General Fiction

#BookReview Coming Up for Air by Patti Callahan Henry @pcalhenry

categories: 7.5/10, Book Review, General Fiction, Women's Fiction
#BookReview Coming Up for Air by Patti Callahan Henry @pcalhenry Title: Coming Up for Air

Author: Patti Callahan Henry

Published by: St. Martin's Griffin on May 22, 2012

Genres: General Fiction, Women's Fiction

Pages: 272

Format: Paperback

Source: Purchased

Book Rating: 7.5/10

Ellie Calvin is caught in a dying marriage, and she knows this. With her beloved daughter away at college and a growing gap between her and her husband, she doesn’t quite seem to fit into her own life. But everything changes when her controlling mother, Lillian, passes away. Ellie sees her ex-boyfriend, Hutch, at the funeral, and learns that he is in charge of a documentary that involved Lillian before her death – and he wants answers to questions that Ellie’s not sure she can face.

As Ellie and Hutch start digging into Lillian’s history and speaking for the first time in years, Ellie’s closed heart slowly begins to open. Using both a hidden diary that Ellie found in her mother’s things and a trip to the Summer House, a mysterious and seductive bayside home, they gamble that they can work together and not fall in love again. But in piecing together a decades-old unrequited-love story, they just might uncover the secrets in their own hearts…

Review:

I enjoyed this book.

It was an interesting story that delved into mother/daughter relationships, secrets, heartbreak, love lost, love found and ultimately finding one’s self.

It was well written, easy to read, thought-provoking, and a generally nice story.

It’s definitely worth a read. 

 

This novel is available now.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from the following Amazon links.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Canada

 

 

About Patti Callahan Henry

Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, including the upcoming BECOMING MRS. LEWIS – The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. A finalist in the Townsend Prize for Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, an OKRA pick, and a multiple nominee for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Novel of the Year, Patti is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs and women’s groups. The mother of three children, she now lives in both Mountain Brook, Alabama and Bluffton, South Carolina with her husband.

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#BookReview Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

categories: 7/10, Book Review, General Fiction
#BookReview Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng Title: Everything I Never Told You

Author: Celeste Ng

Published by: Penguin Books on May 12, 2015

Genres: General Fiction

Pages: 297

Format: Paperback

Source: Purchased

Book Rating: 7/10

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.

So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. 

A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

Review:

When I first picked up this book I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I thought it was going to be a suspenseful novel. And although there is a mystery, Lydia’s death, I feel the main plot evolved more around family dynamics and the different relationships between each member of the family than the mystery itself.

Saying that the writing is very poetic. The characters are developed nicely. And the story is very emotional and thought-provoking.

I think if you’re looking for a good contemporary drama you will really enjoy this book. However, if you pick it up hoping for a page-turning mystery you might be a little disappointed.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from the following Amazon links.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Canada

 

About Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, will be published by Penguin Press in fall 2017.

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