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41. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Rachel Joyce

Genre:  Fiction, Happiness

320 pages, published July 24, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Recently retired and at loose ends, Harold Fry receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old friend and former work colleague who he hasn’t heard from in twenty years who has written to say she is dying and to tell Harold goodbye.  Harold writes Queenie a letter in reply and walks to his neighborhood mailbox to post it, but something unexpected happens.  Harold  becomes convinced that he must deliver his message in person to Queenie, who is 600 miles away in a hospice, because as long as he keeps walking, Harold believes that Queenie will not die.   So begins the unexpected pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  Harold meets meets various characters along the way who cause Harold to look back on his life and examine his failed relationships with his wife and son.

 

Quotes

“Upstairs, Maureen shut the door of David’s room quietly and stood a moment breathing him in.  She pulled open his blue curtains that she closed every night and checked that there was no dust where the hem of the net drapes met the windowsill.  She polished the silver frame of his Cambridge portrait and the black and white baby photograph beside it.  She kept the room clean because she was waiting for David to come back and she never knew when that might be.  A part of her was always waiting.  Men had no idea what it was like to be a mother.  The ache of loving a child, even when he had moved on.”

 

“Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby.  “David is enough,” she had said.  “He is all we need.”  But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear.  He wondered if the pain of loving became diluted the more you had.  A child’s growing was a constant pushing away.”

 

“People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”

 

“If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I’m going to get there. I’ve begun to think we sit far more than we’re supposed to.” He smiled. “Why else would we have feet?”

 

“you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.”

 

“He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day’s agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.”

 

“There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.”

 

“I miss her all the time.  I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain.  It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in.  After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.”

 

“… He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.”

 

My Take

I really loved listening to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  This is a beautifully written book about the human spirit, the meaning of life, and coming to terms with not only what you did in life, but more importantly what you failed to do.  As a side note, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, reminded me a lot of A Man Called Ove, another book I read this year and really enjoyed.

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110. End of Watch

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Crime, Suspense

432 pages, published June 7, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

End of Watch is the third and final book in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy (the first two books were Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers).  Hodges is a retired detective who matches wits with several bad guys.  Hodges’ most diabolical foil is Brady Hartzfield who is known as the “Mercedes Killer” and is Hodges’ antagonist in the first book.  Seemingly in a permanent vegetative state, Hartzfield is back In End of Watch with powers that enable him to the drive his enemies to suicide.  Hodges and his compatriots Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson must figure out a way to stop Hartzfield before they become victims themselves.

 

Quotes

“It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.”

 

“bad luck keeps bad company.”

 

“Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.”

 

“The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.”

 

“That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.”

 

“Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.”

My Take

I enjoy Stephen King generally and enjoyed both Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, the first two books in the Bill Hodges trilogy, in particular and was therefore looking forward to finishing off this series.  I was not disappointed.  King knows how to both create indelible characters and build suspense.  Both skills are on full display in End of Watch.  Not the best Stephen King book I’ve read, but it is certainly worth the time.

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109. The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:   Jonas Jonasson

Genre:  Fiction, Humor, Foreign, Historical Fiction

384 pages, published September 11, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

As he prepares to celebrate his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson does the unexpected.  Still in his slippers, he steps out of his nursing home window and into an incredible adventure.  He will find himself accidentally in possession of a small fortune, on the run from the mob and the police and on the way will make the acquaintance of a colorful cast of characters, including Sophia a former circus elephant.  We learn about Allan’s amazing life and his close encounters with the major players of the twentieth century, along with his key role in shaping our history, through a series of interspersed flashbacks.   

 

Quotes

“People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.”

 

“When life has gone into overtime it’s easy to take liberties,”

 

“There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make vodka from goats’ milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb.”

 

“Revenge is like politics, one thing always leads to another until bad has become worse, and worse has become worst.”

 

“Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.”

 

“Allan admitted that the difference between madness and genius was subtle, and that he couldn’t with certainty say which it was in this case, but that he had his suspicions.”

