Colorways by Vicki Welsh

July was a mixed reading month. I had some real winners but also a few duds.

I find a lot of my books through BookTube channels and I think I should pay more attention to whether I am watching a true review video vs a book haul video. I think I pick up some of these losers from book haul videos where they haven’t even read the book yet. I had 3 DNF books this month and I feel like that’s some sort of record.

I hope you read some good books and will share them in the comments. I get my best recommendations from you.

DNF
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George – Maybe I’m cold-hearted (I am a bit), but I can’t buy into a story that’s premised on grieving a lost love (an affair, no less) for over 20 years.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett – The characters bored me. I didn’t care about any of them.
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark – I gave it 2 hours and still didn’t care

When audiobooks first became popular (or when they became popular to me) in the 90’s, the early books were the classics. I read a lot of Voltaire, Austen and Bronte. I also read a lot of Anthony Trollop. He became one of my favorite authors of all times. His satire on Victorian life, contemporary for him, are full of wonderful and wonderfully-named characters. I’ve decided to re-read some of his series.

This book is the first in the Barsetshire series. Mr. Harding is the local clergyman and is paid through a charitable bequest. He lives a very honest life with his daughter and tends to the people of his parish. Young John Bold, is in love with Mr, Harding’s daughter but also sees himself as a reformer. Bold believes that the Reverend is paid more than the going wage for his position and sets out to expose it.

The bishop and archdeacon support Reverend Harding but Harding is too honest and feels a strong moral dilemma. The book explores themes and pressures for church reforms that were happening at the time.

Beth and her husband, Frank, manage a farm in rural England. They lost their son several years earlier in an accident. It was a traumatic event but they have settled into a quiet and predictable life again.

One day while working the sheep a dog begins rampaging through the sheep and kills several of them. Frank’s brother kills the dog. The dog belongs to the son of Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager. Gabriel is back in the village, living at the family estate with his son. Gabriel is now a famous writer. Gabriel’s son, Leo, reminds Beth of her own son and she finds herself pulled back into Gabriel’s orbit.

It’s largely a predictable love triangle but there are a couple of big surprises waiting at the end. I enjoyed the book although I wanted to slap Beth a few times.

I didn’t do much research into this book before reading it. I simply saw several positive reviews and decided to pick it up. Throughout the book I kept thinking that the author made this characters life a little over the top and almost unbelievable. It wasn’t until the end of the book that I discovered, via the author’s notes, that Hazel Scott was a real person who led an amazing life. The book is a novel but like The Indigo Girl, is 90% true biography.

The book opens in 1943 in Harlem. Hazel Scott is a phenom. She’s a classical piano prodigy who has taken the classics and bent then into amazing jazz piano compositions. She’s a member of Cafe Society nightclub which is kind of her base of operations. Her acting career is taking off and she’s doing concert tours.

One day Adam Clayton Powell, Jr and falls in love. Adam is the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and a US Representative for New York’s 18th district. He was also married. His career survives the affair, eventual divorce from his first wife and then marriage to Hazel. But the marriage is fraught with battles over careers and egos.

Hazel is mostly a forgotten character in music history but she’s remembered well in this mostly historical, not so fiction depiction of her amazing life.

If you are looking for something poignant and reflective with a good amount of humor, this is your book. This is Brammer’s second book. I read the first one, The Collected Regrets of Clover, last year. Before I tell you about Joy, I will admit that I enjoyed Clover more than Joy but that might just be about the timing of the reading and my own headspace at the time.

Joy Bridport is in her 80’s and has lived a quiet life in the Hudson Valley of New York for most of those years. She is widowed, has one adult daughter and a teenage grandson. She devoted herself to homemaking and motherhood and, for years, has given free piano lessons to local children.

She has just learned that her best friend, Hazel, is dying from cancer. They have been friends since school and Hazel has always been the adventurous one. She traveled the world and never settled down. This news has rocked Joy’s world and made her rethink the choices that she has made in her own life. She’s determined to live the rest of her life breaking some rules.

It’s a thoughtful reflection on aging and friendship. Joy and Hazel are very likable characters and there are some really cute and humorous scenes. That said, it did move a little slow for me and there were some incongruities in technology, jargon and themes that I felt didn’t tie in right to a timeline.

I found out about this book last month on Carole’s blog. This is book #3 in the Troublesome Creek series. I really enjoyed the first two book about the post-depression Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky. Just like the first two books, this one did not disappoint. It could be read as a stand-alone novel but it’s best if read in series order. Each book is deeply connected to the other. The unique aspect of this book is that it’s really a parallel story to book #2.

This book is about Cussy Lovett and her husband Jackson and begins when they are arrested for breaking anti-miscegenation laws. They were considered mixed race because he was white and she was blue. Cussy has a genetic condition called methemoglobinemia. It was a very specific condition afflicting a group of Kentucky families and it gave their skin a blue hue. Look up “Blue Fugates” if you are interested. At that time, she was considered a different race. The book is about Cussy’s life and survival in prison.

The second book in the series is The Bookwoman’s Daughter. It also picks up at the time of the arrest but is about Honey, their daughter, who was 15 at the time. It follows her life as she picks up the Packhorse Library route that her mother worked.

I have loved all 3 books and especially enjoyed the narrator. At the end of the book the author shares a lot of background about the book, identifying which things are based on historical fact. She also shares some about her own life growing up in this area of Kentucky.

This is one of those books that you read when you just want a nice ramble through another person’s life. It also helps if you love books.

A. J. Fikry is a bookstore owner on Alice Island. His wife died a few years ago and he’s still grieving. For a bookstore owner, he’s incredibly picky about carrying only books that he likes. There are no children’s books, young adult, ghostwritten novels, memoirs, etc. All of the books are between 150 and 400 pages. When you start the book you would thing he’s about 80 but he’s really in his 30’s, and pretty miserable.

One day he goes out for a walk and when he returns there’s a two-year-old, named Maya, in the store with a note pinned to her outfit. It says that the mother can no longer care for her and wants her to grow up in a place with books. The book documents A. J. and Maya’s lives from that point.

It’s a nice, easy read with some interesting characters, a stolen rare book and new relationships. The narrator is Scott Brick and I don’t feel that he was really appropriate for this story. He’s a great narrator for mysteries that have tough guys as main characters. I don’t think he really portrayed the soft-spoken A.J. as well as it could have been done.