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The sweet life with a diabetic child
I’m always excited to see a main character in a book who lives with type 1 diabetes. “Let Me List the Ways,” a new young adult (YA) novel written by Sarah White, features a teenage girl with T1D. The book was released on August 7, 2018. Find out if Q also read it.
Read my full review of Let Me List the Ways on Diabetes Daily and purchase the book.
Disclosure: I received an Advance Reader’s Edition for review consideration. I was not paid for this review and all opinions are my own.
by Julia Alvarez (audiobook)
After Tyler’s father is injured in a tractor accident, his family is forced to hire migrant Mexican workers to help save their Vermont farm from foreclosure. Tyler isn’t sure what to make of these workers. Are they undocumented? And what about the three daughters, particularly Mari, the oldest, who is proud of her Mexican heritage but also increasingly connected her American life. Her family lives in constant fear of being discovered by the authorities and sent back to the poverty they left behind in Mexico. Can Tyler and Mari find a way to be friends despite their differences?
In a novel full of hope, but no easy answers, Julia Alvarez weaves a beautiful and timely story that will stay with readers long after they finish it.
I actually picked this up in the young adult section at my library because I saw Alvarez’s name on the audiobook jacket. I had just finished reading In the Time of Butterflies also from the author. This audiobook is read by two actors who give voice to Tyler and Mari (pronounced like Mary).
I appreciated the commentary on the life of the migrant worker and also the blurred lines when children of the immigrants are born in the US. Some of the families have citizenship and some do not. No matter your stance on immigration policy, this is a real issue of our times.
What I didn’t realize when I picked this title up is that it’s set in Vermont, a state I am familiar with. At one point in the book they discuss Italian immigrants to Vermont who came to work in the granite industry…this is my family’s story. (Though they migrated legally.)
In the story, the mother is separated from the father and her children. I thought for sure I knew what the title meant for the family, but I was glad that the title actually had a different meaning in the end.
Purchase Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez from my affiliate Amazon.
Review of In the Time of Butterflies, also by Julia Alvarez
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Links to bookstores are affiliate links and are provided so that you can find the books easily. I personally utilize the public library quite a bit, especially for audiobooks and fiction. Please read the disclosure statement regarding affiliate links. Book descriptions are taken directly from the book or from online sources.
by Kathryn Stockett (audiobook)
“Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women-mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends-view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.”
Since I rarely see movies in the theater I knew I had plenty of time to read The Help before seeing the movie. I have heard that the movie does the book justice (unlike some books turned movie). This is another book that was great on audiobook because each of the main characters is narrated by a different actress really bringing each to life.
Oh my gosh I just wanted to smack some of the white women in this book. I realize that they were products of their time, but beyond the racism many were just plain catty and elitist even against women of their own race and social standing. But don’t worry, the worst one gets her just desserts…literally. And you’ll just have to read the book to see what I mean by that.
Despite the conflict in the book, it really is an uplifting story of several strong female figures. The main character Skeeter comes of age, and the two maids find their voice in a world where they typically have no say.
Purchase The Help by Kathryn Stockett from my affiliate Amazon.
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by Ann Brashares (audiobook)
“In the town of Waterby on Fire Island, the rhythms and rituals of summer are sacrosanct: the ceremonial arrivals and departures by ferry; yacht club dinners with terrible food and breathtaking views; the virtual decree against shoes; and the generational parade of sandy, sun-bleached kids, running, swimming, squealing, and coming of age on the beach.
Set against this vivid backdrop, The Last Summer (of You and Me) is the enchanting, heartrending story of a beach-community friendship triangle among three young adults for whom summer and this place have meant everything. Sisters Riley and Alice, now in their twenties, have been returning to their parents modest beach house every summer for their entire lives. Petite, tenacious Riley is a tomboy and a lifeguard, always ready for a midnight swim, a gale-force sail, or a barefoot sprint down the beach. Beautiful Alice is lithe, gentle, a reader and a thinker, and worshipful of her older sister. And every summer growing up, in the big house that overshadowed their humble one, there was Paul, a friend as important to both girls as the place itself, who has now finally returned to the island after three years away. But his return marks a season of tremendous change, and when a simmering attraction, a serious illness, and a deep secret all collide, the three friends are launched into an unfamiliar adult world, a world from which their summer haven can no longer protect them.”