 

“But God answered with silence. He did that sometimes, and Father Ferguson always interpreted it to mean that he should think for himself. Admittedly, it didn’t always work out well when the pastor thought for himself, but you couldn’t just give up.”

 

“Never try to out-drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.”

 

“Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away forever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts forever, except possibly general stupidity.”

My Take

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a fun book that alternates between the present day, hilarious antics of a 100 year old man and his ragtag gang who are on the run from the police and his adventures through the 20th Century.  Through the inscrutable Allan Karlsson who specializes in the art of blowing things up and has perfected the art of making alcoholic beverages from goats milk, we meet Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman Mao Tse-Tung , Francisco Franco, Charles de Gaulle and, best of all, Albert Einstein’s dim-witted half brother Harold.  Quirky and unique, this book is a fun and fast reading romp.

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108. The Bookman’s Tale

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Heather Ringoen

Author:   Charlie Lovett

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Mystery, Fiction

355 pages, published January 1, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Bookman’s Tale opens in 1995 in Hay-on-Wye, England. Newly widowed antiquarian bookseller Peter Byerly is perusing old books in a local shop when he discovers a mysterious portrait from the past century that looks just like his deceased wife Amanda.  As he follows the trail through the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare’s time, Peter talks to Amanda’s spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.  

 

Quotes

“The best way to learn about books, … is to spend time with them, talk about them, defend them.”

 

“He embraced the ache. It reminded him that Amanda was real. For the first time in his life, he knew exactly what he was aching for.”

 

“Like a subscription to a magazine, thought Peter. The period during which I am allowed to be happy has expired.”

 

My Take

I love books (obviously) and as a lover of books, I thought I would enjoy The Bookman’s Tale more than I did.  While there are some interesting aspects to the story, especially the parts that deal with the issue of whether Shakespeare was the author of the works attributed to him, those small sections were not enough to overcome the confusing and convoluted “mystery,” the one dimensional character development and the tedium involved in slogging through this book.

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106. The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Mitch Albom

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Music, Fiction

512 pages, published November 10, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

With a focus on the music scene starting in the 1940’s and a touch of magical realism, Mitch Albom tells the epic story of Frankie Presto, the greatest guitar player who ever lived and the lives he changed with his six magical blue strings.  Frankie is born in a burning church during the Spanish Civil war, abandoned as an infant, and raised by a blind guitar teacher until he is sent to America at nine years old with only an old guitar and six precious strings.  His amazing journey weaves him through the musical landscape of the second half of the Twentieth Century where he encounters D’jango Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Tony Bennett, Lyle Lovett, and many more.  Along the way, he becomes a pop star, meets, marries, loses and regains the love of his life, battles addiction, depression and hopelessness and changes many lives with the power of his magic strings.  

 

Quotes

“All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?”

 

“This is life. Things get taken away. You will learn to start over many times — or you will be useless.”

 

“You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not”—he grabbed for the boy’s hand—“listen.”

 

“Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world.”

 

“EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it.”

 

“In every artist’s life, there comes a person who lifts the curtain on creativity. It is the closest you come to seeing me again. The first time, when you emerge from the womb, I am a brilliant color in the rainbow of human talents from which you choose. Later, when a special someone lifts the curtain, you feel that chosen talent stirring inside you, a bursting passion to sing, paint, dance, bang on drums. And you are never the same.”

 

“You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance—to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse? As a free form of expression, I will never understand it. I can only say that some of my saddest sounds have been heard in such places. A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea.”

 

“Sometimes I think the greatest talent of all is perseverance.”

 

“I have said that music allows for quick creation. But it is nothing compared with what you humans can destroy in a single conversation.”

 

“Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.”

 

“At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else.”

My Take

I’ve read several Mitch Albom books (including The Time Keeper) since starting my thousand book quest and The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is my favorite one.  Not only does the book offer the reader an interesting retrospective of music since the 1940’s, but it also contains compelling insights on the nature of talent, the choices we make in life and the meaning and importance of love.  With many different voices used to great effect on the Audio Book, I would recommend listening to, rather than reading, this book.

