Welcome Friends!

Hello friends, both old and new, and welcome to my newest little spot on the interweb.  After blogging for years about my life and pretty much anything and everything, I got a little burned out and took an extended break.  I miss it terribly but don't quite feel the pull to write again like I used to.  I did, however, want to continue writing about one of my favorite things-- books!  Thus, Bookworm Katie was born.  I've spent a while trying to import book reviews from my previous blog and update this space with recent reads (which is why it will look like this little baby is much older than it really is). You'll find very little, if anything, other than books here.  Feel free to peruse some of my favorite (and not so favorite) reads.  And I'm always looking for recommendations, so please share with me some of your favorites!  :)

Dad is Fat.

GoodReads Synopsis: In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children—everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills (“they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news”), to the eating habits of four year olds (“there is no difference between a four year old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor”). Reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood,Dad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.

My Thoughts: This book was a hilarious peek into parenthood.  Jim Gaffigan is, of course, one of the funniest comics around, and his book was no different.  I definitely recommend it for anyone contemplating parenthood or in the midst of parenthood.  A laugh out loud read.  Five stars.

Gilead.

GoodReads Synopsis: In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

My Thoughts:  This is my second Pulitzer Prize winning book in the last two years, and each of them have left me wondering who in the world gives out this award.  It only took me 150 pages into this 247 page book to find a plot.  I know it was supposed to be a journal from a dying father to his son, so it was going to ramble and not follow a typical storyline.  However, it was incredibly non-linear at many times jumping from scene to scene, character to character then back again that frustrated me immensely.  What saved this book from one star was a lot of the wisdom that was present in Reverend Ames's musings and the story with John Ames Boughton that finally went somewhere in the last twenty pages.  Two stars.

Vaclav and Lena.

GoodReads Synopsis: Vaclav and Lena, both the children of Russian émigrés, are at the same time from radically different worlds. While Vaclav's burgeoning love of performing magic is indulged by hard-working parents pursuing the American dream, troubled orphan Lena is caught in a domestic situation no child should suffer through. Taken in as one of her own by Vaclav's big-hearted mother, Lena might finally be able to blossom; in the naive young magician's eyes, she is destined to be his "faithful assistant"...but after a horrific discovery, the two are ripped apart without even a goodbye. Years later, they meet again. But will their past once more conspire to keep them apart? 

My Thoughts: I listened to most of this on audiobook, and I think the author was helped greatly by the narrator.  I loved the first half of this book when the kids are young-- it was very sweet, and I could easily picture their situations.  After the time jump, however, things went downhill even though I really wanted to love the rest of it.  I enjoyed Vaclav's separate story, but Lena's was nothing more than a rambling introspection that occasionally came back around to a plot.  Then when they were finally back together again, everything seemed rushed and outlandish.  I get that Lena was a messed up girl, but she (perhaps unintentionally) manipulated him from beginning to end.  And the final scene was just ridiculous.  This book was less than 300 pages.  Even only 50 more pages would have fleshed out the characters and plot enough to make it worth reading.  Alas...  Three stars (the first half gets four, and the second half gets 1, so I split the middle and rounded up).

The Invention of Wings.

GoodReads Synopsis: Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.

As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.

Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.

This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.

My Thoughts:  This is my second book in the last month that is a fictionalized account of a real person.  I started this book for two reasons: 1) I needed an Oprah's Book Club book for my 2015 book challenge, and 2) it was the same audio narrator as in Z, whom I adored.  Once again, Jenna Lamia was a fantastic narrator as Sarah Grimke.  In this audiobook, she was paired with the wondeful Adepero Oduye, who read the voice of Handful.  The two of them together made this audiobook come alive.  

The story itself was amazing.  It had characters that immediately made me feel invested into their lives, an unusual ability to make me love characters that weren't always very sympathetic, and a saga-esque story that carried on for decades (yet masterfully fit within the confines of a 350 page book).  It's impossible to recount all the feelings that coursed through me as I listened to and read this story.  Read it, and you'll find out for yourself.  Five stars.

Eve's Daughters.

GoodReads Synopsis: Yearning for love and dignity, four generations of women must come to grips with the choices they've made--and those their mothers made before them. But breaking the cycle that has ensnared them over the decades will prove more difficult than they had ever imagined... Eighty-year-old Emma Bauer has carefully guarded a dark secret for more than fifty years. But when she sees her granddaughter's marriage beginning to unravel, Emma realizes that her lies about her own marriage have poisoned those she loves most. Can she help her granddaughter break free of a legacy of wrong choices? Or will she take her secret--and her broken heart--to the grave?

With honesty and compassion, author Lynn Austin weaves a compelling story of four unforgettable women--their struggles, their crises of faith, their triumphs.

My Thoughts: I first read this book in the ninth grade and loved it.  I read it again a few years later and again loved it.  So when I started my 2015 book challenge, I knew this would be the one for "A book from my childhood."  Lynn Austin is a wonderful storyteller, and this book did not disappoint me after all these years.  Eve's Daughters is a beautiful story of four generations of women and how we are shaped by the lives of those that come before us.  Five stars.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

GoodReads Synopsis:  When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

My Thoughts:  Despite already knowing about Zelda and Scott's life, I was absolutely riveted to this story.  I listened to this on audiobook, and it was one of the absolute best I've ever listened to.  The story was beautifully written by Therese Fowler and and magnificently read by Jenna Lamia.  Z is definitely a novel, but yet also very well researched and based on actual events.  I absolutely fell in love with the Zelda that Fowler and Lamia created and felt immense sadness for her as she struggled through adulthood.  Five stars!