The weather got gloriously better towards the end of our trip and thus my reading moved from the couch to lounge chairs on the patio and even poolside!
I have been looking forward to HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL by Robert Goolrick (June 12th) for months now. As many of you recall I was just crazy about A RELIABLE WIFE, which was a Bookreporter.com Bets On selection. There are many parallels between the two books including the lonely characters who have lots churning inside.
In HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL Charlie Beale rolls into the quiet town of Brownsburg, Virginia. He brings with him two things --- a suitcase of knives and a suitcase of money. He finds work at the butcher shop in town where his skill with creating beautiful steaks and chops gives him a wide audience amongst the townspeople. He also befriends the butcher’s family and his young son, Sam, clearly loves spending time with Charlie. Before we all get caught up in an idyllic world along come two other characters --- a rich man Boaty Glass and his beautiful wife, Sylvan, who catches Charlie’s eye. And well, more than his eye. What Sam sees over the next months between Charlie and Sylvan will change his world forever. The novel is told in the voice of Sam and the scars he has will never
This WILL be a big book for book clubs as there is a lot to discuss about the characters, the writing, the structure and the plot. I see it as attracting just as big an audience as A RELIABLE WIFE. And it WILL be a Bookreporter.com Bets On title.
A few months ago I saw a wonderful movie called The Way starring Martin Sheer where “a father heads overseas to recover the body of his estranged son who died while traveling the "El camino de Santiago," and decides to take the pilgrimage himself.” While I am neither a hiker nor much of an athlete beyond swimming in the pool, journeys like this intrigue me both for the physical endurance of them --- and the way people can open their minds when they are away from the everyday world.
Thus I picked up TO THE LAST BREATH: A Memoir of Going to Extremes by Francis Slakey (May 8th), which I found wonderful in the way that I loved THE WAVE, CRAZY FOR THE STORM, SHADOW DIVERS and THE LAST DIVE. Frances Slakey is a physics professor at Georgetown who one day found he was going through the motions of life not really connecting with people the way he wanted. His lectures were such that at the end of the day he would realize he had written long theorems, but not really spoken to students. Relationships were not working out. Thus he decided to take on a new challenge --- to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean.
It’s a grabber from the start and as Frances moves up and down the peaks and across the oceans he finds himself --- and a whole new, life unfolds. And little by little the things that he has said “never” about edge away to make room for the person he has become. Reading it will have you longing to take your own journey like this.
I was in an adventure frame of mind by now and thus I picked up WILD: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. I so love the cover of this book. Again we have a writer who was lost in Cheryl. Her mom had died, her marriage had ended and she needed some alone time to find her way back. Thus she decided to hike the entire Pacific Coast Trail from the Mojave Desert up through Oregon and into Washington State. She did not enter into this journey as an experienced hiker, more she was a woman walking away from her life. The scene at the beginning --- and I say scene because it reads like a movie --- where she heads to the store to buy equipment is priceless. But that woman emerges as someone very different at the end. By the way, I am seeing this book as a great graduation present for those getting out of college. Especially those who are wondering…what next.
I have been a longtime fan of Karin Slaughter’s thus getting my hands on a galley of her upcoming thriller, CRIMINAL (July 3rd) was a real treat. You know how people always say, “this is the author’s best book”? Well, here I can say with conviction that Karin pushes her craft to a whole new level here. The story opens in 1974 as Lucy Bennett is pedaling her body on an Atlanta street corner. Drugs have torn her down and dragged her far from the world of privilege that she has known. And Atlanta is not the city we know now. This is pre-Olympics where the city got a makeover. There is murder…and then another and Amanda Wagner, a character that Karin’s fans know well is called into investigate. The 70s are not a kind time for women on the police force and she and her partner Evelyn are battling sex discrimination, which is rough as the racial prejudice flairing up around the city.
If Karin kept this one storyline it would be an ambitious enough work as I know there was some meticulous research happening behind the scenes here. But it’s the smart kind of research, the kind that drives the story along, not the show and tell kind.
But…she also weaves in a story of present day and Sara Linton and Will Trent have their own storyline there where we pick up where we left off with them in FALLEN last year. What makes this book her best is the way she wraps the story from the 70s into the one from present day, unlocking a lot of clues about the characters that we have come to know. It’s a prequel wrapped into a sequel. Something very tough to do, but she does it brilliantly. Fans are going to love it. I am not giving one more thing away.
Whew…lots of GREAT books…it’s really a fabulous year for fiction.
