Each month, we ask our bloggers to share the best thing they’ve read (or things, plural, if our bloggers declare a tie ’cause they just can’t choose). It doesn’t have to be a new book, as evidenced below; just something that made the month sparkle a bit more.
Without further ado, here’s the installment for February 2013 (and if you’ve missed any, be sure to check out past recs via the related posts section at the bottom of the post):
Lucy Dosch
The best story I read this month was The Valentine’s Arrangement by Kelsie Leverich. The story is about a tattoo artist who recently found out her soldier-fiancé had been cheating on her while he was deployed, and a soldier on leave who is fascinated by her surly attitude but doesn’t want to promise a commitment while he is deployed. The arrangement referred to in the title is for non-dating, non-committal sex until he returns to his unit in a week’s time. With that description I believed the story would be an erotica and just hoped for a decent storyline between bouts of sex. What I read was a delightful and memorable romance where two people find exactly what they insisted they didn’t want.
Jamie BrennerMe Before You by Jojo Moyes – I heard about this book from a surprisingly varied group of readers so I had to give it a try. I am so thankful that I did! The plot of this story is brilliantly crafted, with a love story that is so rich, so quirky and yet surprisingly real, and at times so heart-wrenching, that I have to defer to Adriana Trigiani’s comment that it is “the perfect modern love story.” These characters will find a place in your soul. It will take me at least a week to recover and pick up another novel. Or maybe I'll just re-read it.
Kate Griffin really puts the “urban” into urban fantasy magic. I just finished the second Matthew Swift book, The Midnight Mayor. The experience was immersive and emotionally gripping despite the narrator being a bit more than human—somehow he's even more human because of that. And, wow, her monsters are terrifying.
Janet WebbSusan Mallery’s Three Sisters (a Blackberry Island novel), was such a pleasure to read. It started out a tad unfortunately (a bride abandoned at the altar) but it soon switched into a voyage of personal discovery for three women – Andi Gordon, the abandoned bride and pediatrician, artist Boston King, and Deanna Phillips, a “perfect” wife and mother whose life disintegrates before our eyes.
The women all live in Queen Anne houses on Blackberry Island, in the Pacific NW – Andi buys the ugly duckling house in the middle, in desperate need of renovation and repair and yes, it’s a metaphor for her life. She decides to set up a pediatric practice on the ground floor and live above the shop.
The reader gets to know Boston and Deanna’s husbands and Wade, Andi’s contractor and new love. What I liked about Three Sisters is that each woman has reached a crisis point in her life: it takes internal strength to face up to problems but, as the phrase goes, it takes a village (or in this case, a sisterhood) to risk reaching for something more, even if the prize is not foreordained. With or without the men in their lives, these “Three Sisters” of the heart all arrive at a satisfying, hard-fought place by the time the last page is read.
