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Carin's Picks

Carin Pratt moved to Strafford, Vermont, 12 years ago from Washington D.C. where she worked at CBS News for 27 years, the last 20 as Executive Producer of Face the Nation. Her husband, John Echeverria, is a professor at Vermont Law School, and she has two grown sons. She likes to hike, cook, garden, bike, horseback ride. She reads a lot. 

More of Carin's Reviews (mid-2021 & earlier)

 

 

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Wolves of Winter: A Novel (Essex Dogs Trilogy #2) By Dan Jones Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780593653791
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Viking - January 30th, 2024

It takes a brave medieval historian to write a vivid bestseller about the Hundred Years War, but Jones has done it! Now twice, with Wolves of Winter, the followup to Essex Dogs. While it's sort of a primer on medieval war, which may not be for everyone (kind of the opposite to a "cozy mystery"), Wolves is violent and exciting, with good character development and, one hopes, historical accuracy. The reader follows the Essex Dog who "fight as one" and are about to siege Calais. Superb for your study of the tactics and vocabulary of 14th century European warfare. I mean, what more could you want?


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Martyr!: A novel By Kaveh Akbar Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593537619
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Knopf - January 23rd, 2024

This whirlwind of a novel is poet Kaveh Akbar's first. And what a book. It's compulsively readable and very funny, which is kind of odd, since it's the account of a newly sober young orphaned Iranian's obsession with death, the meaning of life  (i.e., is there one?), martyrs and martyrdom. Not exactly lol material. While flawed (well who/what isn't?) somehow that doesn't matter. It's a marvel. And whoever had the idea of that exclamation point in the title should get a raise.  -Carin


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All the Little Bird-Hearts: A Novel By Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow Cover Image
$18.99
ISBN: 9781643756615
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Algonquin Books - December 5th, 2023

All the Little Bird Hearts (Victoria Lloyd Barlow) was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and while that is sometimes indicative of nothing, in this case, they nailed it. I love the way some books make you look at the world differently. That is, differently from the way you look at it, like Milkman (Burns) or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon). 
In All the Little Bird Hearts, Sunday, the mother of a teenager, has autism. She interprets the world with the help of her encyclopedic knowledge of Sicilian folk tales and an antiquated etiquette book. And, while that sounds kind of odd, watching her as she navigates her surroundings and her encounters with other people, it makes weird perfect sense, and is a marvelous, often very funny, experience. Sunday's daughter, Dolly, is growing up and out, however, and that presents a whole new level of difficulty and confusion. To complicate matters further, a manipulative, superficially glamorous couple move next door and insert themselves into Sunday and Dolly's lives. What do they have in mind for the impressionable Dolly? Are they true friends, or something a bit more sinister?  
All the Little Bird Hearts is a wonderful, thought-provoking book, perfect to start the year with. (Plus, it's a paperback release...yet another point in its favor. You're welcome.)  


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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel By James McBride Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593422946
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Riverhead Books - August 8th, 2023

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of this year's very best novels. Set in '72 in Chicken Hill, an immigrant-filled neighborhood in PA, it starts ostensibly as a mystery: a body is found in a well....how did it get there?  I can't possibly do justice to the literary machinations McBride is so good at, braiding the history of different neighborhood residents within the intricate plot. It may be a historical (not to mention funny) saga, but it is ultimately about some of the myriad kinds of love: the desperate love of a spouse for his ill partner, the fierce love a childless woman has for a boy who so needs a mother, the casual love of friends who periodically find in each other shelter from the storm, the necessary love between two inmates locked in an accursed institution. This is just one of my takeaways from this wonderful book, which will stick with you.   -Carin


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Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance By Paulette Jiles Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780063252684
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: William Morrow - September 12th, 2023

