Literary Fiction

BOOK REVIEW: It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

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It Ends With Us

BOOK REVIEW: “It Ends With Us”
by Colleen Hoover

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ABOUT THE BOOKS (from Amazon):

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. And when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life seems too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

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The Dutch House

BOOK REVIEW: The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett

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ABOUT THE BOOKS (from Amazon):

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.

The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

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BOOK REVIEW: Mapping Eden by Carol Japha

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Mapping Eden

BOOK REVIEW: Mapping Eden
by Carol Japha

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ABOUT THE BOOKS (from Amazon):

Mapping Eden traces a young girl’s quest to make sense of the world and the event that transforms it–the death of her mother.

From Mapping Eden: “No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling.”

When her dreamy, musical mother falls desperately ill, six-year-old Julia is terrified but forbidden to speak of it. Her mother will get better, her father insists, if only she is left in peace. The dire prediction Julia hears in the schoolyard is, he declares, an ignorant lie.

As her mother slips away, Julia’s sweet memories no longer seem real. Afterward, in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia searches for clues to a landscape forever altered. Who was her mother, and what does it mean to have had—and to have lost—her? Who is she, and how is she connected to her mother?

Mapping Eden is an illuminating journey into the experience of grief and loss, and the devastating impact of the death of a parent in childhood. Set in Chicago, it’s a delicately wrought story of one child that sheds light on the experience of childhood bereavement, the lasting impact of children’s grief, and the search of a motherless daughter for her identity as a woman.

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