The Paris Summer Olympics are in full swing so not sure there will be much reading in August. Good thing I got two books in for August, and one was definitely a top 5 of the year.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride read like an Amor Towles novel. You know Amor from A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway (both top reads in past years). The characters are rich with painstaking back story for each, and everything is revealed like layers of an onion, releasing a tension you didn't know you were holding on to until the last word. In Heaven, the eponymous grocery store is located in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, an area where Blacks and Jews live in tenuous harmony, chafing against the surrounding white majority who does little to mask their disdain. Through their shared experiences and Chona Ludlow's belief that everyone deserves to be loved, they band together to see justice done ... for themselves, their community and a young deaf boy. LOVE!
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid is my seventh Reid book. This story follows the Riva family over the course of 24 hours in August1983. The four Riva siblings are tied by blood and history. Their famous crooner father abandoned them and their loving, wronged mother never realized her own dreams as she was either the wronged wife of Mick Riva or the owner of her parent's coastal seafood restaurant. Each of the siblings is in the midst of their own personal struggles and it all comes to a head at the annual party of the season. Nina, the surfing supermodel, is the caretaker and glue of the family (oh and her husband is sleeping with tennis star Carrie Soto), Jay is a professional surfer who struggles to find love, Hud (short for Hudson) is a photographer with a secret, and Kit, the youngest, is starting to find her own identity in a family of big personalities. I liked the hour-by-hour cadence and deep back stories, but I wasn't as vested in the characters as those in Carrie Soto is Back or Daisy Jones & The Six. Still a solid summer read.
TBR List:
- Homecoming by Kate Morton
- Beach Ready by Emily Henry
- The Honey-Don't List by Christina Lauren
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
- City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
- Blue Love: Blue Valley High by MJ Fields
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
- The Switch by Beth O'Leary
- Buy Yourself the F*cking Lillies by Tara Schuster
- Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
- Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
- Honey and Spice by Bolu Babalola
- Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf, Matthew. Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Lins
- Outlive by Peter Attia, Bill Gifford
