town girl, whose part in a local tragedy forever changes her, to a pragmatic adult who has become a librarian, a career to which she is nicely suited. Her story's trajectory takes an unforeseen, life-altering turn when she meets and falls madly in love with Charlie Blackwell, a rising star in the Republican party who is backed by a powerful, connected family.

While I'm sure that there will be some parts to this story that modern-day readers may already be familiar with, having endured eight long years of George W. Bush's two terms in office, something tells me it won't matter as Sittenfeld unfolds an engaging story for us, regardless of what we may or may not know. Or, think we know...

Though I haven't finished this yet, I feel comfortable recommending it.