Inner Beauty Friday! Book Club!

Hello,

Happy Friday - and I am linking up with Heather from Blonde...Undercover Blonde for Book Club!




This week I read 2 books, both had a hint of the paranormal. 

First was "Sisterland" by Curtis Sittenfeld:


Here is the synopsis from Goodreads.com: "From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar “senses”—innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people’s secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them.

Now, years later, their different paths have led them both back to their hometown of St. Louis. Vi has pursued an eccentric career as a psychic medium, while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has settled down in the suburbs to raise her two young children. But when a minor earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the normal life Kate has always wished for begins to shift. After Vi goes on television to share a premonition that another, more devastating earthquake will soon hit the St. Louis area, Kate is mortified. Equally troubling, however, is her fear that Vi may be right. As the date of the predicted earthquake quickly approaches, Kate is forced to reconcile her fraught relationship with her sister and to face truths about herself she’s long tried to deny."

My thoughts:  I loved her earlier book "Prep", it was so descriptive and just spot on.  Sisterland felt a little disconnected.  Maybe it's because I don't really like a "whiny" main character - maybe I wasn't supposed to like her.   It was an ok story, but not a knock out like her previous work!

I know, I'm so hard to please!  But I don't want to say a book was great unless it really was. 


Next up :"The Mystery of Grace" by Charles de Lint

 

The synopsis from Goodreads.com: "On the Day of the Dead, the Solona Music Hall is jumping.  That's where Altagracia Quintero meets John Burns, just two weeks too late.
Altagracia – her friends call her Grace – has a tattoo of Nuestra Señora de Altagracia on her shoulder, she's got a Ford Motor Company tattoo running down her leg, and she has grease worked so deep into her hands that it'll never wash out.  Grace works at Sanchez Motorworks, customizing hot rods.  Finding the line in a classic car is her calling.
Now Grace has to find the line in her own life.  A few blocks around the Alverson Arms is all her world -- from the little grocery store where she buys beans, tamales, and cigarettes (“cigarettes can kill you,” they tell her, but she smokes them anyway) to the record shop, to the library where Henry, a black man confined to a wheelchair, researches the mystery of life in death – but she’s got unfinished business keeping her close to home."

My thoughts:  Now this book wasn't the most "intellectual" but it was a good story.  If your looking for something light, but a little different and a touch of the "underworld" - you will like this.  It was a fast read, with nice characters and I look forward to reading more books by him.

Until next week!

Jasmine