Joyce’s Comments (group member since May 17, 2014)

Joyce’s comments from the Joyce's Reading Log group.

Night Road
Started: 04/14/2022
Finished:
Rating:

LoR April 2015 BoM Discussion

For eighteen years, Jude Farraday has put her children's needs above her own, and it shows—her twins, Mia and Zach, are bright and happy teenagers. When Lexi Baill moves into their small, close-knit community, no one is more welcoming than Jude. Lexi, a former foster child with a dark past, quickly becomes Mia's best friend. Then Zach falls in love with Lexi and the three become inseparable.

Jude does everything to keep her kids out of harm's way. But senior year of high school tests them all. It's a dangerous, explosive season of drinking, driving, parties, and kids who want to let loose. And then on a hot summer's night, one bad decision is made. In the blink of an eye, the Farraday family will be torn apart and Lexi will lose everything. In the years that follow, each must face the consequences of that single night and find a way to forget…or the courage to forgive.

Vivid, universal, and emotionally complex, Night Road raises profound questions about motherhood, identity, love, and forgiveness. It is a luminous, heartbreaking novel that captures both the exquisite pain of loss and the stunning power of hope. This is Kristin Hannah at her very best, telling an unforgettable story about the longing for family, the resilience of the human heart, and the courage it takes to forgive the people we love

The Garden of Evening Mists
Started: 04/07/2022
Finished:
Rating:

1001 FSB March 2022 Discussion

Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.” Then she can design a garden for herself.

As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?

Without You, There is No Us
Started: 07/18/2018
Finished: 04/14/2022
Rating: ★★★★

A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign

Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves—their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own—at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.

Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."

Started: 03/26/2022
Finished:
Rating:

There are two kinds of families: the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Walk has never left the coastal California town where he grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. Now, thirty years later, Vincent is being released.

Duchess is a thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Her mother, Star, grew up with Walk and Vincent. Walk is in overdrive trying to protect them, but Vincent and Star seem bent on sliding deeper into self-destruction. Star always burned bright, but recently that light has dimmed, leaving Duchess to parent not only her mother but her five-year-old brother. At school the other kids make fun of Duchess―her clothes are torn, her hair a mess. But let them throw their sticks, because she’ll throw stones. Rules are for other people. She’s just trying to survive and keep her family together.

A fortysomething-year-old sheriff and a thirteen-year-old girl may not seem to have a lot in common. But they both have come to expect that people will disappoint you, loved ones will leave you, and if you open your heart it will be broken. So when trouble arrives with Vincent King, Walk and Duchess find they will be unable to do anything but usher it in, arms wide closed.

Chris Whitaker has written an extraordinary novel about people who deserve so much more than life serves them. At times devastating, with flashes of humor and hope throughout, it is ultimately an inspiring tale of how the human spirit prevails and how, in the end, love―in all its different guises―wins.

The Push
Started: 03/30/2022
Finished: 04/05/2022
Rating: ★★★

1001FSB Discussion
LoR Aug 2021 Discussion
PMB Discussion
BB Feb 2022 Discussion

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.

April 2022 Reading Stats

LoR Reading Stats


1. The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir by Steffanie Strathdee 04/04 ★★★★★
2. The Push by Ashley Audrain 04/05 ★★★
3. Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite by Suki Kim 04/14 ★★★★

New Authors: 3
Female Authors: 3
Male Authors:
POC Authors:
Debut: 2
New Series:

4-star: 1
5-star: 1

Favorite of Month:
Worst of Month:
Biggest Surprise of Month:

The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug
Started: 03/18/2022
Finished: 04/04/2022
Rating: ★★★★★

1001 FSB Discussion

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world.Frantic, Steffanie combed through research old and new and came across phage therapy: the idea that the right virus, aka "the perfect predator," can kill even the most lethal bacteria. Phage treatment had fallen out of favor almost 100 years ago, after antibiotic use went mainstream. Now, with time running out, Steffanie appealed to phage researchers all over the world for help. She found allies at the FDA, researchers from Texas A&M, and a clandestine Navy biomedical center -- and together they resurrected a forgotten cure.A nail-biting medical mystery, The Perfect Predator is a story of love and survival against all odds, and the (re)discovery of a powerful new weapon in the global superbug crisis.

Kindred
Started: 03/09/2022
Finished: 03/18/2022
Rating: ★★★

The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.

Tuck Everlasting
Started: 03/07/2022
Finished: 03/18/2022
Rating: ★★★★

Doomed to - or blessed with - eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a stranger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune.

The Exiles
Started:
Finished:
Rating:

1001 Five Star Books March/April 2022 Discussion

Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to “the land beyond the seas,” Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.


During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon. Canny where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel—a skilled midwife and herbalist—is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors.

Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the Chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of legacy.

