November seemed to have come in like a lion and out like a lamb. The weather got colder but we had many long nights filled with Nutcracker practice. I still got to read some really good books, though. Here are the books I read in November:
In One Plus One, Jess is barely hanging on. Day by day, she tries to make enough money to survive and provide for her two children. Well, one child is hers and the other is her husband’s from another woman. Her husband left two years ago to move in with his mother to help deal with his depression. She works two jobs because he offers her no financial support. Her stepson is getting beaten up by neighbors. Her daughter is offered a partial scholarship to a private school for her math abilities, but she can’t afford the rest of the tuition. Then, she catches a break – a man leaves money in a taxi and her daughter can compete in a Math Olympiad. The money could cover the down payment until the competition award comes through and she plans to pay it back. Then, her car breaks down on the way to the competition and the man who offers them a ride is the one whose money she “borrowed.”
I don’t often read books in the thriller genre, but when I heard about The Eyes of Darkness, I quickly added it to my to-read list. It got a lot of media attention in the spring of 2020 due to its “prediction” of coronavirus. It actually mentions a different virus, but it is called WUHAN-400. However, the connection to the world today was enough to generate a lot of buzz about this book. It took several months before it was my turn on the holds list with my local library.
In The Language of Sycamores, Karen has been going through the motions for years. She is climbing the ladder at her tech firm while her husband is an airline pilot. They rarely see each other and don’t connect much when they do. They’ve spent the last eight years avoiding talking about a miscarriage and Karen’s cancer scare. However, when Karen gets fired from her job and her sister calls to invite her to the family farm for a weekend, she takes a chance to do something differently not knowing that she is sending her life in an entirely different direction.
Three women from very different backgrounds find their paths cross in The Exiles. Evangeline is a preacher’s daughter and finds herself caving under the wooing of the son of the household where she is a governess. He gives her a ring, but is accused of stealing it and finds herself condemned to transport to Australia. On the boat, she meets Hazel, the emotionally neglected daughter of a midwife. While they are on board the ship, a young girl named Mathinna is taken from her aboriginal village to be the experiment of the governor and his wife to see if she can be cultured. Hazel works at their house for the prison work program.
Paranoia descended on Susannah like a sudden rainstorm. One day she was fine and the next she had uncontrollable thoughts and urges. The paranoia led her down a path that would take years of fighting to recover from. She started having seizures, moving like a zombie and imagining things that weren’t there. As her friends and family saw her becoming a person they did not know, they sought the help of doctor after doctor. It wasn’t until a brain biopsy was ordered that her disease was diagnosed – Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis. She tells her story in Brain on Fire.
How did the Nazis come to power in Germany and why didn’t the German people do more to stop them? Those are the questions that people have been trying to answer for decades. Defying Hitler is a personal memoir by one man who was an eyewitness to the changes that happened in Germany during those years. As a boy, he read the news and numbers coming out about The Great War. He was a teen as the country tried to recover. As a young man, he saw the Nazis come to power and sought to find a way to avoid getting caught up in their way of thinking. He shares his story in Defying Hitler.
In Finding Lady Enderly, Raina sees no hope for her future. She sells rags and the man she loved was lost at sea. When she tries on a fancy dress for an hour to walk up and down the street, she is seen by a man who offers her the chance of a liftetime – leave with him and stand in for a lady who is sick. She decides to take the chance but on the station to leave with the stranger, she sees the cap of the man she loves. Could he actually still be alive?
One man’s suicide has a ripple affect on almost a dozen people ten years later. There’s the young man who tried to save him but couldn’t who grew up to be a police officer. There’s the teenager who saw the article and tried to attempt the same but was saved. There’s the witness to that event. Then, there’s the bank robber who is just a hopeless single mother, but has to communicate with that grown police officer and his father. Anxious People revolves around the people who were at an apartment showing when the bank robber was trying to escape and found his way to that apartment, technically creating a hostage situation.
I almost didn’t finish Radio Girls. It began well enough but the main character grew unrealistically and the plot focused on too many things. I wanted to be interested as it was set during the first years of the BBC and is a post-WW1 historical fiction book. I lost interest and skimmed through the final chapters just so I could know how it ended. (I started with the audiobook and then had the paperback on hand.)
What books did you read in November? I’d love to add them to my to-read list! Share in the comments!