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105. Finders Keepers

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller

431 pages, published June 2, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Finders Keepers is the second book in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Triology (the first is Mr. Mercedes and the third is End of Watch) and the name of Bill Hodges’ Private Detective Agency.  Hodges is a retired detective who, in Mr. Mercedes which was book one of the series, stopped serial killer Brady Hartzfield before he could blow up an auditorium full of concert-going pre-teens.  While Hodges plays a role in Finders Keepers, the action focuses primarily on Morris Bellamy, a killer who murders a J.D. Salinger type figure and steals his writing notebooks which contain the fourth book in the acclaimed Jimmy Gold series with which Bellamy is obsessed, and Pete Saubers, a smart high school kid who thinks he has found an answer to his family’ money problems when he finds the stolen money and notebooks in the back yard of a house that had been occupied by Bellamy decades earlier.  When Bellamy is released from prison after serving more than 35 years on a on a different charge, he goes looking for his long buried treasure.  When he finds it missing, a cat and mouse game ensues with Bill Hodges and crew pulled back into action.  

 

Quotes

“For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers—not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That’s how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That’s what I think! That’s what I FEEL!”

 

“As the twig is bent the bough is shaped.”

 

“No. I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. I don’t think a teenager has much of a life to change. I just turned eighteen last month. I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”

 

“They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none.”

 

“A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees.  A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.”

 

“Books were escape. Books were freedom.”

 

“Mostly because nobody with his kind of talent has a right to hide it from the world.”

 

“Don’t let your good nature cloud your critical eye. The critical eye should always be cold and clear.”

 

“Coldness went marching up his arms like the feet of evil fairies.”

 

“Some of you will say, This is stupid. Will I break my promise not to argue the point, even though I consider Mr. Owen’s poems the greatest to come out of World War I? No! It’s just my opinion, you see, and opinions are like assholes: everybody has one.” They all roared at that, young ladies and gentlemen alike. Mr. Ricker drew himself up. “I may give some of you detentions if you disrupt my class, I have no problem with imposing discipline, but never will I disrespect your opinion. And yet! And yet!” Up went the finger. “Time will pass! Tempus will fugit! Owen’s poem may fall away from your mind, in which case your verdict of is-stupid will have turned out to be correct. For you, at least. But for some of you it will recur. And recur. And recur. Each time it does, the steady march of your maturity will deepen its resonance. Each time that poem steals back into your mind, it will seem a little less stupid and a little more vital. A little more important. Until it shines, young ladies and gentlemen. Until it shines.”

 

“when someone says they’re going to be honest with you, they are in most cases preparing to lie faster than a horse can trot.”

 

“He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?”

My Take

I have always found Stephen King to be a masterful storyteller and he continues to please with Finders Keepers, the second book in the Bill Hodges trilogy.  Like he does in Misery, King has created a novel that is intense, suspenseful and has some interesting thoughts on a reader’s unhealthy obsession with a reclusive writer.  I found Finders Keepers to be an engrossing book (with excellent narration by Will Patton) and highly recommend it.

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103. The Sellout

Rating:  ☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Paul Beatty

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

289 pages, published March 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens—on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout tells of his upbringing by a single father who exposed him to racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes, but when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir.  All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.  The narrator then sets out to right another wrong.  Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment.  Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he reinstates slavery and segregates the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.  

 

Quotes

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

 

“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”

 

“My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.”

 

“If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.”

 

“The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything.”

 

“I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!”

My Take

I picked up The Sellout from the library after seeing several rave reviews on the internet and a reference to it as a book that captures the current zeitgeist.  Hopefully, I will save you the pain of reading this horrible book.  I HATED it!  It seems that every other sentence contains the f-word, the characters to a person are irredeemable, the story meanders all over the place with little cohesion and the writing is dull.  Enough said.

