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| 4th of July manicure |
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| My neighbor has a green thumb! |
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| Lupine! |
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| Treated myself to some yarn! |
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| Home away from home for a couple of days |
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| The journal I bought |
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| Green Tea Lemonade #1 for the road! |
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| Sigh. |
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| My second Green Tea Lemonade of the day! |
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| Room with a view--it's thundering! |
Written in tandem with My Name Is Lucy Barton and drawing on the small-town characters evoked there, these pages reverberate with the themes of love, loss, and hope that have drawn millions of readers to Strout s work.
“As I was writing My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Strout says, “it came to me that all the characters Lucy and her mother talked about had their own stories—of course!—and so the unfolding of their lives became tremendously important to me.”
Here, among others, are the “Pretty Nicely Girls,” now adults: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband, the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. Tommy, the janitor at the local high school, has his faith tested in an encounter with an emotionally isolated man he has come to help; a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD discovers unexpected solace in the company of a lonely innkeeper; and Lucy Barton’s sister, Vicky, struggling with feelings of abandonment and jealousy, nonetheless comes to Lucy’s aid, ratifying the deepest bonds of family.
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Paris, France: 1860's. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moulding it into a "modern city." The reforms will erase generations of history—but in the midst of the tumult, one woman will take a stand.
Rose Bazelet is determined to fight against the destruction of her family home until the very end; as others flee, she stakes her claim in the basement of the old house on rue Childebert, ignoring the sounds of change that come closer and closer each day. Attempting to overcome the loneliness of her daily life, she begins to write letters to Armand, her beloved late husband. And as she delves into the ritual of remembering, Rose is forced to come to terms with a secret that has been buried deep in her heart for thirty years.
There was that abominable day, toward the end, when I was returning from the market with Mariette, and we came upon Germaine in tears in the street in front of the house. You had gone. She had found the sitting room empty, and your hat and cane had disappeared. How could this have happened? You hate leaving the house.
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“Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
“Brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
“I can't change where I come from or what I've been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
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“Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She could
walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account
of somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;
such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other
ways of being.”
― Ashley Hay, The Railwayman's Wife
When Anikka Lachlan’s husband, Mac, is killed in a railway accident, she is offered—and accepts—a job at the Railway Institute’s library and searches there for some solace in her unexpectedly new life. But in Thirroul, in 1948, she’s not the only person trying to chase dreams through books. There’s Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war, but who has now lost his words and his hope. There’s Frank Draper, trapped by the guilt of those his medical treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom. All three struggle to find their own peace, and their own new story.
But along with the firming of this triangle of friendship and a sense of lives inching towards renewal come other extremities—and misunderstandings. In the end, love and freedom can have unexpected ways of expressing themselves.
The Railwayman’s Wife explores the power of beginnings and endings, and how hard it can sometimes be to tell them apart. Most of all, it celebrates love in all its forms, and the beauty of discovering that loving someone can be as extraordinary as being loved yourself.
So there's a video in the depths of YouTube of the three of us lip-syncing to the Jonas Brothers and pretending to play guitars and drums in Hailey's bedroom. She decided she was Joe, I was Nick, and Maya was Kevin. I really wanted to be Joe--I secretly loved him the most, but Hailey said she should have him, so I let her.
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And there she was, just inches away, his bride, staring into his eyes as he studied hers. There were so many colors in them: grey and gold and a green that was almost metallic. In the center, near the pupil, was a flash of ocher so bright it was almost red.
"Your eyelashes are different colors," she said at last.
"Different how?"
"Different to each other--you've got blond ones and ginger ones and brown ones. Like your beard. I've never noticed that before."
I'm not quite sure what to say about this book. It's sparse and there are few answers. But in this case, the halting narration makes sense. I really liked it.Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.
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Tornadoes, illness, famine, floods, and fires. I'm trying to get some perspective. It's nothing, really, my little world and my and its little problems. I know I'm stronger than this. Where is my woman of steel hiding? This is not the person I think of as me. I resemble a car crash lately, a sodden, sulky, weepy, empty mess, rumpled and barely standing at the edge of Union Square.
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