Book Review-Lucia, Lucia

This review is a little out of order but I wanted to post the most recent review in November first.

Adriana Trigiani is one of our favorite authors. Several of us have read this book before and this is the second time that all members gave this book a perfect 5-star review. This book follows Lucia Sartori, a 25-year old seamstress from Greenwich Village. She is a “career” woman in the 1950’s when that was often frowned upon. This story follows her struggle between what society and her old school Italian family expects of a woman and her desire to be self-sufficient and pursue the career that makes her so happy.

It is charming and touching. Adriana Trigiani is such a vivid author. We all felt we lived this book right along with the characters. We all give this novel a very enthusiastic thumbs up.

This was our October read so along with our book discussion we had our yearly spaghetti dinner. Always one of our favorite meetings of the year.

Final Thoughts: An EXTREMELY nice book recommendation.

Halloween Spaghetti Dinner

Book Review-The Life We Bury

We recently had our November book club meeting.  We love to have fun with our monthly photo so I made everyone pilgrim hats!

Our hostess made us a full turkey dinner.  it was absolutely delicious.  After dinner we had our book discussion. We always discuss our book.

We read The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens . We gave the book a collective rating of 4.25 stars out of 5. Most of us really enjoyed it from the start.

It’s somewhat of a murder-mystery thriller. A college student, Joe,is assigned a writing project that leads him to a terminally ill veteran who served thirty years for murder.  The story ends up enveloping Joe’s life. We won’t say more but we do recommend the novel.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!

Final thoughts from us: A very nice book recomendation.

Book Review-When We Meet Again

We are suckers for a great book cover, and we are really sold when we get the title on a daily Kindle deal on Amazon. We were able to download this for $2.99 one day and off we went. This was our September, 2016 read. When we look at this cover we see Drew Barrymore back in time.

We gave this book a collective rating of 4.6 stars out of 5. We’ve been so lucky with our book title choices overall. This book is beautiful and heartbreaking. We also learned about some American history that occurred with German POW’s that were sent to live in the United States during the second world war. We never knew this had occurred.

This is a romance worthy of Rose and Jack from the Titanic movie. The story is told in modern day by Emily as she learns about the tragic love story of her grandparents. It is quite complex so we won’t spoil any of the details but we all loved the story. Some were brought to tears.

If you like to be swept back into the World War II era and you like your heartstrings to be tugged, than you’ll love this book.

Final thoughts from us: A very NICE book club recommendation

Book Battle 3-The Sound of Gravel vs. Golden State

 

The Sound of Gravel

Golden State

We are putting our books to battle after we read them. Each time we finish a book we vote to see which book is our favorite. The previous “winner” is challenged by the book we just finished.  In December, we will post our favorite read of the year. Ties are allowed so maybe more than one will reign supreme.

This one was no contest. Even though we really enjoyed both of these titles,  ALL votes unanimously  went to one!

The winner of book battle 3 is:

The Sound of Gravel

Consecutive wins for this title: 3

Book Review-Golden State

We won this book from BookMovement The author wrote us a note that over 600 book  clubs had entered the giveaway and WE WON! What a thrill! This was our July, 2016 book club read.

We gave this book a collective 4.6 out of 5 star rating. This book deals with the fallout of the entire family when a family member is accused of a horrific act. If you read it, you will immediately notice the parallels of a real life story that happened in the nineties. We’ll keep the suspense going for you.

As a group we loved that the book has very short chapters. A few members found the book wordy but agreed that it moved along probably because of the quick to read chapters. Another member stated: “It kept my interest the entire time.” Depending on what we could relate to, we reacted favorably or unfavorably to certain characters.

We were thrilled to have won these beautiful hard cover books and were overjoyed that we all enjoyed the book. Just today, we were told our club won another Book Movement giveaway so we will be reviewing our new book as soon as we get to read it.

Final thoughts from us: A VERY NICE book club recommendation

Book Battle 2-The Sound of Gravel vs. Hope In Every Raindrop

The Sound of Gravel

Hope In Every Raindrop

We are putting our books to battle after we read them. Each time we finish a book we vote to see which book is our favorite. The previous “winner” is challenged by the book we just finished.  In December, we will post our favorite read of the year. Ties are allowed so maybe more than one will reign supreme.

