I finished seven books during February, and three of them were five star reviews! I’m calling that a banner month for reading!!
True Grit by Charles Portis
Format: Paperback
Genre: Western
Pages: 224
Reading time: 8 days
A classic in the American canon, True Grit is the story of one girl’s relentless pursuit of justice for her father. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross arrives in Fort Smith, Arkansas following the murder of her father by Tom Chaney, hired help on her family’s farm in Dardanelle, Arkansas. She hires infamous US Marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to chase Chaney into Indian Territory where he’s joined up with Lucky Ned Pepper and his band of outlaws. Accompanied by a Texas Ranger, the party sets off on their dangerous journey.
True Grit is a quick, uncomplicated story that spans, excluding the final chapter, just a few days. Whereas so many novels today leverage alternating timelines and multiple points of view, Portis delivers an entertaining and meaningful story using a singular voice and linear narrative. Readers quickly discover the reason behind the title of the book. Mattie hires Cogburn for his "true grit.” But of all the characters, I found Mattie to be most possessive of this determined quality. From beginning to end, Mattie doggedly pursues what she believes to be fair and just. While certainly steadfast in her values and desires, I also thought Mattie was obnoxious and empathized with Cogburn and Laboeuf, who repeatedly became exasperated with her.
I’m not generally a fan of the Western genre, but if you’re looking to dabble, True Grit is an easy, straightforward story perfect for dipping in a toe.
Order True Grit online here.
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
Format: Hardback
Genre: Historical fiction
Pages: 334
Reading time: 3 days
I consider myself a connoisseur of WWII historical fiction, but admittedly, all of the books I’ve read have focused on the Western Front. The Storm We Made appealed to me because it offered a different perspective, focusing on the Japanese occupation of Malaya (present day Malaysia).
In August 1945, the Alcantara family lives in Japanese-occupied Malaya. Cecily is married to Gordon, a former employee in the British civil service, and together, they have three children—Jujube, Abel, and Jasmine. Jujube works in a local tea house serving drunk and aggressive Japanese soldiers while Jasmine hides in the family’s basement to avoid conscription as a comfort woman. Abel, like so many other boys in their town, has disappeared. As her family struggles to survive, Cecily drowns in guilt because nine years earlier, fueled by boredom and lust, she served as a spy for the Japanese. The novel alternates between characters and timelines, and through each, we witness the terrible and sweeping toll of war through the destruction of a single family.
There is no way to sugar coat it. The Storm We Made is a horrific read. Chan describes in unsparing detail how war is waged against a people seen as savage…less than human. Readers be warned, there is little in the way of redemption for this family. I gave this book three stars because I found Cecily infuriating and unrelatable. Her wonton disregard for her children and husband impaired my ability to feel any empathy towards her.
Favorite Quotes
Women do not yearn for gods; they yearn for broken toys they can mold and imprint on. It was so stupid, and she hated herself for it. Yet perhaps this was what a woman’s idealism is: not to reach for a utopia—everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach—but the need to transform one thing into something better.
Order a copy of The Storm We Made online here.
All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Memoir
Listening time: 8 hours
Days to listen: 19
Narrator: Beth Moore
Beth Moore is the evangelical Bible study author, speaker, and founder of Living Proof Ministries. Moore grew up in the Southern Baptist Church in Arkadelphia, Arkansas until the family’s move to Houston. From an early age, she developed a deep love for Jesus and felt called to a life of ministry at just eighteen years old. Moore’s work began as a Christian aerobics instructor before growing into one of the most well-known speakers in the Christian evangelical church. Her position and fame within the Southern Baptist Church came under fire in 2021 after she posted a series of Tweets calling out then Presidential candidate Donald Trump in the wake of his Access Hollywood video. After months of public backlash, Moore left the Southern Baptist Convention to make a new way for herself, her family, and her faith.
While Moore reveals much in her memoir—from the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father to her husband’s bipolar diagnosis—she does so with grace. This does not feel like a salacious tell-all. Feminists will find a friend in Moore as much of her memoir focuses on the sexism and mysogyny she experienced in the SBC along with her candid reactions to the SBC’s sexual abuse and cover-up scandals.