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102. What She Left Behind

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   Ellen Marie Wiseman

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction. Mystery

368 pages, published December 31, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Ten years ago, Izzy Stone’s mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother’s apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at a local museum, have enlisted Izzy’s help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters and an old journal written by Clara Cartwright.  When Clara was eighteen years old in 1929 she was caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant named Bruno.  When she rejects a loveless arranged marriage, Clara is committed to a public asylum.  As Izzy deals with her own challenges, Clara’s story keeps drawing her into the past.  

 

Quotes 

“The world was full of broken people, and all the hospitals and institutions and jails could never mend their fractured hearts, wounded minds, and trampled spirits.”

 

“The earth and everything on it was cast black for those last few minutes of daylight, as if evil ruled the world for that short period of time, before the stars and moon came out to illuminate the night sky and remind everyone and everything that there really was lightness and goodness in the universe, that there really was hope and heaven.”

 

“Either way, the thought of entire lives lost—family celebrations, Christmases and birthdays, love affairs and bedtime stories, weddings and high school graduations—because of a misfire or unexplained chaos inside a person’s brain, made her chest constrict. It wasn’t fair.”

My Take

I haven’t given two stars to many books, but that is the best I can do for What She Left Behind.  Stringing together clichés and worn out tropes does not make for compelling reading.

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101. The Nest

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:   Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Genre:  Fiction

368 pages, published March 22, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Nest follows the four dysfunctional siblings in the Plumb family who are thrown a curve ball when “the nest,” the name given to their sizable expected inheritance, is substantially reduced to pay for brother Leo’s recklessness.  Leo’s siblings, Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather in downtown New York City to confront the charismatic and irresponsible older brother Leo.  We soon learn that all of the Plumbs have been counting on money from “the nest” to solve their self-inflicted problems. Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters.  Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open.  Bea, a once-promising short-story writer is struggling to finish her overdue novel.  Brought together by Leo’s irresponsibility, the Plumbs must ultimately acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.

 

Quotes

“They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s addicts stayed addicts.”

 

“She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.”

 

“This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives.”

 

“Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.”

 

“People might not change but their incentives could.”

 

“If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives.”

 

“If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”

 

“People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn’t, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.”

 

“She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.”

My Take

I have long had an interest in stories about how money affects families and The Nest is one of the better ones that I have encountered.  While I was worked at a large law firm in Los Angeles, I had several discussions with our estate planning attorneys about how debilitating and corrupting it is for adult children to depend on their parents for support.  The more money, the more of a problem.  The Nest reinforces this conclusion as we see adults in the 40’s sink into bitter recriminations when an expected inheritance fails to materialize.  Sweeney captures this condition and also offers the reader several compelling character studies.

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100. The Invention of Wings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, History

384 pages, published January 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Invention of Wings, which is based on real people, tells the story of two girls in early nineteenth century Charleston.  Hetty “Handful” Grimke is a slave who works in the wealthy Grimke household with dreams of freedom.  Sarah Grimke idolizes her father who is a judge and wants to follow in his footsteps but is subject to the restrictions and expectations of that era placed on women. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given ownership of Handful and she tries in vain to free her, but promises Handful’s slave mother that she will someday accomplish this mission.  Over the next 35 years, both Handful and Sarah endure disappointment, loss, sorrow, and betrayal, but continue courageously on and discover their destiny in the process. Sarah, along with her younger sister, Angelina, becomes an abolitionist and feminist.  

 

Quotes

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

 

“We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren ‘t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

 

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

 

“I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.”

 

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

 

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

 

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

 

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

 

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

 

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.”

 

“I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.”

 

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

 

“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

 

“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

 

“He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

My Take

I had previously read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and enjoyed it, but liked The Invention of Wings even more.  With layers of detail on the place, time and characters, Kidd creates a world that feels immediate and real.  She also tells a compelling story that is interwoven with historical details about the Antebellum South and the movement for Abolition and Women’s rights.  I highly recommend The Invention of Wings, especially the audio version.

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