My best friend chose the movie “Home” for one of our family movie nights. When the movie was over, the credits stated that it was based on a book. So I had to read the book. And let me tell you, they use the phrase “based on the novel” very loosely. While the same concepts are here, the execution is vastly different. The book was a fun read, and I enjoyed it. It was excellent entertainment while I painted cabinet doors for the kitchen. It made me laugh out loud several times.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I picked this book as my January Book of the Month pick, but a book that was written so cinematically wasn’t it. It is a magical realism book, so keep that in mind, and be prepared to suspend your disbelief. However, the language and descriptions in this book were gorgeous. There is one scene near the end of the book where I could picture it clearly and I immediately decided I needed an adaptation of the book.
Meh. I think I wanted a little more out of this book. I felt some of the characters were underdeveloped and some of the storyline just felt rushed. The book definitely had potential, it just needed to go a little further.
I was able to get the last five Katherine Center books I hadn’t read from the library, so I binged them. Starting with this one. I really liked it. My favorite thing about Center books are the characters and how real they feel. And I felt that the problems these characters experienced were not as extreme as the ones her characters experience in her newer books, and that’s okay. The impact was still the same. I, of course, cried.
I really enjoyed this one, and I think this is definitely up in the top half of her books for me. Even though the romance was not front and center, I really loved how the heroine was the focus. About her overcoming her own internal obstacles through external obstacles was the focus instead. It felt really empowering. I even used some of the hiking knowledge from this book on a recent camping trip with my family.
This book was very cute, and a very good debut novel. I could see Center’s formula coming into play. But, these early books were very light on the romance. But I still liked them. This one was great, and I loved the LI. This book made my heart full.
I loved this book because it was different than other romances I’ve read. I LOVED that it was about a married couple falling back in love. I L O V E D that it showed the reality of parenting small children. And I LOVED that the mom was trying to find something for herself outside of motherhood. This book was so relatable and I ugly cried through out it.
This was by far the weakest of Center’s books, and I am so glad that I read it last. I didn’t quite like or buy the concept and I felt that the strains between the different relationships felt forced and contrived, and the romance felt sort of tacked on. Definitely ranked number 11 out of 11 in my ranking of Center’s books.
Why did I wait so long to read this book?! Reading this book, especially with having just lost my grandma, and the anticipatory grief of the inevitable loss of my young nephew, was cathartic. The way Klune talks about death and the afterlife, I don’t know. It really was beautifully written and really fililed me with a sense of hope. Klune has done it again. Even with a book that he merely described as a love story with a ghost.
This book circulates around my school, and my oldest has read it, and I figured why not give it a try for a reading challenge I’m doing. Friends. This book. The audiobook is only four hours, and in that four hours Brown told a beautiful story about friendship, motherhood, and found family. I asked my son if the book had a happy ending and he told me no. But, I would argue that while not the ending you would hope for, it wasn’t necessarily sad. It definitely leaves room for hope, too.
This is a book I had hoped would be better. I don’t know what I didn’t like about it. The plot was okay, the characters were okay, but something just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe after bingeing all of Center’s books the stakes just felt too low? I don’t know. The book was okay.
I read this for the ISDAR book club, and wow. This was very fascinating. I learned a lot about life as a woman in the 18th and 19th Centuries. I also learned a lot about the diseases that ran rampant. Thank goodness for vaccines! I cried a couple times. Eliza had a really hard life, but she persevered. And I learned that LMM took some liberties with the story when he wrote Hamilton. I guess insider trading and stock market speculation don’t make interesting plot points.
Okay. This book. I wanted to like it, but the plot just felt all over the place. Like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. I think if it cut a couple plot points out, focused in a little more on character development, and developed the relationship a little more, I would have liked the book a lot better. As it was, there were about five different conflicts and some resolved within two pages, and then whole thing felt disjointed and rushed.
Stephanie Caffrey, Author 