A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

It's almost sad to me that I have only read this book once, and that was over twelve years ago (I think I read it in the summer of 2005, if I am remembering correctly). I remembered that I loved it, but I didn't really remember anything about it. Once I started reading, things started coming back to me, and I remembered more of what it was about and what happened. I started reading it very slowly, trying to take my time and just savor it and enjoy it. I didn't want to rush and try to get through this fast--I wanted to sit with it. I ended up reading a huge chunk last night, so I finished it faster than I meant to, but once the action started halfway through I couldn't really put it down.

I think it's interesting how the first half of this very long book is basically just Smith world-building and giving so much detail about Francie's life in Brooklyn. The details are amazing, how clearly and expressively she describes their Brooklyn neighborhood and their family. I think that might annoy some people, since there wasn't much action for at least the first 200 pages of the book, but I loved it. I felt like I had such a good sense of where they were--I felt like I was there and like I was with Francie. Smith's spare writing also had a way of making me feel so strongly for Francie and Neeley. My heart just ached for them at so many little spots, how things were so difficult and how tough they had to be. There were so many small things in the story that made me want to cry--like the librarian who never looked at Francie while she checked out her books, even though she was there every day, or the English teacher who told her not to write about her own life any more after her father died, or how Francie was always lonely and never, ever had any friends.

I loved how Smith created the characters of both Johnny and Katie, Francie's parents. They both had amazing, admirable qualities, and they both had terrible, detrimental qualities as well--they were truly human. Katie was tough as nails and so hard-working and refused to give up even when life was so unbelievably hard, and Johnny was so loving and tender with his children, especially Francie. It is an inspiring story, how they worked so hard and made things work even when they barely could. It's not a rags-to-riches story, more of a rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story, and it was a hard, hard life. It's such a relief that things work out more in the end for them.

Anyways, I feel like there are a billion more things I could say about this one. It is definitely one of my favorites ever. I love, love, love it, and I am happy that I read it again this year.

Glass Houses by Louise Penny

I have been working on this Armand Gamache series for months now and this is the last one (that's been published so far)! I can't believe I actually read all of them--I only was able to start the series because I assured myself I didn't have to read them all if I didn't want to. But once I got started, I really, really did want to. The true reason is because of Armand Gamache. His personality is so endearing and so much what I want to be like--kind, intelligent, thoughtful, honest, wise, loving towards his wife and family. It's hard not to love him and Reine-Marie and the whole cast of characters. And that is what keeps drawing me back every time.

In this book, Gamache is finally the Chief Superintendent of the whole Securite du Quebec, and he's acting as a witness for a trial of a murder. The book tells the story of a murder that happened in Three Pines (as always) and alternates with the story of the trial for that murder. The murder itself was interesting--the story of a Cobrador, or a debt collector come to make someone pay a moral debt that they'd never been forced to justice. In the Author's Note, Penny says that she came up with most of that part of the plot, which is always amazing to see what sorts of things she can come up with and incorporate into her stories. I always enjoy how Penny does such a good job intertwining two different storylines and having them come together at the end, like the story of the murder and the bigger, overarching goal of Gamache's of taking down the drug trade in Quebec. I am a little skeptical of how they could possibly have taken down all the drug trade with capturing the head of the cartel (wouldn't the second-in-command just take over?) but it was a relief when it worked out well (mostly--I need the next book to find out what happened to Lacoste). I was dying to speed through the last 15%, it was so intense and crazy. I hated it and I love it. And overall, the idea of the "higher court" of conscience was a really great premise for the storyline.

The Midwife's Revolt by Jodi Daynard

I read this one for my book club. I probably would not have picked it up otherwise, because I hadn't heard any reviews of it or recommendations, but I was game to try it. It seemed like an engrossing story: Lizzie Boylston is widowed in one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, and has to use her training as a midwife to survive and live on her farm. She lives in Braintree, Massachusetts, and one of her closest friends is Abigail Adams. Eventually events of the War come close to their small hamlet and the women all get involved.

There were some really good things about this book, and then some things I really was annoyed by. First, the good: I liked the detailed research that the author did in getting the setting right. I thought the details were impeccable and I got a good sense of the time period. I also really liked many of the characters and their interactions. I loved the sense of Abigail Adams that we got, since she seemed true to life after what I remember from reading John Adams (which I kind of want to read again, since I just listened to the abridged audiobook version years and years ago). I also liked the details of the birth stories that Daynard included, and the details of midwifery and the knowledge that Lizzie had in her work. I usually am not a huge fan of that sort of story (birth stories always freak me out) but none of them were depressing and that was one of my favorite parts of the book.

But the bad almost overwhelmed the good for me in this book. First of all, this book was soooooooooo long. It was over 400 pages and really did not need to be. The first half of the book had almost no action, it just had Lizzie and her servant Martha living on a farm, and it really did not need to be so detailed and so long. You could have easily cut out 100 pages and nobody would have noticed. I was super super annoyed by some of the major plot points: like Lizzie hints early on in the book that she dresses as a man and does some crucial work for the Cause, but she decides all on her own to crossdress and go try to spy on this one inn, without anyone asking her, and she pretty much gets nowhere as far as I can tell and is just stupid and not actually useful. I was so confused as to why she was doing that and what she accomplished, and how obviously stupid she was. She talked so much about how important her work was as a midwife and how she needed to be there to take care of the women in the area, but then she just up and leaves for weeks at a time because her work as a spy (???) was more important. It seemed like a MAJOR plot hole to me. And there were others. Her relationship with the two love interests (ugh) was also totally not believable or interesting at all. I couldn't see any reason why she would be in love with the one she really loved by the end. But the real killer for me was that the writing was awkward. I hate it when I read conversations between characters and I am distracted by how awkward the writing is--and that is exactly what was happening in this book. I hate making that general critique without any specific example or idea of how it could have been fixed (because I imagine it is very difficult to write good conversations), but it bothered me so bad. I couldn't get into the story because it was so annoying.