The winner of book battle 2 is:

The Sound of Gravel

consecutive wins for this title: 2

Book Club Review-Hope In Every Raindrop

“There is hope all around us-in every breath, in every raindrop.”

We downloaded this book for free from Amazon. We check the free Kindle downloads every day.This was our third read for 2016 for the month of May.

This book was very sweet. It is about a young 21 year old reporter named Kate that is having a hard time finding a story to write. She picks a place on a map and she ends up in a tiny town called Bishopville, South Carolina.

There is a man and his nephew who raise a very rare breed of dogs, and Kate decides the dogs will be her next story. Not everyone makes it easy for her to get the information she needs to make her story become a reality.

There isn’t much more to tell because the story is long on sweetness but short on content. The description of the book basically tells the entire story. Every one of us said while it was an easy read, we were left “wanting more.” We were all a little perplexed about something that happened at the very end. It wasn’t explained well, and we weren’t sure if it happened or not.

We gave it a collective rating of 3.6 stars but a lot of individual 4 star ratings because it was a quick and easy read. This was the first book we chose that did not have enough substance to have a good “talk” about.  We were only able to come up with a few minutes of discussion so this month turned into a “girl’s night out” of laughing and talking. We won’t complain about that!

Final thoughts from us: Nice individual read, Not so nice for a book club pick

It’s nice to be featured…

We had a very exciting day yesterday! We are the featured Spotlight book club for November! We are very excited and honored to have been chosen by Reading Group Choices. In addition to being featured in their newsletter and website, we won a box of books for our book club that will be arriving shortly.

We had a goal to have at least 100 followers on our Facebook page by October 31. We posted each day with the number of  followers we still needed to meet our goal and WE EXCEEDED THE AMOUNT of followers we were hoping for. It’s fun to surpass a goal. Here is the link to our Facebook Page if you’d like to keep up with all of our adventures on there as well.

THANK YOU to ALL OF YOU that read and/or follow our blog. We appreciate you. We would like to build our blog into a valuable resource for readers and book clubs.

 

Have a NICE Halloween!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! From our reading group to all of you readers out there. Please BE SAFE if you are out and about!

 

Great Group Reads-2016

This is a great resource we came across to help narrow down your next book club read. There are several years archived on the site also. Happy Reading!
http://readinggroupchoices.com/great-group-reads-2016/

Book Review-A Fall of Marigolds

This is the second book we read for our book club group in April, 2016. This is a beautiful story that received 4 and 5 stars from each one of us. Susan Meissner has an excellent writing style and all of us could “see” the story through her vivid writing.

The story takes place in New York City in two different centuries. Clara in 1911 after The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. One of the deadliest industrial fires in the history of the United States. 146 souls perished that day. Most of them were young immigrant women and girls. A very tragic true story that we’re interested in reading more about. The other parallel story is told by Taryn in New York City on 9/11. in 2001. Every other chapter switches between Clara and Taryn. We liked that the chapters are CLEARLY labeled with the narrator’s name so it was easy to keep track of. A red scarf with marigolds “weaves” the two women’s stories together. We found it to be a beautiful book and had a good discussion. There are discussion questions at the end of the book.

We definitely recommend this book. A lovely one to curl up in your favorite reading chair with a cup of hot coffee or tea. Bonus if it is raining outside. Such a lovely story to get lost in on a cold fall day.

Final Thoughts from us: VERY NICE book recommendation

Hello-Allow us to introduce ourselves

We are a group of six best friends (including one mother-daughter) that decided to start a book club in March, 2016. Our book club meetings have become the highlight of our month.

This blog will feature posts about our adventures, and our monthly book reviews along with whatever else we find interesting. We love taking our monthly photo and try to be as creative as we can. LOL! In addition to our monthly meetings we have an annual overnight book club retreat, a tea, a picnic potluck, a dress up dinner party, a Halloween spaghetti dinner, and a Christmas Party. We use any excuse we can to get together and discuss our books.

We are all thrifty at heart and our reads usually consist of free Kindle downloads, library books, thrift store books or Kindle downloads that cost $2 or less. It is VERY RARE we spend a lot on our books. We spend less in a year than some clubs spend in a few months. We are VERY PROUD of that.

We enter book giveaways and WE WON once. Over 600 entries and they chose us so that was very exciting. We hope it happens again! Please subscribe to our blog and follow us on Facebook. We would love to be a valuable resource for readers and book clubs. Happy Reading!