Ann Napolitano, the brilliant writer behind Dear Edward (2020), has done it again with her latest novel, Hello Beautiful. While I normally steer clear of Oprah’s Book Club picks, Ann Napolitano is phenomenal, so I gave it a go. We meet William Waters as a young boy in a house silenced by tragedy. His parents can hardly look at him, so it’s a relief when he earns a scholarship to college far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, an ambitious young woman. He is soon engulfed in her boisterous close-knit Italian family, and embraced by sisters Sylvie, a romantic bibliophile, Cecelia, an aspiring artist, and Emeline, […]
Read more...Tag Archives: books set in the 1970s
Damnation Spring – Book Review
Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper, a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall, a job his father and grandfather died doing. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods and fashions his life to support his deceit. Colleen, who has suffered eight miscarriages and is desperate to have a second baby, […]
Read more...