A few notes for potential readers and listeners. First (and this should come as no surprise), this is very much a book about faith. Through all of her challenges, Moore’s love for the Lod abides, and it’s woven throughout her book. And second, should you choose to listen to the audiobook, forewarning that Moore adopts a thick Arkansas accent for the first several chapters. She notes in the prologue that she wanted to represent her younger self accurately, and this is in fact how she sounded. Because I’m from the region, this didn’t bother me, but for anyone living north of the Mason-Dixon, it may be a little grating. As Moore moves into her later chapters, the accent mellows.
Faith aside, Moore is a gifted writer. She has a wonderful knack for analogies. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this memoir, but this is a rare case where I wish I had read the physical book so I could re-read, highlight, and underline all of her creative uses of language and hilarious turns of phrase.
Order your copy of All My Knotted Up Life here.
Mercury by Amy Jo Burns
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary fiction
Pages: 315
Reading time: 13 days
I love a good dysfunctional family novel, and while Mercury held so much promise, it ultimately fell short for me.
Seventeen year old Marley arrives in Mercury, a small Pennsylvania town, and almost immediately meets the Joseph family. Mick, the unpredictable patriarch. Baylor, the rough and tumble eldest son. Waylon, the sensitive and good-sensed middle child. Shay, the lovable baby of the family. And at the helm, Elise—the wife and mother holding their family together through determination and sacrifice. Marley quickly falls for one brother but eventually marries another, and in the process of becoming a part of their family, takes on their secrets, flaws, and wounds as her own.
Family secrets come to a head when a body is discovered in the attic of the church, and the Josephs must reckon with their past and present, with where they come from and the people they desperately wish to be.
Burns’s writing is lovely and poetic, but I didn’t find her style well-suited for a novel. Her use of abstract language left me feeling like I never fully understood her characters. I think I might have appreciated the dynamic between Elise and Marley more if Burns had used clearer, more direct language. Too often, I would read a paragraph describing how a character felt and think, “Wait, what?” Her writing didn’t give me a clear enough picture inside her characters’ heads.
I’ll applaud Burns’s ending. The conclusion feels both satisfying and realistic, and that’s not always easy to achieve.
Order Mercury here.
Favorite Quotes
“What’s the church for, then?” This was the question he’d had as a three-year-old, then as a ten-year-old, now nineteen. Shay couldn’t decide whether he wanted to find his own faith or not.
“I think it’s for this.” Lennox motioned between them. “A way to work out the lives we’re living, to reach for something deeper.”
“What if you’re afraid of what you’ll find if you reach too deep?”
Lennox titled his head. “You’d be right at home, I’d say.
The soft wind took flight and called her higher, like the opiate of a piano’s prelude, the hush of rainfall on a midnight roof, the way a heartbeat flutters like a wing.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Format: Hardback
Genre: Historical fiction
Pages: 480
Reading time: 6 days
If you’ve ever read a Kristin Hannah novel, then you know… these novels need no glowing reviews. Her track record speaks for itself. And here, she’s done it again with The Women. Yet another sweeping, epic, female-driven story that leaves readers heart wrenched and warmed.
In The Women, Hannah tackles a new time period: the Vietnam War. Frances “Frankie” McGrath grew up in Southern California, the daughter of wealthy, conservative parents. By all accounts, Frankie is a proper lady with a strong moral compass destined to get married to the “right” kind of man. But when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, inspired by her family’s legacy of military service, Frankie joins the Army Nurse Corps. Dropped into the literal jungle, the reality of war overwhelms and terrifies Frankie, but she’s shepherded by her fellow female nurses. Each day, they fight to keep soldiers and themselves alive.
When Frankie finally returns home, the country has changed. She struggles to make her way in a world that doesn’t understand or value her service, especially as a woman. All too often she hears, “There were no women in Vietnam.” Like so many other veterans of the past and present, Frankie must learn how to survive the mission after her mission.
