Here's what we discussed:
The Summer House - Hannah McKinnon
The Liars' Club - Mary Karr
Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
These Women - Ivy Pochoda
Slightly South of Simple - Kristy Woodson Harvey
The Expats - Chris Pavone
The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury - Marc Levy
The Daughters of Erietown: A Novel - Connie Schultz
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson
What the Hell Did I Just Read - David Wong
P. G. Wodehouse
From Mary Lou in Maryland:
Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War (2016). This novel is as quirky and delightful as her first one, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. In the summer of 1914, Beatrice Nash arrives in Rye, an East Sussex coastal town, to become a Latin teacher. Her father has died recently and she has to support herself. Her relatives do all they can to thwart her independence. The members of the school board and the town leaders aren’t at all sure that they want a female Latin teacher. She has the support of a couple of the leading women of the town, but even they have very narrow concepts of female propriety. Before school starts, she tutors a group of disadvantaged boys and strives to win them over. A couple eligible young men add a potentially romantic thread to the story. Beatrice’s situation is very precarious and stressful. And then along comes the war and upsets all the social dynamics. Simonson is justly compared to Austin.
Ian Ferguson, Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts (2003). In 1959, before the author’s birth, his parents left Edmonton and went 500+ miles north to the former fur trapping town of Fort Vermillion. His father was a charming con man with his heart in the right place who generally lived on step ahead of the law. He got a job as a school teacher and Ian was raised in a community of eccentric, independent characters, many of them First Nations people. It gave Ian quite a broad perspective on cultural norms. I think I have read this book before, but I got so engrossed I had to keep reading anyway. The story of Ian’s birth is one of the funniest I have read. His mother had a lot to put up with.
Kristy Woodson Harvey, Slightly South of Simple (2017). This may be the best summer novel you will find this year. It is set on the island of Peachtree Bluff, Georgia. When Ansley’s husband is killed in the twin towers on 9/11, she has no alternative but to move with her three daughters to the waterfront cottage she inherited from her grandmother. Her eldest daughter Caroline was particularly upset by the move at the beginning of her senior year in high school and she soon escapes back to college in NYC. The events that unfold 17 years later are alternately narrated by Ansley and Caroline. Ansley has established a successful interior design business. She is quite satisfied with her single life and proud that each of her daughters has established an independent life of her own. Then Caroline, 6 months pregnant, leaves her philandering husband in NYC and comes back to Peachtree Bluff with her 11-year-old daughter. Middle daughter Sloane and her two rambunctious sons decide to join the house party. Finally, youngest daughter Emerson, a Hollywood actress, comes to do a film in Atlanta. Ansley’s peaceful home and her orderly life are uproariously invaded by her daughters and grandchildren. Furthermore, she has a secret she doesn’t want them to discover. In fact, each of the women has a secret or two. Despite the interpersonal tensions, some of the scenes are hilarious. It seems impossible that there can be a happy ending, but this is a summer novel.
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