The following two books were re-reads. Originally read them for the "Moms' Night Out" Book Club (my friends in Washington State) in the 2001-2002 school year, when we started our book group since our kids, friends and classmates, started middle school and our opportunities to volunteer in their classroom and on their field trips (and thus see each other) plummeted to zero. I picked up mass-market paperbacks of these books for next to nothing at a Friends of the Library book sale, and finally got around to reading them (so I could donate them back).
The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan, tells the story of three generations of women - a Chinese immigrant with an American daughter, and a birth mother who is the bonesetter's daughter of the title. Most of the book is the immigrant LuLing's story, written as a memoir that her daughter Ruth has translated. It covers her life (mostly in a village near where the Peking Man was found) in China, just before, during, and after World War II. This part was sad but fascinating. The book is more about family relationships (especially mother-daughter) than anything else.
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx - Giant, gentle Quoyle (no first name is ever given, only the initials R. G. near the end of the book) loses his cheating, abusive wife in a car accident. He moves with their two young daughters and his paternal aunt to the family's abandoned home in Newfoundland. Quoyle takes a job with the local paper, The Gammy Bird, initially writing about car wrecks and "the shipping news" from the nearby port. Over the following year, Quoyle and the reader meet the interesting townspeople (with quirky names like Tert Card and Wavey Prowse) and experience life in Newfoundland (particularly the impact of the weather and the sea). Quoyle makes friends and learns to love again (himself and others).
This novel won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and the 1993 National Book Award, and was made into a movie in 2001 (which I don't intend to see). Author Annie Proulx is a master at description, despite (or perhaps because of) a writing style full of sentence fragments.
Despite this, the book is pretty easy to read, thanks to short chapters, all of which have interesting names and associated quotations. In the book's acknowledgments, Proulx states that Clifford W. Ashley's 1944 work, The Ashley Book of Knots, was an inspiration - without it, "this book would have remained just a thread of an idea." Quotes and illustrations from that book make up most of the chapter headings, as well as some of the names. For example, "quoyle" is a very old word for a coil of rope.
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers - Jean Swinney is a 40-year-old single newspaper reporter living a dreary life with her widowed mother in 1957 England. She mostly writes women's columns, like household hints, but one day 20-something Gretchen Tilbury contacts the paper and claims that her ten-year-old daughter Margaret is the result of a virgin birth. Jean gets the assignment to find out if it's fact or fraud.
Gretchen and Margaret willingly participate in various medical tests that are supposed to provide an answer. Meanwhile, Jean interviews various people who knew Gretchen ten years earlier, and becomes friends with the family, including Gretchen's much-older husband Howard.
I won't spoil the resolution of the mystery, nor the other surprise developments along the way. I will say that I was extremely disappointed in the ending, as it left a number of characters hanging. And that was a shame, as I enjoyed the character development as well as the depiction of life in late-1950s England.
Electrons by Mary Wissinger, illustrated by Harriet Kim Anh Rodis, is a cute. colorful book that may be over the heads of most two-to-seven-year-olds, the stated age range for the book. In my state, the concept of atoms is not taught until middle school, and some of the vocabulary in this book (despite a two-page glossary at the end) would be a challenge even at the early elementary level. The rhyming text (sometimes forced) might serve to reinforce the concepts with older elementary school children.
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