Overall, I'm not sure that this book fell into my goal of "reading books that make me happy," but I read it so that I could go to book club and doing that makes me happy, so I guess it works.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

I liked this book as a kid, but Dane REALLY loved this one. This is a great boys' book. Ralph, a mouse who lives in a hotel, finds a toy motorcycle that a boy brought to the hotel, and learns how to ride it. He and the boy become friends, and he even helps the boy in a big way by the end. Dane was enraptured by the toy motorcycle and imagining Ralph riding around on it, and he got so interested in the story that he was nervous and scared when anything climactic was happening. I thought this was a super fun one and Dane is dying to read the other two books in the series, so we will keep going. It took us a while to get through this one (we started it over Christmas, this was one of Dane's Christmas presents) but we are trying really hard to have Dane do reading practice and read him a bit of a chapter book most days every week.

My main question in this book is one of mechanics. Why does the motorcycle work when Ralph makes the sound with his mouth? Is this supposed to be fantastical and a suspension of disbelief thing? I guess the mouse and the boy are having long conversations with each other, so this shouldn't be that much worse, haha!

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

I was looking for a quick and easy audiobook to listen to, and I heard that Kenneth Branagh did a recording for the audiobook of this one. And after seeing the movie, which I enjoyed, I imagined Branagh would do an awesome job with all the many accents in this book, and I wanted to revisit this again. I think the book was better than the movie (as usual!) and I liked seeing how Poirot worked this all out. I remember the first time I read this book I was annoyed by how Poirot just seemed to work things out and just randomly figure out what people were in the Armstrong household, and it didn't seem to work really well to me. It also felt that way in the movie when I watched it recently. But for some reason, listening to it this time, I really heard the part where Poirot talks about imagining a household in America with people of all nationalities, and how he placed them all in roles in the drama in his head, and then worked from that imagination. It seemed like it worked a little better than I remember. I love how he works out the whole solution and how he figures out what happened in this book--I remember the first time I read it, it just blew my mind. This is definitely a very well-done one.

The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn

In The Jane Austen Project, two people from the future time travel back to 1815 to meet Jane Austen and try to recover one of her manuscripts from being destroyed. Rachel and Liam are acting as brother and sister, who try to get in with Jane's brother Henry and to befriend Jane. This is obviously a very different sort of Jane Austen fan fiction, and I wasn't sure it would work super well, but I think it was very well done in many ways. It was so interesting to see the world of 1815 from the eyes of someone modern/futuristic--the things that wouldn't make sense to mention in Austen's original works. The things like the smells, the sounds, the uncomfortableness of the carriage rides. I really liked how detailed and how well-integrated all the imagery of the world was in this book. I also really liked seeing Jane Austen as a character in her own time period. She seemed like I imagine she would, and I liked her character a lot. My only real complaint about this book was the relationship between Rachel and Liam, the two modern characters traveling in time in this book--obviously they're going to fall in love (that's easy to predict from page 1), but I couldn't really tell why he liked her or why he seemed so odd around her sometimes. But mostly I felt like there was more talk of sex than I expected in a book set in 1815, even with futuristic characters (who are apparently more free and liberated even than today, haha). It wasn't terrible by any means, and nothing graphic at all in the whole book--but I just felt like a Jane Austen-esque heroine didn't seem like she should be thinking and talking about sex so much. It felt out of place and kind of willfully over-the-top to me. But I think the good parts of the book outweighed the not-so-good parts. The author is apparently a copy-editor, and she did a great job with her research and writing, and I liked this mesh of sci-fi and historical fiction.

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

I've made a decision for 2018: I'm not going to keep track of the quantity of books I read. I blew my numerical reading goal for 2017 out of the water with over 130 books last year, and this year, I'm going to try to actually read less. I want to read only books that make me happy, and not try to get through as many as possible. I also want to be more productive with other things, and try to accomplish more with my small amount of free time. So, I'm not going to number the books I read this year and I'll see how that works out for me.

I started listening to A Great Reckoning and of course, by the time I was 80% of the way done, I had to get the e-book and blast through it by reading it because I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. This one was very good, but I kind of hated how so much doubt and negative feeling was cast in Gamache's way in this book, both that he could be the killer in the murder mystery and that he could have had an affair twenty-some-odd years ago. I mean, you KNOW that he didn't do either of those things, but everyone else starts to think that maybe he did, and he won't explain what's going on to stop everyone thinking it. I know that the genre of a mystery requires that there be a lot of, well, mystery, but it bugs me how Gamache always is keeping secrets from his colleagues, when there's really no point to keep them secret except for the dramatic reveal at the end, which is really only important for the narrative of the book and not for the investigation itself. I liked how the map figured into this book, which had a very sad backstory in the end, and I was glad that Penny didn't try to twist the story to fit the two narratives together (they just happened to be solved at the same time, but they didn't actually have anything to do with each other).

Anyways, a few of the things in this story didn't make much sense to me (like the Russian Roullette game that the professor was forcing his students to play--how is it POSSIBLE that that has been going on for years and nobody's ever died? And how would he have explained it if they had died? I'm so confused by this) but it worked well in the end.