Book Report

The Witch’s Daughter by Paula Brackston – This is a nice novel about a woman who becomes a ‘good’ witch and lives throughout a few centuries, always trying to evade the evil warlock who wants her to join him. It was a pleasant enough read, but given the recent “Ten Best of All Time” book reports I’ve done, I found myself instead longing to re-read the ‘witch’ book on my Honorable Mention section, “The Third Witch” by Rebecca Reisert. That one was a great; this one was just ‘nice enough’. Grade: C+

Off the Sidelines by Kirsten Gillibrand – The author is a US Senator representing New York, and I picked up her book on a whim at the library one day. The book is actually excellent! Gillibrand tells us about her story and how she came to be a US Senator; she’s clearly very hard-working and driven. But what I loved most about it was her insights about getting off the sidelines and making a difference. She writes about how the women’s movement is so stalled, despite glaring sexism (the fact that birth control is actually open to debate among politicians, the US is one of the only industrialized countries with no paid parental leave, we don’t have affordable day care even though most other industrialized countries subsidize it, etc). She makes the point that she didn’t want to just gripe about this stuff but to engage with the dirty world of politics.  Gillibrand  has such a great point. Why do so many women sit back and just take this instead of organizing? She inspired me to look into volunteering with Tammy Duckworth’s campaign for Senate (I first want to confirm Duckworth’s opinions on a few key issues since her website doesn’t contain details) or even get involved in Hilary’s campaign. Extra points - Gillibrand says she has a “girl crush” on Angelina Jolie. Best words spoken by a sitting US Senator ever. Grade: B+

Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq edited by Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain – This anthology definitely convinced me that being in the armed services is extremely hard, and being a woman in the armed services is even harder. I’m not going to give it a high grade though, because the book is so short, used the same few contributors over and over, and had too much poetry for my taste. Some of the essays were eye-opening and intriguing but I think this book just could’ve been a lot better. Grade: C-

Walking Home by Kelly Winters – This is a re-read. After doing my posts on my all-time favorite books, I wanted to re-read some books that I loved over the years. Although this book did not make the all-time favorite list (or even the Honorable Mentions list), I really loved it when I read it, circa 2004 or so. It’s about a woman who walked, solo, the Appalachian Trail – which typically takes about 6 months and requires a Herculean amount of planning and strength. I like travel memoirs and this one was so interesting because Winters took me into a world that I knew nothing about. I loved reading about each day of hers – the other people she meets on the trail, various encounters at the shelters along the way, the dangers she faces and how she overcomes them. The backdrop to Winters’ journey is her coming out story. Before walking the trail, she had just ended a bad relationship with a man and was starting to think that maybe being with women was where she was meant to be. When I finished with my re-read, I did a bit of googling on the author and her book, and sadly even though this was published in 2001, it looks like Winters has published nothing else. Winters shares with us during her tale that she wants to work as a freelancer, in any occupation where she doesn’t have to be tied down to a desk job or indoors. I truly hope she found what she was looking for; since it apparently wasn’t writing, I hope she is doing something else that allows her to pay the bills and stay close to the outdoors. Grade: A (Even the second time through, I loved every moment I spent reading this. It kept me company during the long plane rides to/from San Francisco).

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen – I definitely have to call this novel “historical romance” instead of “historical fiction” and put it in the “guilty pleasure” category. On one hand, it was an engrossing read which included good attention to period details and a heroine who undergoes a relatively believable transformation. But the novel’s plotline is rushed. It needed more time, nuance, and care - and its pacing got pretty choppy during the second half of the book. We also got predictable and convenient plot twists, a male lead who is too perfect to be credible, and villans who needed to be better rounded out.  I did enjoy it a lot though, sorry to say. Grade: B-