I had so much time on my hands in April. I helped children with schoolwork, worked on house projects and also spent a lot of time doing my favorite thing – reading. Here is what I read in April:
Kristina Kuzmic is an Internet sensation, known for her funny and sarcastic videos that give mothers and parents important lessons in being a good parent. She shares honestly from her own experiences in the videos and now shares more in-depth about her own journey in Hold On, But Don’t Hold Still. She was a struggling single mother of two after a divorce and has dealt with anxiety and feelings of not being good enough. However, she eventually finds ways to bring herself back up to the surface and believe in her worth as a person and her ability to be the best parent for her children.
Peggy and her mother, Thelma, have just about one thing in common – the ability to be obsessed with something. For Peggy, it’s horses. For Thelma, it’s the Baltimore Orioles. In almost every other area, mother and daughter clash. In a series of stories about her childhood and early adult years, Peggy shows hos Thelma’s strong will molded their family. About My Mother is a book full of family, mother and daughter relationships, horses, baseball and love.
When Life Gives You Pears is the story of how Jeannie Gaffigan found out about having a brain tumor, faced surgery and had a long road to recovery. As a mom of five children and wife to a comedian, she had been the glue holding the family schedule together. During her ordeal, she realizes some key life lesson about motherhood, faith and love. She is candid about her fears and struggles, hoping to help anyone else who might face similar circumstances. The lessons she learned are lessons we can all learn.
When she was just two years old, Greta was sitting on a bench next to her grandmother in New York City when a brick fell off a building and hit her head. Despite getting quick medical attention, the damage was too severe and Greta passed away. Her parents donated some of her organs, but had to leave the hospital without their daughter in their arms. Greta’s father, Jayson Greene, shares his and his wife’s path of grief in Once More We Saw Stars.
Don’t Go by Lisa Scottoline
During his deployment to Afghanistan, Dr. Mike Scanlon receives the worst news he can imagine. His wife died in a household accident – cutting herself with a knife and bleeding to death because she passed out and couldn’t get help. He is given enough time to head home and bury her and arrange for someone to watch their baby girl, who was just a newborn when he left. His wife’s sister and her husband agree to watch the baby. However, as Mike digs deeper into his wife’s belongings, he starts to uncover things he didn’t know about her in Don’t Go.
Hannah Martin has not felt at home in her adult life anywhere. She’s tried a new city every couple months and finally decides to head back to L.A., where she grew up and spent the last two years of high school living with her best friend. Her parent and little sister had moved to London for a dance opportunity. As she is welcomed back home by her best friend Gabby, she runs into her first love, Ethan. That night her life takes two paths – one where she stays at the party with Ethan and the other where she leaves with Gabby in Maybe In Another Life.
On the day Laurel planned to escape from her family to spend time with the boy she loved, making plans to run away to acting school, she witnesses a crime. It ends up being a family secret that she keeps until her mother is getting close to the end of her life. Realizing she doesn’t know her mother’s past much at all, she decides to see what she can find out about why the crime was committed. Digging into her mother’s past uncovers far more than she ever thought she’d find in The Secret Keeper.
Winston Churchill is a fascinating character. As England’s leader during one of the darkest times in its history, he managed to evoke a sense of meaning and courage in his people. The Splendid and The Vile takes a close look at Churchill’s first year in power, which included the Blitz of London, fearing a land attack by Germany and trying to get America to help their war effort. Personal life didn’t stop because of the war and Churchill’s son faced divorce and one of his daughters fell in love. Each and every day was full.
Summer Island: When Ruby’s mother left the summer she turned 16, she only saw one side of the story and that left her hating her mother, Nora. As she grew up, her mother found a career as an advice columnist – famous and rich – but no one that Ruby wanted to know. Then, after Nora’s past starts to get exposed, she gets in car accident and Ruby is the only one available to take care of her on Summer Island. Stuck together, the truth of the past comes flooding into Ruby’s life, changing her perspective of the past and her future path.
Winter Garden: Nina and Meredith’s mother has been cold to them their whole lives. Their father loved them tremendously, but when he passes away, there is no one there to connect them to their mother. However, he made them promise to hear out a fairy tale she always tells and in doing so they find out their mother’s true past. They find out why she spends so much time out in her Winter Garden.
Virginia Hall is a woman more people should know about. She was an American who not only helped Britain, but also America, as a spy during WWII. She helped the French Resistance while working for Britain and then helped find information in Germany while working for the U.S. Then, she went on to become one of the first women officers in the CIA. Her contribution to the war effort and America’s intelligence community is profound. She did all this with a prosthetic leg, too. Her story is told in A Woman of No Importance.
The Manhattan Project is a collection of documents that tell the story about how the U.S. created the atomic bomb. It compiles letters, articles, government files and selections from books to create a comprehensive look at this time in history. While it was a little bit on the scholarly side, the parts talking about the people involved were interesting.
Mirror for the Soul is a Christian look at the Enneagram. I’ve read several books on the Enneagram now and this book would be a good place for someone just learning about it. It gives a great overview, starting with the triads and then moving to each Enneagram. There are questions and meditations at the end of each chapter, too.
Do you feel like your life is too fast-paced? In Get Your Life Back, Jon Eldredge proposes that people should take pauses during their day to reconnect to God. He even created an app called the One Minute Pause to help people take just a minute when they move from one task to another to take time to pray. The book examines why people need to take breaks and just enjoy life – for our souls.
If married, the household should be run as a team without one person shouldering more than the other. Each person’s time is worth the same and even if one works and the other doesn’t, it doesn’t mean one has more time than the other. Fair Play takes this idea and gives couples a tangible way to divide up household tasks so that each feels he or she is taking on an equitable load. There is even a card deck to go along with the book to actually divide up the cards. I thought it was a great way to broach the topic and the author even includes self-care and time for each person’s life passion as non-negotiable tasks.
Citizen Survivor Tales is a compilations of interviews by Maryanne Coleman seeing how people are surviving after Great Britain loses WW2. There is no occupation, but it seems the government now in control favors the Germans. Each chapter focuses on a character who really comes to life quickly. However, the context of the end of the war with no occupation is not told at the beginning of the book well. The book could use an author’s introduction telling the context of the world in which the stories are told.
I started listening to Almost Moon, but decided to not finish it. It was a bit too creepy for my tastes. It’s about a woman who kills her mother and confesses to thinking about hacking her to pieces as a young girl. Too graphic for me.
What did you read in April? Did you read more during social distancing? Share in the comments! I’m always looking for more good book recommendations!