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.

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.

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! 

Pronto.

GoodReads Synopsis-- The feds want Miami bookmaker Harry Arno to squeal on his wiseguy boss. So they're putting word out on the street that Arno's skimming profits from "Jimmy Cap" Capotorto—which he is, but everybody does it. He was planning to retire to Italy someday anyway, so Harry figures now's a good time to get lost. U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens knows Harry's tricky—the bookie ditched him once in an airport while in the marshal's custody—but not careful. So Raylan's determined to find the fugitive's Italian hideaway before a cold-blooded Sicilian "Zip" does and whacks Arno for fun. After all, it's a "pride thing"...and it might even put Raylan in good stead with Harry's sexy ex-stripper girlfriend Joyce.

My Thoughts-- My love for Justified and Raylan Givens led me to pick this up even though Raylan isn't the main character in this story.  I definitely saw some glimpses of the Raylan I know, but otherwise it was quite different.  Elmore Leonard sure knows how to tell a story though.  For a cat-and-mouse story with such high stakes, there's a remarkable amount of humor and wit.  I definitely need to pick up more from Leonard.  Four stars.