Hannah’s book is split into two parts, and my only critique is that I wanted more Vietnam and less of Frankie’s return home. Hannah did an exceptional job portraying the chaos and atrocity of war, and I was eager to read more of it. Still, Hannah uses the second half of the novel to shed light on the largely untold stories of the women who served and their experiences returning from war. I imagine this was a hefty subject to tackle, and I applaud her herculean effort to take on such a tumultuous time in our nation’s history.
Order The Women here.
Favorite Quotes
Here and there, streaks of red arced through the night sky like fireworks; orange fires blossomed. From here, the war was almost beautiful. Maybe that was a fundamental truth: War looked one way for those who saw it from a safe distance. Close up, the view was different.
Nowhere Girl by Cheryl Diamond
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Memoir
Listening time: 10 hours, 37 minutes
Days to listen: 28 days
Narrator: Eileen Stevens
Buckle up for a truly wild ride. Nowhere Girl is the unbelievable story of a fugitive family on the run.
Cheryl Diamond’s story starts when she’s four-years-old in the backseat of her family’s car as it speeds down a mountainside in the Himalayas. At the time, Cheryl’s family are Sikhs, and her name is Harbhajan. Cheryl doesn’t know it yet, but when her father isn’t trading in gold and embezzling from his clients, he’s committing international fraud. And it doesn’t take long before Interpol and law enforcement are chasing the family down, forcing them to “blow town.”
Over the next nine years, Cheryl moves with her family to five different continents and assumes six different identities. Her education is a mix of her father’s textbooks, practical life lessons, and how to fake identification papers. Somehow, despite all of this, Cheryl manages to become an Olympic-level athlete, a teenage model, and a best-selling author. As Cheryl grows older, her father’s gambles grow riskier, and her family crumbles around her. Trust is broken, secrets are revealed, and Cheryl must fight for the true identify she never had.
If you’re a fan of The Glass Castle or Educated, then Nowhere Girl is the perfect next memoir for you. It’s hard to believe this is a true story. Cheryl is resilient, and I appreciated that despite the pain her family caused her, she’s capable of recognizing the good amid the bad. While this one isn’t narrated by the author, Eileen Stevens does a fantastic job.
Drowning by T.J. Newman
Format: Hardback
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 304
Reading time: 1 day
I am not the fastest reader, so the fact that I finished Drowning in less than 24 hours tells you everything you need to know about this fast-paced thriller! When I first started reading again after having babies, thrillers were my genre-of-choice. But in recent years, I’ve found myself reaching for more serious books—lots of contemporary literary fiction. But after a rave review from my friend
, I knew I had to give Drowning a shot.Six minutes after take off, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands. Miraculously, rafts are unfurled and life jacket-clad passengers begin exiting the plane. But when the engine explodes and the ocean turns to a sea of fire, the remaining passengers inside the plane are forced to close the door. Will Kent and his daughter Shannon, along with ten other passengers, are trapped inside the partially flooded plane as goes down. But instead of sinking to the bottom of the ocean where pressure would have caused the plane to implode, the plane comes to rest on the edge of an undersea cliff.
On the surface, Chris Kent—Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife and Shannon’s mother—happens to be working on one of the Navy ships called to the undersea rescue operation. Oh, and Chris also happens to be an elite diver. With less than six hours of oxygen left in the plane, it’s up to Chris to save her family.
This book was FUN. If you love disaster or end-of-the-world action movies, Drowning will be right up your alley. Author T.J. Newman is a retired flight attendant, so the book feels surprisingly… and I realize how ridiculous this sounds… real. If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and exciting read, I highly recommend this one!
Order your copy of Drowning here.
That’s it for February, folks. Let’s chat in the comments if you read any of these, too!
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GOOOOD MONTH!!! So glad you enjoyed Drowning too, I didn't love her debut nearly as much as this one, it was a perfect thriller IMHO.
I want to read Kristin Hannah’s book! I have a hold on the audio at my library but the wait time is months!