June 6, 2013

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Davina & Paul Witts - Founders

Each month we give away books to members to read and review (or discuss). Members who choose to take part tend to receive a free book about every three months. Here are their opinions on three recently published books:

 

Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: 05/21/2013
Novels, 352 pages

Number of reader reviews: 65
Readers' consensus:


BookBrowse Members Say
"Max is a 'perfect' young man. His grades are great, the girls love him, he's captain of the football team, and he doesn't give his parents trouble. There is one great family secret, however. Max is intersex. This is a wonderful book, well-written and a page-turner at the same time." - Bonnie B. (Port St. Lucie, FL)

"Golden Boy is one of the best novels I've read in years. It provides a heart-wrenching view at the growing pains faced by an intersex teen. I highly recommend it." - Rebecca K. (Illinois)

I read first-time author Abigail Tarttelin's Golden Boy in a little over a day and am still (nearly a week later) thinking about how the lives of the characters are going on...Read it as soon as humanly possible; it will haunt you in the nicest way imaginable." - Sue H. (Wooster, OH)

"I have worked with teenagers and the issues and thought processes ring true. I highly recommend this book to parents and even young adults." - Linda W. (Summit, NJ)

"Golden Boy is one of the best novels I've read in years. When I read the plot summary I immediately thought of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, but I discovered a much more intimate story told through the voices and perspective of the main characters." - John W. (Saint Louis, MO)

"This would make an excellent book club discussion, bearing in mind the suitability of its sensitive nature. As a nurse and a mother, I say kudos to Abigail Tarttelin!" - Patricia S. (New Canaan, CT)

These are 6 of the 65 member reviews of this book
Read all the Reviews

Buy at Amazon 

 

Below is part of BookBrowse's review of TransAtlantic. Read the review in full here


Publisher: Random House
ISBN 9781400069590

BookBrowse Rating:
Critics' Consensus:


Review:
It might be tempting to interpret Colum McCann's brilliant novel, TransAtlantic, as a literary exercise in pointillism. After all, he presents us with a series of "dots" which slowly click into place and paint, when we take a step back, one breathtaking picture. But McCann, the winner of the National Book Award for his previous book, Let the Great World Spin, goes one step beyond. The "dots" here are not fuzzy and loosely pixelated. Instead each literary vignette is so precisely painted that there's beauty both when the camera zooms in and out.

Three historical events, transatlantic crossings, create the scaffolding for the story: Frederick Douglass visits Ireland in 1845, at the start of the potato famine and is impressed by Irish emancipator Daniel O'Connell; in 1919, aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown make history as they try to be the first people to fly nonstop across the Atlantic; and in 1998, Sen. George Mitchell departs for Ireland for one last attempt at peace talks, what would eventually come to be known as the Good Friday agreement.

Wrapped around these historical events are the stories of four generations of women: Lily Duggan, an Irish Catholic woman who is enslaved and shipped to America where she later settles as a free woman; her daughter, Lottie Ehlrich; Lottie's daughter, Emily and finally Emily's daughter, Hannah Carson. Each of these women will have "crossings" of their own (transatlantic or not) and move back and forth between Ireland and North America always redefining the concept of home.

TransAtlantic starts with the story of Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown attempting their first flight across the Atlantic, from Newfoundland. At this time, Lottie Ehlrich and her daughter, Emily, are a mother-daughter journalist-photographer team set up in the same hotel and intent on capturing every detail of the historic flight. Shortly before Brown leaves, Emily hands him a letter to mail once he lands in Ireland. It is addressed: "The Jennings Family, 9 Brown Street, Cork." That letter never quite reaches its intended destination but is instead passed on from daughter to daughter through the generations, unopened. "I admit that I have sat at the kitchen table, looking out over the lough, and have rubbed the edges on the envelope and held it in the palm of my hand to try to divine what the contents might be, but, just as we are knotted by wars, so mystery holds us together," says the last daughter, Hannah. This letter, a mysterious family heirloom that holds so much intrigue and value for successive generations, also serves to bind the story together... Continued

Reviewed by Poornima Apte

Above is part of BookBrowse's review of TransAtlantic. Read the review in full here

At BookBrowse, we don't just review books, we go 'beyond the book' to explore interesting aspects relating to the story.

BookBrowse Rating:
Critics' Consensus:  

 

In the fictional North Carolina mountain town at the heart of Gail Godwin's Flora, a 1945 polio scare takes the life of one child and paralyzes another while the community scrambles to contain the disease. These tragedies, which form part of the cultural fabric of Godwin's fictional world, echo real events that took place in rural North Carolina in the 1940s, when the polio epidemic was peaking there. In 1944, the mountain town of Hickory, NC, experienced a devastating polio outbreak. When local facilities were not adequate to house the stricken, most of whom were children, residents mobilized. They repurposed a rustic health camp that had been built the year before for children recovering from tuberculosis, and built a new hospital on the spot. Tent wards were erected, and the one stone building on the site held the worst cases. Water, electrical, and phone service were brought in, and beds and equipment collected. Medical staff, in short supply during wartime, came from all over the country to help. The hospital opened to patients just 54 hours after the outbreak began, a feat which went down in history as the "Miracle of Hickory."

People who grew up in the environs of Hickory remember being kept indoors in summer when the polio epidemic was raging, as Helen is in Flora. Children were especially susceptible to infection, although polio can strike at any age. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most high-profile American survivors of polio, was 39 when he was infected.

Poliomyeletis is an ancient disease, but its increasing prevalence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is thought to be related to improvements in water supply and sanitation. The virus is transmitted through fecal-oral routes, primarily in contaminated water, and before sanitation the germ was everywhere. Constant exposure from infancy created a certain degree of immunity, and most cases of illness occurred in babies and toddlers. Under cleaner conditions, children didn't encounter polio until they were older and more at risk for developing a more severe form of the disease... Continued

Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder

Above is part of the backstory to Flora by Gail Godwin. Read the review & backstory in full here