The great bookshelf purge continues. Next up, Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner. “At thirty-nine, Manon Bradshaw is a devoted and respected member of the Cambridgeshire police force, and though she loves her job, what she longs for is a personal life. Single and distant from her family, she wants a husband and children of her own. One night, after yet another disastrous Internet date, she turns on her police radio to help herself fall asleep—and receives an alert that sends her to a puzzling crime scene. Edith Hind—a beautiful graduate student at Cambridge University and daughter of the surgeon to the Royal Family—has been missing for nearly twenty-four hours. Her home offers few clues: a smattering of blood in the kitchen, her keys and phone left behind, the front door ajar but showing no signs of forced entry. Manon instantly knows that this case will be big—and that every second is crucial to finding Edith alive. The investigation starts with Edith’s loved ones: her attentive boyfriend, her reserved best friend, her patrician parents. As the search widens and press coverage reaches a frenzied pitch, secrets begin to emerge about Edith’s tangled love life and her erratic behavior leading up to her disappearance. With no clear leads, Manon summons every last bit of her skill and intuition to close the case, and what she discovers will have shocking consequences not just for Edith’s family but for Manon herself.” (Amazon) I will admit I only finished this one to find out what happened. It wasn’t particularly gripping, though the back half was better than the first. The middle really dragged. I’m not going to be grabbing the next two in the series.

Matrix by Lauren Groff has been everywhere this year and Obama chose it as one of his favorite books of 2021. So, I was excited that a friend loaned it to me (the friend did remark that she didn’t like it much). Nor did I. What a disappointment. “Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?” (Amazon) While this didn’t take long to read, I wish I hadn’t bothered.

I will admit to reading some short books at the end of the year in hopes of meeting my yearly book reading goal. I have fallen short of my 100 and figured if I crammed in a bunch of short ones, I might just squeak in. I have avoided WWII books for a while, but because this one was so short, I grabbed it anyway. The Paris Secret by Lily Graham was a quick, sad, but hopeful read. “The last time Valerie was in Paris, she was three years old, running from the Nazis, away from the only home she had ever known.Now as a young woman all alone in the world, Valerie must return to Paris, to the bookshop and her sole surviving relative, her grandfather Vincent, the only person who knows the truth about what happened to her parents. As she gets to know grumpy, taciturn Vincent again, she hears a tragic story of Nazi-occupied Paris, a doomed love affair and a mother willing to sacrifice everything for her beloved daughter.” (Amazon) While this was a good read, it wasn’t anything incredible. It was captivating, nonetheless.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy has been on my shelf for a very long time. As it kept getting put aside for library books or new books, I kept thinking about it and wondering if it was worth reading. I did a major TBR bookshelf cull last year, and still South of Broad stayed on the shelf. For some reason, this seemed to be the time to hunker down and read it. It’s long – my only complaint and why it doesn’t get five stars – but worth it. Amazon: “Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for.” I do generally love a family/friendship saga over time and this was one. And, there were twists and surprises, which made you want to keep reading. It’s not a quick read, but it’s a very enjoyable one.

Several people recommended Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce to me (remind me who you are if you read this). And, boy am I glad they did. I have liked Joyce’s work in the past (The Music Shop and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, though I didn’t enjoy Perfect) and am not sure how I missed this one. Amazon: “It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life, surviving on scraps. One day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and small existence to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may not exist—the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for an assistant to accompany her, the woman she ends up with is the last person she had in mind. Fun-loving Enid Pretty in her tight-fitting pink suit and pom-pom sandals seems to attract trouble wherever she goes. But together these two British women find themselves drawn into a cross-ocean adventure that exceeds all expectations and delivers something neither of them expected to find: the transformative power of friendship.” I thoroughly enjoyed this story, though it was a little draggy in one section, hence the 4.5- rather than 5-stars.

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed is a wonderful intertwining of the author’s personal history and the history of Texas. She deftly slips back and forth between the two to explain why she loves a state so fraught historically and for people of color specifically. “Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed―herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s―forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.” (Amazon) Amazon’s description is quite long and I did not include it all here, but this spare work is a powerful one and well-worth picking up, especially if you don’t know this history already.

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang has been everywhere of late, including many 2021 Books of the Year lists. I LOVED this book. LOVED. Even when it had slow points, I still really, really liked it. “In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.” (Amazon) Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows how much I love a memoir. This one was not an exception. Highly, highly recommend.

Even though I didn’t love The Overstory, also by Richard Powers, Bewilderment was so short and has gotten such good reviews that I thought it would be worth a try. And, I was pleasantly surprised. From Amazon: “The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?” While there were moments that I didn’t love, overall, this was a good read.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren has been on my TBR list for a while – not sure how it got there. And, it is a fluffy beach read for sure. Having read a number of heavy books of late, this was a nice change of pace. While you sometimes wanted to scream at the characters, overall the author got the reader right into the beautiful setting and it was a pleasant, fast romp. “Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky twin: from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister Ami is an eternal champion…she even managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a slew of contests. Unfortunately for Olive, the only thing worse than constant bad luck is having to spend the wedding day with the best man (and her nemesis), Ethan Thomas. Olive braces herself for wedding hell, determined to put on a brave face, but when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. Suddenly there’s a free honeymoon up for grabs, and Olive will be damned if Ethan gets to enjoy paradise solo. Agreeing to a temporary truce, the pair head for Maui. After all, ten days of bliss is worth having to assume the role of loving newlyweds, right? But the weird thing is…Olive doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, the more she pretends to be the luckiest woman alive, the more it feels like she might be.” (Amazon) Again, this is shallow and simple, but nice book candy.

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke was a good mystery, but a little too long. Perhaps it’s my attention span…anyway, I did enjoy it. Amazon describes it: “When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules — a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders — a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman — have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes — and save himself in the process — before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. From a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Bluebird, Bluebird is a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas.” If you like a good mystery, try this one.