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Quite often people will ask library staff for recommendations of books to read. From time to time, you share the titles of books you really enjoyed with us. Here are just a few.
In Once We Were Brothers, you become immersed in a story about WWll between a German and Jewish family - before and during the war. The story continues when two of the family members meet again many years after the war and the story is finally brought to completion. The patron told me he couldn’t put the book down and he was right.
The next recommendation, A Fall of Marigolds, is also historical fiction that ties two time periods together- the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 and September 11, 2001. Events that took place one hundred years apart and yet are connected by a common thread, a scarf that found its way from one period of time to the next. A scarf that helped its owners to overcome the tragedies that had over whelmed them.
City Baker’s Guide to Country Living is so quaint and cozy you just want to pack up your things and move there. Olivia Rawlings is a fantastic pastry chef in Boston until she almost burns down the dining club as she is setting her flambe dessert aglow. She leaves town with no place to go. She ends up on her friend’s doorstop in the middle of the night in Guthrie, Vermont. She needs to work, so she agrees to work at the Sugar Maple Inn for a year. Little did she know, not only had she found a job she loved, but she had finally found a place she could call home. If you’re a food junkie, this book is for you.
The next three recommendations are about older men whose wives have died. The first book is The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper. Ever since Arthur Pepper’s wife died, his life has become more routine than it had ever been in the past. He gets up at 7:30 every day and wears the same grey pants and mustard colored sweater vest. It’s now been a year since her death and he decides to break with his routine and finally go through her things and decide what to do with them. It’s then that he discovers a charm bracelet that he doesn’t remember her wearing. This piece of jewelry is much more elaborate than the life she lived and he’s very confused as to why she had it. As he discovers what each charm represents, he comes to learn of the life his wife led before they were married. His heart begins its slow process of healing charm by charm.
In A Man Called Ove, most people would say that he was born grumpy. It wasn’t so much that he was grumpy, as it was that Ove just had expectations of how one should live their life and his opinion just wasn’t the same as most other people’s opinions. However, the more you get to know Ove, the more endearing he becomes - no matter how hard he is around the edges. I loved his story.
In Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, we travel to England to the rustic little village of Edgecombe St. Mary. It’s a place where everything is done properly, including how the tea is made and served. The Major is a 68-year-old widower who is retired from service and is a respected fixture in the community. His orderly life comes undone when his younger brother dies suddenly. In his moment of grief, he is unexpectedly comforted by Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. A friendship grows between them as they share the things they have in common, but is it “proper” for this relationship between a local English gent and a permanent foreigner to become more?
Thanks for the recommendations and happy reading!
Book covers courtesy of Easicat.