Planes, Trains, and Running Shoes

 I definitely think I've come out of my reading rut after heading the library the last few weeks armed with my Goodreads To Read list (which I never seem to read anything off of) and heading home with giant stacks of books! I've read more books this month than I think I have all year!

Here's a look at everything I've read this month:


"I'll See You in Paris" by Michelle Gable - This book was wildly disappointing. The premise sounded interesting - a young woman finds herself in a small English hamlet to uncover the true story of the Duchess of Marlborough while in search of answers about who her father is. I was 190 pages into the book and had almost given up on trying to figure out why the book had "Paris" in the title when the story finally ended up in Paris. Maybe I just felt deceived by the title but I found the ending to be predictable and the whole book to be underwhelming. I gave it two stars.

"Etta and Otto and Russell and James" by Emma Hooper - I didn't like this book. Told from different perspectives - an 83-year-old woman who decides to walk across Canada, her husband she leaves behind, and their childhood friend, Russell - the book was hard to read and didn't use quotation marks. I actually liked the premise of the story, especially Emma's and Otto's backstories, but I didn't like the way the book was written.

"Children of the Jacaranda Tree" by Sahar Delijani - I love reading books about the Middle East and this book didn't disappoint. Sahar Delijani was, herself, born in a women's prison in Iran during the war with Iraq and this book starts in a prison in Iran where a woman is giving birth to her daughter, Neda. The subsequent chapters are all told from different perspectives of children who grew up during the war and how it impacted their lives just as the same political unrest begins to impact their lives.

"Here Comes the Sun" by Nicole Dennis-Benn - I have never read a book where I hated all of the characters so much. The book tells the story of Margo, taught to sell sex in exchange for money to support her family at a young age, who is determined to keep her sister from the same fate. The main characters, Margo, her sister, Thandi, and her mother are all equally unlikeable and while I expected some kind of story of self-revelation, I really hated the plot of this book and all of the characters in it. It was disturbing and the characters were horrid toward one another. I had been looking forward to this book for awhile and was disappointed.

"The Truth According to Us" by Annie Barrows - This book started off slowly but once it picked up, I couldn't put it down and I loved the way it ended. Written by one of the authors of "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," one of my all-time favorite books, this story follows Layla beck, daughter of a US Senator and recently disowned by her father after turning down an engagement in Macedonia, West Virginia on the Federal Writer's Project working for her money for the first time. She expects a dreary, dull town where she'll die of boredom but ends up entangling herself in the storied history of the Romeyn family who she boards with. At the same time, 12-year-old Willa Romeyn decides to do some sleuthing of her own to learn a little bit more about her father's frequent business trips. I loved this book and absolutely recommend it!

"The Dust that Falls from Dreams" by Louis de Bernieres - I read this book so that you don't have to. Over 500 pages of what felt like a WWI era "War and Peace," this book dragged on and on and on. At times, I loved the story, and at other times, I was just skimming the page waiting to get to something better. It reminded me a lot of "War and Peace," which I enjoyed, as I did with this book, but I definitely would have preferred someone to sum it up for me!