Monday, June 5, 2017

June Book Club Pick

May's Book Club pick was M's pick, The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani. This book was so good. I've known that Adriana Trigiani was a pretty popular author for a long time but I'd never picked up any of her books. After reading The Shoemaker's Wife I've started picking up her books at the library bookstore, because I want to read a lot more of her.
Image from Goodreads 

The writing was so beautiful. The way she described the Italian Alps was amazing. She walked a very fine line between perfect description and over description and managed to stay on the side of perfect. Her characters were unforgettable, Enza's whole family were amazing and I could read a whole book just about the nuns that Ciro grew up with. The romance story was the slowest slow-burn romance I think I've ever read. The story followed how Enza became the shoemaker's wife and it took about a decade for them to finally get together, but it was so worth it.

The only problems I had with the story were that it seemed to go on a bit too long. The majority of the story was, as I said before, how Enza became the shoemaker's wife. Once they were married and off on their life together there was a perfect spot to end the story, with Ciro and Enza walking off into the wilderness of Minnesota to follow their dreams together. But it didn't end there, and I really feel like it should have, the rest seemed like it got chopped off of a different book and tacked on to this one just to fill the word count.

There was also one point where I went 'Wow. Someone's trying too hard.' and that was when Ciro went to Italy to visit after WWI. He was having some internal monologue about how it wasn't his Italy anymore, and how years of poverty had taken it's toll on the people and they'd latch on to the next ideology to come along. And of course that's exactly what happened, Mussolini and the rise of Fascism, was the next ideology to come along. It just seemed so out of place for a young man, even a well read young man, who just left a war zone and was seeing his brother for the first time in over a decade to be sitting in a cafe, smoking and contemplating ideology.

This was a great pick, and I gave it 4 out of 5 stars!

June's pick is from C whose last pick was I am Malala. C always seems to have the most thought provoking picks and this new pick fits right in. For June the pick is The Color of Water by James McBride.
Image from Goodreads

The Color of Water is the story of the authors mother, the daughter of a Polish Rabbi who married a black man in the early 1940's and raised 12 children in the Projects of Brooklyn, I don't know much about it besides what I read in the blurb but it sounds good and I can't wait to read it!


Next month is supposed to be J's pick but she's going to be out of town so I get to pick! I'm pretty excited about it and I think I have my book chosen already, although it might change before the next meeting.

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