Karen: After reading
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof about the oppression of women and girls throughout the world, I find myself drawn to lighter books on women finding their strength and often - opening businesses. I just finished
Semi-Sweet by Roisin Meaney about a woman who's boyfriend leaves her just as she's about to open her new shop, Cupcakes on the Corner. While she's piecing her life back together, the world around her seems to be falling apart. Like it's title and like life itself, it is not all sweetness and roses. Before that, it was
South of Superior, a debut novel by Ellen Airgood about a young woman who moves 500 miles from home to a downtrodden community to take care of two aging women. While there she learns more about family, love and little it sometimes takes to make someone happy. And she ends up opening their long-closed hotel.
And probably my favorite was
Joy for Beginners, by Erica Bauermeister which like
South of Superior comes out in June. Cancer survivor Kate challenges each of her friends to do something that scares them - and she will decide what that is. This is a novel (like her previous work,
The School of Essential Ingredients) which tells each character's story in such a loving and delightful way that you truly wish they were real and your best friends.
Alexa: Watch Me by Lauren Barnholdt.
We've all wanted to be a cast member on The Real World at some point right? Ally thinks she has nothing to hide in her life, she's starting college, her boyfriend is leaving to go to Miami for college to play basketball, and she needs something to do! Ally and her best friend, Grant decide to go try out to be on a reality show being held on campus for the incoming freshman of the college. Through the book it tells about her "friends," getting to know the cast members, and her issue's with the long distance relationship. As the book unfolds it shows just how Ally grows and steps outside of the box, this is a really good short novel. I'm on to the next Lauren Barnholdt novel, One Night.
Life among the poor immigrants or the wealthy families of New York, for those of us who have never lived there, might as well be on another planet. What I liked about this book was being taken to that other planet into those other lives. Based on the author's experiences as an illegal immigrant working as a babysitter (i.e. servant) for wealthy New York families, the book plunges us graphically into the poverty, fear, and underlying hope that keeps the workers going day after awful day. The heroine is a resilient 16-year-old from Trinidad who left the island to better her life. After her first job ends, she finds herself living with an immigrant family in an overcrowded tenement where she cares for the children, cooks, and cleans for her room and board--and subsidizes the family with her savings. How she finds and keeps another job with little support from her adopted family and in spite of her ambiguous position in her employer's household is a fascinating and frustrating story of survival.