The subtitle sort of says it all: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance. Union soldier John Chenneville is slowly recovering from a head wound sustained in a depot explosion during the last few months of the Civil War. Still recovering, he travels home only to find that his beloved sister, her husband (a former Confederate), and their child have been brutally killed. Chenneville tracks the murderer south, through Oklahoma and on to Texas, bound for justice. Jiles is particularly good at describing this perilous time and equally adept with her usage of historical fact and detail. Chenneville, too, is an appealing character, driven and stubborn for sure, but in an honorable way. You can't help but root for him, despite his ultimate aim. -Carin


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Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War By Charles Glass Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9781984877956
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Penguin Press - June 6th, 2023

British soldiers suffering "shell shock" from the hellscape of WWI went to Scotland's Craiglockhart War Hospital, hopefully to recover. Some did; many didn't. Charles Glass' book tells the fascinating story of some of the more famous residents, including poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and how they were treated by compassionate doctors learning themselves to deal with this modern affliction. For fans of The War in Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell, and the incomparable WWI Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker.  -Carin


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Kala: A Novel By Colin Walsh Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780385549639
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Doubleday - July 25th, 2023

Irish noir is not everyone's cuppa tea, but it's mine and Kala is totally addictive, and really, more than noir. Kala, one of 6 inseparable friends in a backwater Irish town, goes missing at age 15. Now, years later, three of the group are home when her remains are found. Determined to find out just what happened to their magnetic and brave friend, they scour the past and present to unlock the secrets of the town and her murder. Totally addictive. A debut novel, but you would never know it.  -Carin


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Somebody's Fool: A novel (North Bath Trilogy #3) By Richard Russo Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780593317891
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Knopf - July 25th, 2023

Reading Richard Russo is like slipping your weary dogs into a pair of old slippers, down at the heel but still comfy. He is one of America's best comedic storytellers, more chuckle than guffaw kind of humor. Somebody's Fool is the third in the North Bath Trilogy (Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool are 1 and 2), and it is a masterclass in depicting the relationship intricacies and complications that come with living in a small town for a long time. Patriarch Sully (played by Paul Newman in the '94 film of Nobody's Fool) is no longer, but his cranky spirit lives on in his son and friends and their lovers, who get into all kinds of tricky situations. This is a book with a lot of heart that's not sentimental. Perfect for summer.  -Carin


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The House of Doors By Tan Twan Eng Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9781639731930
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing - October 17th, 2023

Eng wrote two of my favorite books: The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists...I just had to wait about ten years for his third but it's well worth it. Set in the exotic South Seas, The House of Doors is a fictionalized account of a trip the writer Somerset Maugham took to Penang in 1921 to stay with an old friend and his wife. There's the usual evocative, mesmerizing writing of Eng, a couple of intrigues, betrayal and secrets, of course, and a murder trial to boot. All against the backdrop of colonialism and revolution. Wonderful storytelling.  -Carin


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The Lost Wife: A novel By Susanna Moore Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780385351430
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Knopf - April 4th, 2023

Moore’s spare, evocative and compelling writing anchors this novel about a woman on the run in the mid-1800s Minnesota Territory. Fleeing abuse, she doggedly creates a new life for herself only to be caught up in the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Vivid and devastating, this story of frontier survival might change how you look at Manifest Destiny.  -Carin


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Crook Manifesto: A Novel By Colson Whitehead Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780385545150
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Doubleday - July 18th, 2023

Carney’s back! Your favorite furniture salesman cum jewelry fence from Harlem Shuffle. This time, to start, Carney needs Jackson Five tickets (event is sold out) for his daughter. To get them, well, he’s got to get back in the game. (“Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.”) Read it, yes, for the hijinks, the humor, the frequent well-turned phrase and sociological insight. Honor it also for the vivid and knowledgeable depiction of a certain time in a certain place: 1970s Harlem. This book is a total blast.  -Carin


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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma By Claire Dederer Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780525655114
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Knopf - April 25th, 2023

