Bucket List Book Club: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Buddy Read!
Get ready for the first book for the Bucket List Book Club!! I chose A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
If you want to join in on this book, we will be reading it from January 31 to March 1, with a discussion over on my Instagram account the following week. If you’ve already read it, come join us in the discussion! If you plan to read it in the future, the discussion will stay up on my Instagram page, so jump in at any time.
You can also follow the hashtag #bucketlistbookclub on Instagram to see other people’s posts as we get started.
Have you read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I’ll post my review here when I’m finished, and you can also use the comments section on that post, and this one, to discuss it.
Happy reading, and may our unread piles get a little bit smaller in 2018!
Review: One True Loves
I am finishing up dinner with my family and my fiancé when my husband calls.
When I discovered Taylor Jenkins Reid in June, after reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (My review of that book HERE), I knew she would be one of my favorite authors. I regretted not having read her books sooner, but was also excited because I knew there were four other books I could look forward to reading. One True Loves
Emma Blair, a 20-something free spirit, marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. On their first anniversary, Jesse goes missing in a helicopter crash while on a filming job and is presumed dead. Devastated, Emma moves back home, takes over the family bookstore, and finds love in another high school friend, Sam. Now in her 30s, Emma is stable, in love again, and has put aside her previous free-spirited life. Until Jesse is found, alive, and determined to get Emma back after surviving for many years with the thought of returning to her. Emma must decide which of her true loves is the one for her, and which version of herself is the true one.
This is women’s fictions/chick lit/popular fiction/whatever you want to call it done so, so right. If you just read the back of the book, you might be under the impression that this is a light, fluffy read. It is most definitely not. Yes, it’s a love story, but it’s really about how people change over the years, and grow up . . . and sometimes apart. Reid isn’t afraid of putting her characters through the ringer, and in doing so she acknowledges how painful life can be sometimes, but also how beautiful it can become after difficult decisions.
The characters felt like real people to me, and I was nervous for them. I loved how they all actually talked to each other too. In so many books, no one tells anyone else how they’re feeling, they just think it so that only the reader knows. These characters are straightforward with each other, and there’s real emotion there because of it. It felt like watching a real life play out. Kind of like those episodes of Parenthood that were so real I was certain that I was spying on a real family.
If you enjoy women’s fiction with a lot of heart that makes you think Taylor Jenkins Reid is THE author to read. One True Loves
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Review: Snow & Rose
Thank you so much to Random House Children’s Books and Allison Judd for the free copy of this book! All opinions are my own!
Snow and Rose didn’t know they were living in a fairy tale. People never do . . .
The last few years have been great for fractured fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. I am a huge fan of all of those, and actual fairy tales. Emily Winfield Martin’s Snow & Rose
In the original tale, Snow White and Rose Red (not the Snow White of dwarf and evil queen fame) are sisters who live with their widowed mother in the woods. One winter night they find a bear at their door. They take care of it all winter, and when it disappears in the summer, the sisters run away to look for it. There is an encounter with an evil dwarf, and the bear ends up killing up. In doing so, the spell put on him is broken and he is revealed to a prince. Snow White marries the prince and Rose Red marries his brother.
This retelling is a bit different.
The sisters are still there, and they live with their mother deep in the woods, but they are not at all convinced that their father has died. When the bear they have been taking care of disappears, the two sisters go after him to try and keep the woodsman from killing him. With a healthy dose of magic, enchantment, and help from a friend, Snow White and Rose Red discover who the bear really is, and their lives are changed forever.
I loved this book, and it would make a beautiful gift for someone who loves fairy tales or magical stories. Aside from the story itself being wonderful, the book is absolutely beautiful. Winfield Martin’s illustrations are gorgeous and the cover would look amazing on any bookshelf. While this is a children’s book (probably age 9 or 10 and up), I enjoyed it very much. It’s a beautiful fairy tale to disappear into for a few hours. I love how the author re-imagined this story and made it more modern, with strength and family as a prize, not a princely husband.
Snow & Rose
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
[Top]Review: Mr. Dickens and His Carol
“Bah! Humbug!”
I have been dying to get my hands on this book for what seems like forever. It’s been much hyped in the bookstagram community, so when my library hold finally came in I rushed right over to get it. I enjoy reading holiday books, but I don’t generally go for the plucky, romantic books. (But you can bet I’ll be watching Netflix’s A Christmas Prince real soon.) Samantha Silva’s Mr. Dickens and His Carol
. . . for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.
Mr. Dickens and His Carol, part fact part Silva’s imagination, begins with Charles Dickens himself in a holiday slump. He is sick of Christmas excess, sick of his family and friends always needing money from him, and sick of his publishers hounding him to write a Christmas book he doesn’t want to write. (And giving him only two weeks in which to write that book.) He isolates himself in a hotel room to write the book, for which he has little inspiration, and spends his nights taking long walks around London to try and clear his mind. On one of his walks, he meets a mysterious woman named Eleanor Lovejoy who challenges Dickens to re-think what he believes about Christmas, family, friendship, and love. Their friendship sparks a Christmas story that changes everything.
This is a feel-good story that isn’t cheesy. Dickens wants to believe in the spirit of Christmas again but is unable to because of all the pressure placed on him by everyone around him. That’s something we can all relate to on different levels. In her Author’s Note, Silva includes which parts are completely true, including the situation (A Christmas Carol
This a beautiful story of love and family, of the Christmas spirit, and of a man who needed to find himself to break a serious case of writer’s block. I want to know more about Dickens and the history of A Christmas Carol now, and I’m already looking up more books about the subject! (There’s also a great twist that completely surprised me because I was so caught up in the story and how good the writing was. I didn’t see it coming at all!) Mr. Dickens and His Carol
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
[Top]Review: The Deal of a Lifetime
I was born here but I’ve never gotten used to it; Helsingborg and I will never find peace. Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us.
Fredrik Backman is one of my favorite writers, and a true wordsmith. I fell in love with A Man Called Ove
The story begins with a father writing a letter to his son on Christmas Eve. Instead of a typical feel-good letter, the father is writing to tell his son that he has taken a life. Throughout the course of the novella, we meet a 5-year-old girl with cancer, a mysterious woman who drifts in and out of the picture, and find out why the narrator feels he failed as a parent. When he is given the opportunity to commit a selfless act and save the little girl, he has to see what his life was really worth before he can make the deal. Thus, he writes a letter to his son, examining his entire life.
This book yanked at my heartstrings right from the introduction. I was hooked before the book had even begun. Backman gets the feelings of a man trying to do right, and the strange feelings that accompany returning to a hometown that you might never have felt at home in, exactly right. This novella is only 65 pages long, but I smiled, I laughed, and I definitely cried.
The book is so short, and I don’t want to give the entire plot away, so just know that it is the story of a man desperate to fix things in the past, and the deal a parent is willing to make to achieve those changes. The Deal of a Lifetime
Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.
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