SoapZone Community Message Board

Six books and not a dog in the bunch...though some books were definitely better than others...

The Little Village of Book Lovers by Nina George - My first read of the new year, and it was a good one. I'm a sucker for any books set in, or dealing with, book stores, and I've liked other books by NG that I've read. This one is, in a way, a prequel to NG's The Little Paris Bookshop in that there was a fictitious book in the latter that changed a character's life. This is that book. It's about a young girl who was literally touched by love and now is able to see love's mark on other people. "Soul marks" are a common trope in fan fiction (people have a mark on their body and then find someone who has the same mark or a mark that completes theirs or whatnot), and it's usually a trope I hate but it just works here. This is such a cheerful, charming, heartfelt book, which is just what I needed after all the depressing books I read (but didn't exactly seek out) at the end of 2023. Another fun aspect of the book: as I was reading, the list of characters introduced later started to sound familiar. They should...they turn up later, as older versions of themselves, in NG's book The Little French Bistro. A solid A, maybe even an A+...but maybe I just want to give it an A+ for being a cheerful book when I needed something cheerful to read.

The River We Remember by Willian Kent Krueger- Set in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s, a body washes up on the shore of a river. It's the town a-hole, a rich man with many enemies. But was he murdered? Did he kill himself? Was it an accidental death? The mystery was very satisfying but I had two tiny quibbles with the book. First, almost everybody has a secret, something dark in their past. It's not quite a full on trope but often, when authors aren't filling their fictitious small towns with quirky characters, they're filling them with "perfect on the outside but rotten on the inside" characters. It was hard rooting for all the "heroes" in the book. And second, I know other readers love it but I'm just not a fan of applying modern sensibilities or morals to the past. This book does that in spots and can get a little preachy with the "see? This is the right thing to do/say/be, dang it!" Still, those are minor quibbles...this book made several "top books of 2023" lists but I'd give it a B+.

Everyone Here is Lying by Shari LaPena - Another mystery, by an author I've read before. A 9 year old girl goes missing in a close knit community. Is she just missing or is she dead? And who took her? We know part of the answer to one of those questions early on; after that, the book, like all the other SL books I've read, turns into a rather formulaic procession through potential suspects. The ending neither thrilled me nor annoyed me...but again, it's another "you think you know your perfect neighbors but you don't!" book. I'll give it a B...I gave it to Dad to read, because he usually loves mysteries, especially procedural mysteries, but he was overwhelmed by all the characters and (mostly) figured it out early on.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry - I'm sure I read this classic children's book a long time ago...but I remembered nothing of it. So when a friend gave it to me to add to a book donation (long story), I thought I'd spend an hour reading it. And man...it's kind of a weird story. Most kids' books are very creative and imaginative but this is on a whole 'nuther level. I Googled "what's the message of the book The Little Prince?" and got a half dozen different answers. The one most accepted seemed to be "children are imaginative, and we lose that when we grow up". Hmmm...maybe. Had this been a book for adults, I would've hated it (and not finished it), but since it's a book for children, I will appreciate the imagination of the author and give the book a solid B.

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Netsukawa - And speaking of weird books...a teenage boy, a self-professed hikikomori, loses his grandfather, with whom he lived and helped run a book store (there's that book store thing again <g>). His aunt comes to take him away but before he closes the shop, a mysterious talking cat appears and tells him he accompany him on a mission to, yes, save books. I can't really say more without spoiling the book...it's a shorter novel, almost more a novella, and it's very, very Japanese, which isn't a bad thing. There was an interesting note at the end by the translator who explained the challenges of translating the book into English. One challenge: there's not really an exact translation for hikikomori; the closest translation would be "young person, often male, who deliberately withdraws from society". Google the word...the results are very interesting. I'm giving the book a B+ but mostly for the new word I learned and for the talking cat.

The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel - Aaaaaand...we're back to depressing books. Yet another book set during WWII (but the author explains this), it's the story of an aspiring American artist who marries a Frenchman who's up and coming in the French art scene. She's not particularly happy though but when she gets pregnant with their first child, she's convinced the baby will bring them together. Meanwhile, she befriends another American woman living in Paris and married to a Frenchman (they run...a book store <g>) and she's also having a baby. The women become fast friends, and when the war comes to their doorstep, the artist reluctantly leaves her daughter with her friend and flees to the countryside to avoid being captured by Nazis. When she finally returns at the end of the war, the bookstore is gone, reduced to rubble. What happened to her friend, her friend's family, and most importantly, her daughter? It's a sad tale, and though there's a (mostly) happy ending, it's an ending that relies on some hard to believe coincidences. I almost gave this a C but I'm going to be charitable and go with a B- because I learned some things about the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. And why do so many authors like to write stories set in WWII? According to KH, it's because WWII highlighted the resiliency of the human spirit, and many think that's what we need right now in the midst of the world (figuratively) burning.

ETA - Oh, and I FINALLY joined Goodreads <g>. Mostly because I ran across a GR post on Pinterest about the 100 Books To Read In a Lifetime, and I wanted to be able to mark whether I'd read them or not. I've not gone all the way through the list...I'm 25 titles in and have read 22 of them.