How’s it go?  “Love the sinner, hate the sin? “.  When it comes to consuming art produced by demonstrably horrible people (Roman Polanski, Picasso, Woody Allen, etc.,) should the phrase be “hate the artist, love the art?” Or disdain both? That’s the question at the heart of Claire Dederer’s fascinating, closely reasoned Monsters. This is not a new question but Dederer makes it fresh and lively. Ultimately consumers will have to make up their own minds, as it should be.  -Carin


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All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel By S. A. Cosby Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250831910
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Flatiron Books - June 6th, 2023

Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears) is just getting better and better. His latest delves into disturbing material — school shooting, serial killers, racism. Titus Crowne is the first black sheriff in Charon County, VA. Former FBI, he came home to Charon and now has a whole lot on his plate, including the past. A good police procedural, yes, but most interesting to me was the depiction of the complicated life and work of a black cop in a Southern town.  - Carin


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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder By David Grann Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780385534260
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Doubleday - April 18th, 2023

Nothing like a good shipwreck tale to help get you through mudseason....which is a cakewalk, to say the least, compared with life on an 18th Century ship.  Typhus, scurvy, enemy cannonballs, navigational issues, floggings, storms,  bad food!  And that's all before the Wager was shipwrecked off Patagonia.  With his usual verve and impetus, David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Lost City of Z) tells the tale of the sailors and their ordeal. There were factions and the captain was abandoned on the shore when a number of sailors rebuilt a boat and sailed off.  Eventually both groups of sailors landed back in England and a war over who was telling the truth about the mutiny began.  If you like Mutiny on the Bounty or The Endurance, this is the book for you.  -Carin


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Lone Women: A Novel By Victor LaValle Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780525512080
Availability: Hard to Find (may be out of print - email to check availability)
Published: One World - March 28th, 2023

As a rule, horror stories have never appealed to me, but I'm trying to be braver (expanding my reading into new literary genres seem to be the only extent of that bravery, but hey.) Lone Women has been called horror, but it's more a mashup of a number of genres: horror, western, feminist survival story, historical fiction, suspense...In 1914 Adelaide Henry lands in Montana, coming from California with little but her steamer trunk. She's on the run, but why? And what the hell is IN that steamer trunk anyway? In any case she has to survive, a black woman in one of the whitest, man-centric states in the country. AND it's 1914, not exactly a banner time for single women. How she does survive is the story -- that and what's in the trunk -- and it's absolutely riveting, albeit a tad violent. LaValle knows what he's doing. I'm pretty sure there's a parable in there somewhere, but since parables are more often than not totally lost on me, I'll leave it to you readers to determine what it is.  -Carin


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Small Mercies: A Detective Mystery By Dennis Lehane Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780062129482
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Harper - April 25th, 2023

Classic Dennis Lehane: A thriller that's hard to read because of the virulent racism that suffused South Boston in the 70's, but also impossible to put down. Southie, summer of '74. The weather's hot and the busing controversy is making things hotter. A young white girl goes missing....and a young black man is found dead on the subway tracks. What happened? Are the two situations related somehow? The girl's mother, who's as imaginatively vengeful as a distressed mother can get, will find out come hell or highwater. Movie, movie, movie. (And I've already done the casting, if only they would call.)  -Carin


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Essex Dogs: A Novel (Essex Dogs Trilogy #1) By Dan Jones Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780593653784
Availability: Hard to Find (may be out of print - email to check availability)
Published: Viking - February 14th, 2023

Essex Dogs is medieval historian Dan Jones' first foray into fiction and it's a doozy. The Dogs are a motley crew of ten British, Scottish, and Welsh soldiers who land in Normandy in 1346, tasked with retaking the throne from the French. Led by a captain whose life and war experience have made him a reluctant warrior, they head south, battling the French all the way to Crecy. Jones knows his medieval wars and weaponry and if you don't mind a few (ok, a lot) of body parts flying around, you will enjoy this depiction of the early days of the Hundred Years War. First in a planned trilogy. I'm in....  -Carin


