Some long-awaited input from BT

BT has been doing some heavy reading lately and here are her thoughts:

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. 800 pages! She speed-read the last 20% and in her opinion, it longs for tighter editing. But she's never read such a brilliant articulation of PTSD, as well as other forms of mental illness (depression, suicidal ideation co-dependency, et al) and how exhausting and excruciating and devastating  and sometimes seemingly pointless it is to love and care for the victim(s).

She also read The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kirshner and gave it a B rating. (Goodreads doesn't care for it much either.)

But she liked Homegoing: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi and Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier's Story by Jon Kerstetter. (Both of these are rated well on Goodreads.)

Thanks, BT. Keep 'em coming!!

The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Harden

The subtitle of this book is "A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing".  A good summary. This is Lara Love Harden's journey from college educated soccer mom to drug addiction, jail, and ultimately recovery. The book describes in detail how she lived through her incarceration, the unlikely friendships she made there, and how she slipped backwards a few times, but she ultimately made it through. Much of her success can be attributed to the people who helped her along the way and her love of writing.

Harden is an excellent writer, and I found her story to be captivating and hard to put down. I recommend this one. - June

Land by Maggie O'Farrell

There is no doubt that Maggie O'Farrell is a wonderful author! I loved Hamnet, and this one is also beautifully written with lengthy descriptions of life in rural Ireland in the 1860's. This is the story of a family of 6, Tomas, Phina, Liam, Enda, Rosa, & Eugene. And a sweet dog name Bran. Tomas is a mapmaker, and he is assigned to a peninsula on the western coast. The first half of the novel weaves in some Irish folklore and mystery, and also describes the devastation that occurred during the Great Hunger. 

I confess I was getting a little restless about halfway through the novel. While it held my interest most of the time, nothing was really happening after the characters were developed. But that all changed in the second half when there seemed to be non-stop action, most of it tragic. The ending wasn't what I wanted but it showed the difficulty of communication and travel during that time. No Google Maps or cell phones!

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.