May Book Report

I've been trying to get some of 'my own' books read which these two are.
Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley. Two of six friends, who all moved to NYC together, are murdered. The others become suspects.

The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand is another in her Nantucket series. The lives of four couples, all close friends, are examined when one of the couples dies in a boating accident.

We Never Asked For Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. What she did with flowers in The Language of Flowers, she does here with birds/feathers. Again her protagonists are the marginalized, this time undocumented families from Mexico. An excellent book and my favorite read this month.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. I have adored Dillard's writing since her first book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, but this book is more about people and less about nature, so I didn't like it as well. Still worth reading, especially for the lyrical descriptions of Cape Cod and Provincetown.

Pekoe Most Poison by Laura Childs is #18 in A Tea Shop Mystery series. I enjoy reading about the teas, relationships and murders in this series and think this is one of the best.

The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson by Nancy Wilson. The story of an escaped slave living in Texas after the Civil War. Very interesting and well written, and, of course, at times hard to read.

The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline. Fired from her job, NYC woman decides to move to Maine to be with a man she met online. Of course it doesn't work out, but she stays in Maine and begins figuring out her life when she starts a cooking class to teach cooking as her Italian grandmother taught her. My second favorite book this month.

The Blue Last by Martha Grimes. In need of a new author, I Googled 'authors like P.D. James, Deborah Crombie, Ruth Rendell', etc. and came up with the name Martha Grimes. I decided to give her a try and liked this first book, one of her series with Richard Jury as the English detective and his friend, the intrepid Melrose Plant. I'm going to enjoy reading my way through this series.

Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes is one of her stand alone novels and I can tell I'm going to enjoy reading these, too. This one is told by a 12-year-old girl trying to solve a 40-year-old mystery about the death of another 12-year-old girl. Excellent writing of feelings, thoughts, etc. of a coming of age young woman.