The Lincoln Highway
Started:
Finished:
Rating:

1001 Five Star Books Discussion
LoR March 2022 Side Reads Discussion

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

Americanah
Started: 03/08/2022
Finished: 03/30/2022
Rating: ★★★

1001 Five Star Books Discussion
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Series

Start Date: 11/27/2017
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Series
Author: Louise Penny

Books in this series:
1. Still Life 11/27/2017 ★★★★
2. A Fatal Grace
3. The Cruelest Month
4. A Rule Against Murder
5. The Brutal Telling
6. Bury Your Dead
6.5 The Hangman
7. A Trick of the Light
8. How the Light Gets In
9. How the Light Gets In
10. The Long Way Home
11. The Nature of the Beast
12. A Great Reckoning
13. Glass Houses
14. Kingdom of the Blind
15. A Better Man
16. All the Devils Are Here
17. The Madness of Crowds


No. of books in this series: 18
No. of books complete: 1
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

Stephanie Plum Series

Start Date:
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: Stephanie Plum Series
Author: Janet Evanovich

Books in this series:
1. One for the Money
2. Two for the Dough
3. Three to Get Deadly
4. Four to Score
5. High Five
6. Hot Six
7. Seven Up
8. Hard Eight
8.5 Visions of Sugar Plums
9. To the Nines
10. Ten Big Ones
11. Eleven on Top
12. Twelve Sharp
12.5 Plum Lovin'
13. Lean Mean Thirteen
13.5 Plum Lucky
14. Fearless Fourteen
14.5 Plum Spooky
15. Finger Lickin' Fifteen
16. Sizzling Sixteen
17. Smokin' Seventeen
18. Explosive Eighteen
19. Notorious Nineteen
20. Takedown Twenty
21. Top Secret Twenty-One
22. Tricky Twenty-Two
23. Turbo Twenty-Three
24. Hardcore Twenty-Four
25. Look Alive Twenty-Five
26. Twisted Twenty-Six
27. Fortune and Glory: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven
28. Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight
29. Going Rogue

No. of books in this series: 33
No. of books complete: 0
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

The Vampire Chronicles Series

Start Date:
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: The Vampire Chronicles Series
Author: Anne Rice

Books in this series:
1. Interview with the Vampire
2. The Vampire Lestat
3. The Queen of the Damned
4. The Tale of the Body Thief
5. Memnoch the Devil
6. The Vampire Armand
7. Merrick
8. Blood And Gold
9. Blackwood Farm
10. Blood Canticle
11. Prince Lestat
12. Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
13. Blood Communion

No. of books in this series: 13
No. of books complete: 0
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

Afraid Series

Start Date: 01/12/2021
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: Afraid Series
Author: Jack Kilborn

Books in this series:
1. Afraid 01/13/2021 ★★★★
2. Trapped
3. Endurance
4. Haunted House

No. of books in this series: 4
No. of books complete: 1
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

Rizzoli & Isles Series

Start Date: 01/01/2020
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: Rizzoli & Isles Series
Author: Tess Gerritsen

Books in this series:
1. The Surgeon 01/18/2020 ★★★
2. The Apprentice
3. The Sinner
4. Body Double
5. Vanish
6. The Mephisto Club
7. The Keepsake
8. Ice Cold
8.5 Freaks
9. The Silent Girl
9.5 John Doe
10. Last to Die
11. Die Again
12. I Know a Secret
13. Listen to Me


No. of books in this series: 15
No. of books complete: 1
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

Maisie Dobbs Series

Start Date: 08/15/2018
Time Limit: No time line
Series Name: Maisie Dobbs
Author: Jacqueline Winspear

Books in this series:
1. Maisie Dobbs 08/21/2018 ★★★
2. Birds of a Feather 02/07/2020 ★★★★
3. Pardonable Lies
4. Messenger of Truth
5. An Incomplete Revenge
6. Among the Mad
7. The Mapping of Love and Death
8. A Lesson in Secrets
9. Elegy for Eddie
10. Leaving Everything Most Loved
11. A Dangerous Place
12. Journey to Munich
13. In This Grave Hour
14. To Die But Once
15. The American Agent
16. The Consequences of Fear
17. A Sunlit Weapon

No. of books in this series: 17
No. of books complete: 2
My overall rating for this series (when complete):

Her Last Breath
Started: 03/06/2022
Finished: 03/17/2022
Rating: ★★★★

LoR Series Discussion

An extraordinarily beautiful Amish woman, a dangerous femme fatale, is the central figure in a story that reveals a dark side of Painters Mill and its seemingly perfect Amish world

A rainy night, an Amish father returning home with his three children, a speeding car hurtling toward them out of nowhere.

What at first seems like a tragic, but routine car accident suddenly takes on a more sinister cast as evidence emerges that nothing about the crash is accidental. But who would want to kill an Amish deacon and two of his children? He leaves behind a grieving widow and a young boy who clings to life in the intensive care wing of a hospital, unable to communicate. He may be the only one who knows what happened that night. Desperate to find out who killed her best friend's husband and why, Kate begins to suspect she is not looking for a reckless drunk, but instead is on the trail of a cold blooded killer amid the residents of Painter's Mill. It is a search that takes her on a chilling journey into the darkest reaches of the human heart and makes her question everything she has ever believed about the Amish culture into which she was born.

The Three Mothers
Started: 03/20/2022
Finished:
Rating:

64 Top Nonfiction Books to Read for Women's History
Listopia Challenge

In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, who were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women.

Berdis, Alberta, and Louise passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced.

These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.