I was offered several books from publishers through NetGalley but had to pass them over when eye surgery meant a two-week vacation from reading. I decided to have my lifelong astigmatism corrected with my cataract surgery and I could not see with or without glasses until the second eye was operated on. I was falling behind in my reading!
Both books have received good reviews from my Goodreads friends.
One book was The Ash Family by Molly Dektar from Simon and Schuster. I read perhaps fifty pages. The writing is wonderful. I felt a dark story coming up and was not sure I wanted to go there at the time. From the publisher:
When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel.
At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.
Thrilling and profound, The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging.
Another book I had been offered was Saving Meghan by D. J. Palmer from St. Martin's Press. Being a thriller, which is not one of my favorite genres although I do read them now and then, I decided to forgo it as well.
From the publisher:
Saving Meghan is a riveting new thriller full of secrets and lies from author D.J. Palmer.
Can you love someone to death?
Some would say Becky Gerard is a devoted mother and would do anything for her only child. Others, including her husband Carl, claim she's obsessed and can't stop the vicious circle of finding a cure at her daughter's expense.
Fifteen-year-old Meghan has been in and out of hospitals with a plague of unexplained illnesses. But when the ailments take a sharp turn, clashing medical opinions begin to raise questions about the puzzling nature of Meghan’s illness. Doctors suspect Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare behavioral disorder where the primary caretaker seeks medical help for made-up symptoms of a child. Is this what's going on? Or is there something even more sinister at hand?
As the Gerards grow more and more suspicious of each other and their medical team, Becky must race against time to prove her daughter has a deadly disease. But first, she must confront her darkest fears and family secrets that threaten to not only upend her once-ordered life…but to destroy it.
I was eager to read Stephanie Barron's historical fiction novel That Churchill Woman. Some years ago I had read several of Barron's Jane Austen mysteries and enjoyed them. I had read about Jennie Churchill in books about her famous son Winston Churchill and I had seen a television series about her life. I was pleased when I won an ARC on Goodreads.
I have read 188 pages of the 381-page book. I am going to be setting it aside for now.
Jennie's marriage was at once brilliant and a failure, Jennie supporting her husband's career and social life while engaging in a series of love affairs. Barron takes us into Parliament and Lord Randolph Churchill's career, as seen through Jennie's eyes. And in the background are Jennie's children. They adore their parents even if both are distant and uninvolved in their lives.
My disappointment is that the novel is not drawing me into a deep emotional connection with Jennie. There is lots of period detail about her costumes and the social scene and dark hints about Lord Randolph's sexual orientation. Jennie gives up her true love to remain in her marriage. And she puts her social obligations over being a mother, even when it breaks her heart.
An example is the scene were Lord Randolph is involved with voting against Home Rule for the Irish. Jennie has come to listen to the debate and was with another woman whose lover is in Parliament. There is a long paragraph telling the other woman's backstory. There is a description of Lord Randolph's apparel. A few paragraphs about his speech and the reaction and Jennie's understanding of what this meant to her husband's career. The scene lacks the excitement and emotion that must have been in that room. A new government was formed out of that debate. I felt that Barron missed an opportunity to make history real.
Readers can glean a great deal about this time period and society from the book, and perhaps be motivated to learn more. Perhaps I will return to this book later. But I have seven other Advanced Reading Copies sitting on the table and another half dozen egalleys to be read! Time to move on.