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The Sun Walks Down: A Novel By Fiona McFarlane Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780374606237
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - February 14th, 2023

This is what I call a "braided" novel. And it's really good. Set in colonial Australia, the main event is a six year old boy getting lost in the outback in a ferocious dust storm. McFarlane tells the stories of the people who join the desperate search for the boy, from family members to indigenous trackers to passers by. (The sun is a character too...) The question of the boy's survival crackles like a live wire under these braided stories. I told an Australian friend to read it and she said, "I see why everybody is talking about McFarlane's strikingly original prose." Grips from the first page.  -Carin


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We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland By Fintan O'Toole Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9781324092872
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Liveright - February 7th, 2023

Chosen as one of the best of the year by the New York Times, this memoir/history deserves any and all accolades. It's a honker for sure, more than 600 pages, but so worth the time. O'Toole has written a compelling history of Ireland from 1958 to the present, seen through the prism of his personal life. You will learn more about Ireland than you perhaps want to. Clear-eyed and impressively researched and detailed, We Don't Know Ourselves is remarkable. I have never read anything like it. -Carin


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Age of Vice: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel) By Deepti Kapoor Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780593328798
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Riverhead Books - January 3rd, 2023

This brutal thriller/family saga set in modern India is hard to stop reading. While long, it speeds along like the fancy cars the corrupt Wadia family like to drive around Delhi. Shakespearean plots involving betrayal, greed, conspiracy and romance are woven into this complicated tale of gangsters and their family members, journalists, and the underclass. For fans of Don Winslow (Mexico) and Marlon James (Jamaica).  


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They're Going to Love You: A Novel By Meg Howrey Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780385548779
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Doubleday - November 15th, 2022

Having been told at a tender age that I didn't have the body for ballet (I mean, all true, but really??) I have a love/hate relationship with the art. So I was reluctant to read this book....but so glad I did. The main character, Carlisle, has a mother who danced for Balanchine, and a father who manages a ballet company, but who left her mother for another man. Carlisle is too tall to be a dancer so becomes a choreographer. I found this novel to be wonderfully immersive and moving. Mistakes, of course, are made, and family bonds strained, to say the least, but the discipline of ballet, the music, the movement, the emotion all undergird the book and make it somehow so real. (Made me want to strap on the old pointe shoes....oh never mind.)  -Carin


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Trespasses: A Novel By Louise Kennedy Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780593540893
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Riverhead Books - November 1st, 2022

This exquisite, pitch-perfect novel recounts a dangerous affair a young Catholic teacher has with an older, married, Protestant barrister in Northern Ireland. Beautifully written and intensely moving, this love story thrums with the complicated menace that permeated Northern Ireland during the inaptly named Troubles. Don't miss it.  -Carin


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Homestead: A Novel By Melinda Moustakis Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250845559
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Flatiron Books - February 28th, 2023

Homesteading books remind me just how easy, relatively, most of our lives are. In Homestead, set in Alaska shortly before it became a state, a young couple, married in a fever, homestead about 150 acres, building up from nothin' but woods. It's pretty hard to nurture an early marriage when you are dealing with marauding bears, vicious wolverines, Alaskan weather, and no indoor plumbing, to say the least. Sure hope they make it.....  -Carin


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Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison By Ben Macintyre Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780593136355
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Crown - August 1st, 2023

Thirty miles from Dresden the medieval Colditz Castle sits on a high promontory. The Nazis used the huge building to house hundreds of the most defiant prisoners of war from a number of countries. A major pastime for these men was planning and attempting escape after escape, some more successful than others. Ben Macintyre (Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor) tells their stories with fascinating detail and human understanding of the toll long-term prison takes on a soul. (Especially intriguing are the aids sent from outside, which helped enable the escapes...i.e. a tiny compass secreted in a walnut.)  -Carin


