GOOD READS FOR THE MONTH OF MAY - posted 4.27.26

I'm so happy to share these four wonderful books with you. I've been waiting many months to tell you about the first three books, which release on May 5th. They aren't summer beach reads. Rather, they are slices of life with all the pain and hardships that life offers. The fourth book is the dessert on the list, heartwarming and full of hope. Let me know what you think!

The Lifeguard - Laura Kasischke

This melancholy book is full of exquisite sentences and beautiful imagery. In the summer of 1969, on the day three astronauts were rocket-launched to the moon, a 5-year old boy's thoughts are only on the thrilling moment he can jump into the swim club pool his parents belong to. We meet the lifeguard, we see the pool, we are in the little boy's head . . . but, in a snap, we're taken into somebody else's story, inside someone else's head. We come to understand who that head belongs to, and why, as one heartbreaking moment is repeated and relived throughout the story. As the circumstances of what happened that one day at the pool get peeled back and revealed, we come to recognize how one single moment, one regrettable blink of an eye, can transform the lives of many, for the rest of their lives. 

Calamity Club - Kathryn Stockett

After a stranger discovers eleven-year old Meg has been abandoned by her poor single mother, she is placed in the county orphanage in Oxford, Mississippi. It's the midst of the Depression - 1933 - when even the wealthy are losing their homes and livelihoods. The boss lady of the all-girls orphanage, Lucille, is a cruel and vindictive "Christian" whose intent is to prevent the world from out-of-wedlock women giving birth to "dirty, filthy" babies and to put an end to the "vice" that results in those births. Inexplicably, she has it in for Meg, abusing her with unheard of cruelties. The story is the intersection of Meg and Birdie Calhoun, a young woman who has traveled to Oxford to get money from her socialite sister to send home to their struggling mother and grandmother. The title of the book speaks to the calamity that ensues on Meg, Birdie, the sister, and many other characters who are a shock and a delight to get to know. The time-span is little over a month, but what takes place in that time will turn your head around, and leave you with a smile at the book's ending.

The Foursome - Christina Baker Kline

This fictionalized story is a page out of history: the world-famous Siamese twins and the life they created in 1800s North Carolina married to two sisters. A distant relative to the sisters, author Christina Baker Kline imaginatively recreates the story of how her relatives were courted, to the disapproval of their conventionally and religiously conservative rural family and community, and then wed to the brothers, and how they shared/endured living with men who were joined at their waist by a fragment of skin. The reader will feel like a voyeur as even the couples' intimate moments are imagined by Kline, which of course is what thoroughly enraged and creeped out their out-spoken critics.

Life: A Love Story - Elizabeth Berg

Flo is dying. She is 92, dying from terminal cancer. Before she takes her last breath, she composes a letter to Ruthie, the girl next door, now a grown woman with children of her own, living in another city. The two met when Ruthie was five, Flo an adult. They developed a life-long friendship, two peas in a pod in their kindred spirits despite their age difference. The novel is two-fold: Flo writing her life story to Ruthie through the snippets of the small and large occurrences and things that made up her 92 years, and the author unfolding Flo's story outside of the long letter to Ruthie. This is a love story of sorts: the ups and downs of Flo's loving marriage and the friendship between a little girl and her sweet older next door neighbor. It is a precious telling of a wise woman whose glass was never half empty. I highly recommend spending time in this book, enjoying the unique form of storytelling and the lesson to be learned about how a good life can be lived.