July column



As if I don't keep busy enough I have joined a sweet bunch of ladies here in Granby for a little sewing a couple times a month. I was happy to find it was not just quilting but learning how to do many projects to create useful things for the home or gifts. It is very motivating to me as I love to learn new things. Thanks, Tammy, Amy, Debbie, and Mary, plus a couple I have not met.

I had to be closed another week in May due to family illness, but hang in there with me. When my flag and sign is out I am here and most days come in much earlier than my posted hours.

I did not get much reading done this month, but did read another Lisa Unger book and found another “favorite” author.

Heartbroken

by

Lisa Unger

Heart Island is a privately owned small island in the middle of a huge lake in the Adirondacks, owned for generations by Birdie Burke's family. Birdy is truly a crusty old bird that seems to love her island more than her husband and grown children. Each summer they are to show up for a week together on the island. This year her daughter Kate, an aspiring author who has used old family journals to write her first novel is a source of irritation to Birdy. Kate's book is fiction, but based on facts from the journals left to her by Birdie's sister. Is there really a ghost on the island? Enter in the mix is Emily. You wonder for awhile where she came from and how she fits in with this family. She is young and struggling and has hooked up with a guy who is obviously no good. He uses her to help commit petty crimes and she hates it. Then she is forced to help with an armed robbery and they end up on the island. The linking together of the characters was done very well and in the end family ghosts are put to rest. I like the way Unger slips in characters from her previous books. It makes you think she loves them and has to keep them alive. Unger has become a favorite author of mine.

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

by

Barbara Vine

I throughly enjoyed this book!

Writing as Barbara Vine, Britain's mystery novelist Ruth Rendell writes this literary suspense of the highest order. With this truly absorbing page-turner, Vine developes her characters in a way that makes you feel what they feel and have empathy even for Gerald Candless, a bestselling novelist who dies suddenly, and leaves behind a wife and two doting daughters. To sort through her grief, his daughter Sarah puts aside her university studies and agrees to write a biography of her famous father. But as she begins her research and pulls back the veil of his past, her life is slowly torn apart: a terrible logic begins to unfold that explains her mother's remoteness, as she learns that her father took on a new identity before he married and had two daughters. So if he wasn't Gerald then who was he and what could have made him take on a new identity? She also sheds shocking light on a long-forgotten London murder. To quote from the back of the book: “The mystery of Gerald Candless is so ingeniously constructed, its truth and falsehoods are so deftly and convincingly interwoven, that its solution...is as jolting as a flash of lightning”

I would definitely read more books by this author.