The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
by David Grann
The Wager (3/22/2023)
This novel is not an easy read. Not twisty, not romantic, not swashbuckling nor any of the reasons we usually expect or desire in our book selections. It is difficult to read. So many people with so many stories in a time in history when countries are trying to assert themselves to profit from the newly discovered lands, people, crops, and precious metals. Which country or king will take control of these newly found treasures?
The period is the latter part of 1600 to the mid 1700's. The Wager is a small ship in a squadron of five ships sailing from Portsmouth, England, to wage a secret war on a Spanish galleon near Brazil for gold onboard these Spanish ships.
There were many literate men who could read and write aboard the squadron ships. They kept journals some for themselves and others, officers, as a requirement of their jobs. Remarkably, much information from these sources was intact and usable. The author spent 5-6 years researching and gathering data which had not been lost, destroyed, or damaged making them useless.
It is a challenging read. There are so many characters, so many positions/ranks among the crew, diseases, scurvy, burials overboard, storms and eventually mayhem, murder, mutiny, and cannibalism.
Sisters of the Lost Nation
by Nick Medina
I Loved This Book (11/7/2022)
I loved this book. It made my heartbeat faster at times and clutch the book tighter.
The plot revolves around an indigenous American Indian tribe, the Takoda, living in the North American Gulf coast area. The native Takoda comes from the Sioux Nation, the name meaning 'friend to all.' The two main characters are sisters, 17 and 15 and their family living on the rez. Their grandmother also lives with them in their small house. The girls attend school in town and work in shifts as house cleaners at the hotel. The rez standard of living has changed tremendously with the advent of a casino/luxury hotel resort complex built on the reservation. The residents continue to live on the rez in their existing homes but with more money and jobs, life changed. Air conditioning, new appliances, furniture, tools purchased and installed. Their history and stories, carried down through the years, began to fade away, their loss observed by few, mostly elders.
Visitors, tourists, and others crowd the new facilities and along with the guests, the law enforcement was stretched thin resulting in an overload of crimes, petty to major. A lack of funding also played a role in why so many crimes received so little attention or investigation.
Although the novel is fictional, some parts were taken from real occurrences, actual events, and the cold hard numbers from the records of missing and murdered girls and women from Indian reservations across America and Canada. The numbers are shocking and heart-breaking.
This book will keep you on the edge of your seat. You cannot put it down. The characters are so well developed, they are your friends. And the story, the writer tells such a good story you don't want it to end or, possibly, end with a different ending?
Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
not sci-fi, not a fairy tale, just an enchanting story by a great story-teller (9/16/2020)
Even the title was off-putting to me. I do not even believe in magic. It is too much like science fiction to be on my favorites’ list. I am so glad that I overruled my first opinion!!
Surprise! This book is beautifully written about women in the mid-1600’s in Massachusetts, New York, along the upper East Coast. Women without rights, or voices, treated in their own homes as second class and even lower. It is particularly about witchery, sorcery, fantasy, witches from the good side and witches from the dark side. It is about love and healing, and potions, recipes; teas blended with herbs, flower petals, the bones and organs of baby sparrows. It is also about mothers and daughters, lovers and friends; drownings, burnings, abuse, dirty jails and hangings. And survival. ‘How did these events come to be and morph into so much evil in this time of the Salem witchcraft trails and hangings? This is the most that can be revealed without spoilers.’
Alice Hoffman takes a subject that is so far-fetched and bizarre and makes it real in a unique way. The reader loves the characters, even if they are not lovable. Most are quirky and some have a spell cast upon them and must perform in such a manner. The story is delivered brilliantly with historical incidents germane to the time, i.e. the Salem witch trials and subsequent beatings, abuse, and hangings
I recommend that you read this book She is an amazing storyteller. You will love it! I did and, incidentally, I did read it all. It is a prequel to another ‘magic-inspired’ books…I have already bought the next one.
Valentine
by Elizabeth Wetmore
not your average West Texas cowboy novel (7/15/2020)
I loved this book from the moment I read the first page. I couldn't put it down. The setting is in oil country, Texas, in the 1970s.The boom is over now but oilmen are expecting another one on its way. This is a story mostly of the women and girls living during this time and place enduring sadness and hardships they are ill-equipped for. This is the working class, housewives, ranchers' wives...there is no glamour here but there is compassion and empathy for each other. This novel is a beautifully written graphic tale which will hold you captive until the last page...literally!
The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls: A Novel
by Ursula Hegi
The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls (5/13/2020)
In 1878 the remote German village of Nordstrand lies amid a thick yellow growth of rapeseed and the Nordsee with its grays and blues.
This story is about people who love and whose lives are laced together, who respect, no, venerate their elders. 'The old people' are revered for their knowledge and experience . An annual festival festival is held honoring the eldest person in the village -- --- a coveted honor. It is acknowledged however that many of their stories may have been picked up through gossip. The men fish, the women tend their houses, cook, clean and care for their children. They attend mass at the stately St. Margaret's church where the nuns care for pregnant Girls, birth their babies, and find homes for them. The nuns provide a broad education for the Girls… physics, geography, theater, dancing, art. A circus comes to town once a year, thrilling everyone. Life in this tranquil village is anything but idyllic or simple. Unbelievably, a tragedy occurs in the wake of a tremendous wave, a surge that only occurs every 100 years. Three children are lost to the wave. The entire village is devastated. The story of how they were affected, both immediately and for the rest of their lives is exquisitely told by the writer. Lives become intertwined throughout the devastation and sorrow. It is a story of women, mothers, wives, girls, nuns...young and old. I loved this book, the characters and the realism. I had a problem, however with so many Germanic words and phrases which interfered with my thought process like hitting a bump in the road while enjoying a beautiful bucolic country ride.
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