If you remember, I recently read My Name is Memory, also by Ann Brashares. I love, love, loved that book and can’t wait for the next book in the series. I had high hopes for The Last Summer (of You and Me).
The book has received a lot of great reviews, but I have to say I just didn’t like it as much as My Name is Memory. Maybe I had too high of hopes for it.
I didn’t feel like Brashares developed the characters fully or made me want to feel invested in them. It was as if she left out big chunks of background or inner monologue that would have let me know more about each of the three main characters and made me root for them. Perhaps it’s because the story was told in the third person, it’s almost as if she was skimming the surface.
If I had to sum up my reaction to the book, I would say that it left me unaffected.
I’m certainly not giving up on Brashares…yet.
Purchase The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares from my affiliate Amazon.
My Name is Memory review
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Links to bookstores are affiliate links and are provided so that you can find the books easily. I personally utilize the public library quite a bit, especially for audiobooks and fiction. Please read the disclosure statement regarding affiliate links. Book descriptions are taken directly from the book or from online sources.
by Julia Alvarez (audiobook)
“It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.” In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.”
As with several of the other books that I have listened to on audiobook, this is one that is fantastic to listen to. I am not a Spanish speaker and I would have surely mangled the names of the characters and places. A different woman narrates each character, bringing them to life.
Though the four main characters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and Dedé–are real, Julia Alvarez uses some facts from their lives as a framework for a story of what their lives might have been like growing up in the oppressed Dominican Republic and the events that lead up to the death of three of the four sisters.
Alvarez leads on us a journey beginning in the girls’ youth as they each leave home to go to parochial school. It is at this school where some of the sisters first become political through meeting a schoolmate who’s family is murdered by Trujillo’s men. They see another schoolmate become a victim of Trujillo when she is wisked away to be one of his kept women.
As the years pass, the girls each gain an education, fall in love, marry, and have children at the same time being spied upon by Trujillo’s men who lurk in their gardens. Though not all of the sisters make a conscious effort of dissension, they can’t help but be dragged in, forced to fight for the rights of their husbands and children.
This is an engaging tale of four women who helped with the revolution in the Dominican Republic.
Purchase In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez from my affiliate Amazon.
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Links to bookstores are affiliate links and are provided so that you can find the books easily. I personally utilize the public library quite a bit, especially for audiobooks and fiction. Please read the disclosure statement regarding affiliate links. Book descriptions are taken directly from the book or from online sources.
by Kim Edwards (audiobook)
About the Book“Kim Edwards’s stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that winter night long ago.
A family drama, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter explores every mother’s silent fear: What would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? It is also an astonishing tale of love and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache.”
I picked up this title as I was browsing the audiobooks at my local library. The story sounded familiar and I couldn’t quite place if I had read it or not. Turns out it was a Lifetime movie. But I decided to listen to it anyway.
During a snowstorm a doctor’s wife goes into labor. Not able to make it to the hospital, he takes her to the clinic where he sees patients at no charge each week. The doctor who is to deliver the baby gets stuck in the snow and he and the nurse Caroline deliver the baby, a healthy boy.
In this time before ultrasounds, little did the couple know that they were having twins. A second child, a girl, is delivered and he sees right away that the baby has the tell-tale signs of Down Syndrome. At that time, many children with this medical condition lived short lives, sometimes due to heart conditions. To protect his wife (and we will learn himself) he makes a quick decision to have Caroline take the baby to an institution.
Caroline cannot hand over the baby and instead takes her away, raising her as her own.
His decision and the lies that followed had implications that would shape each of their futures changing who they are or would be.
The audiobook is performed by Martha Plimpton. I have to say that she was hilarious in the TV series Raising Hope, so it was hard at times not to picture her as that character. But I found her performance to be spectacular!
Purchase The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards from my affiliate Amazon.
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Links to bookstores are affiliate links and are provided so that you can find the books easily. I personally utilize the public library quite a bit, especially for audiobooks and fiction. I received this title for review consideration. Please read the disclosure statement regarding affiliate links. Book descriptions are taken directly from the book or from online sources.
“When a child’s blood sugar is low it’s difficult for them to think. During a low blood sugar, the brain literally doesn’t have the fuel it needs to function properly.”