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American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis By Adam Hochschild Cover Image
$29.99
ISBN: 9780358455462
Availability: Hard to Find (may be out of print - email to check availability)
Published: Mariner Books - October 4th, 2022

You think the U.S. is divided now? Hah. Read this account of what was going on in the U.S. during WWI and shortly thereafter. Violent racism, anti immigrant ire, horrifying attacks on pacifists and labor unionists, press crackdowns...etc. etc. All with the background of not only the flu epidemic, but WWI. Hochschild, author of, among others, Spain in Our Hearts, To End All Wars, and King Leopold's Ghost, gives a character-driven account of these years with heroes and a whole host of villains. Not sure whether I found the book to be terrifying, or to be thankful that somehow the country came out of those nightmare years intact. More or less.


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Act of Oblivion: A Novel By Robert Harris Cover Image
$28.99
ISBN: 9780063248007
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Harper - September 13th, 2022

God, I love a good manhunt story (see: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, Outlander (Adamson), Butch Cassidy etc.).  In the thrilling Act of Oblivion, two Englishman involved with the killing of King Charles I in 1649, are on the run, pursued by the relentless Richard Nayler, clerk to the Privy Council. Where do they flee to? New England... and the Connecticut River Valley. Full of great period detail and a thoroughly enjoyable way to bone up on your colonial age history.  -Carin


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Flight: A Novel By Lynn Steger Strong Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9780063135147
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Mariner Books - November 8th, 2022

Lynn Steger Strong's new book Flight takes place in Upstate New York, during a Christmas holiday. Three siblings and their partners and kids all gather for the first Christmas after the death of a beloved and strong-willed mother. Strong knows her sibling dynamics for sure, replete as they usually are with complicated rivalries, jealousy, loyalties and love. If you have siblings, you will nod your head repeatedly in recognition. Other themes involve art, poverty vs. wealth, grief, and shame. Once you get the characters straightened out, the story flies. Loved it.  -Carin


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Horse: A Novel By Geraldine Brooks Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780399562969
Availability: Hard to Find (may be out of print - email to check availability)
Published: Viking - June 14th, 2022

Brooks has proven adept at historical fiction with her previous novels March, People of the Book, Year of Wonders, et al. Horse, with the primary character being Lexington, a record breaking racehorse, is no exception. Set in both recent time, and when the horse lived -- the mid 1850's -- the novel seamlessly braids the experiences of a black art researcher, the primary trainer of Lexington, a slave, and the horse, in clear prose. While it takes a bit to get going, hold on. It takes off and becomes one of those books you can't wait to get back to.


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The Perfect Golden Circle By Benjamin Myers Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9781685890391
Availability: On Our Shelves Now (call to confirm availability)
Published: Melville House - April 25th, 2023

Crop circle noir! It's a thing! Well, no, it isn't, but it could be. Set in rural England in the '80s, The Perfect Golden Circle follows two misfits, one with PTSD from the Falklands War, one recovering from too much time with drug-addled punk rockers, who tramp out complicated crop circles in farmers' fields in the middle of the night. The "mystery is everything," and soon practically all England is speculating that aliens have landed. This is not a big family saga, or sweeping historical fiction...instead it's a wonderful "small" book about friendship, art, healing and obsession. "Fuel the myth and strive for beauty." Indeed.  -Carin


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Lucy by the Sea: A Novel By Elizabeth Strout Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593446065
Availability: Usually Available in 2-10 Business Days
Published: Random House - September 20th, 2022

In Lucy by the Sea, the latest of the Lucy Barton books by Elizabeth Strout, the pandemic is the main event. Lucy and her ex-husband, whom you might remember from Oh William!, flee NYC for Maine during the first panicked days. Nothing much dramatic happens...hard to say a plot exists. The novel consists primarily of interior dialogue as Lucy recalls her difficult past, and copes with the problems of her ex-husband and daughters. Strout's books seem so simple, but they are so not. The universality of her experiences and feelings living through this pandemic burrows into your bones.  -Carin


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