Author: Marsha

The Things We Never Say

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2026

Read June 2026

As usual Strout gives us a character driven novel with characters who are generally ordinary people leading generally ordinary lives.  They are generally good people who have flaws and they’ve suffered some setbacks during their lives.

Our protagonist is Artie Dam, a fifty-seven-year-old man who has been married for thirty-four years, has a married son, has been a history teacher at the local high school for over three decades, and who was recognized as Teacher of the Year at the state level five years ago.  Artie and his wife now live in the costal home that was his parents-in-law.  He enjoys regularly sailing in the bay. 

Despite these accomplishments and seemingly desirable life, Artie is feeling increasingly isolated from many aspects of his community.  He is pondering whether man has free will and tries to engage others in conversation about this, generally unsuccessfully.  He is also pondering suicide although he never reveals this to anyone.  Fortunately for his family and friends, after nearly dying in a boating accident, he decides he wants to live.  

As he continues with new willingness to live, he experiences several changes at work, with friendships, and in society.  His principal, who has held this position during most of Artie’s tenure, requests he change his approach to a specific class due to pressure from students and their parents.  A good friend at school, the English teacher, changes when she retires.   He and his wife had a several decades friendship with another couple.  Artie became good friends with Flossie, the wife.   This friendship changes dramatically when Flossie moves closer to her daughter following the death of her husband.  A positive, however, is that Artie acquires a new friend with whom he has deeper discussions than with anyone else currently in his life despite the newness of their relationship. 

The biggest change for Artie, however, comes when he learns a significant family secret that has been hidden from him.  This knowledge staggers him substantially and he exhibits some strange behavior that is unknown to his family and that scares him a bit. 

The description of this book so far sounds generally like Strout’s territory and the reason her followers read her.  There are a couple of significant deviations, however.  This book is not set in Maine nor does it include any of her previous characters.  These changes are refreshing in many ways—new possibilities for Strout to explore.  The second major deviation is that she firmly sets the “present time” in the fall of 2024 just after the presidential election.   Trump’s name isn’t stated but it’s clear to this reader that the characters are discussing him and the potential impacts he will have. 

This is the second Strout novel in which she explores the impact of specific major historical events on her characters.  Lucy by the Sea was set during the Covid-19 epidemic.  This time she explores how her characters are affected by shifts of US culture concomitant with the election of Trump to a second term.  Interestingly, Artie’s new friend is a “Trumpster”.  Several other characters openly express concern for the future due to this election.   This reader wonders whether these two books will have a lasting a following as Olive Kitteridge enjoys.  Even more importantly for this reader, this firm political vein detracted from the more universal themes and left this reader somewhat disappointed by this Strout book.  However, this reader is very likely to read Strout’s next book which will hopefully arrive soon. 

In the Woods

Published 2007

Read June 2026

The Likeness

Published 2008

Read Jun 2026

Faithful Place

Published 2010

Read July 2026

Books 1-3 of the Dublin Murder Squad series

By Tana French

This reader has enjoyed the first three books of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series.  The structure of this series is interesting in that although characters from the Murder Squad and other Dublin police units participate in multiple books, the protagonist, through whom the story is told is different in each book.  The corresponding reader of the audiobooks also changes along with the protagonist.    

In both the first and third books, the protagonist’s youth plays a substantial role in the story.

 In the first book, In the Woods, Adam Robert Ryan and two friends, age twelve, go out to play as usual in the woods neighboring their development.  Only Adam Robert Ryan makes it home that day.  Adam Ryan is sent to a boarding school in England to escape the pressures of the situation (thus a British reader for this audiobook).  Decades later our story starts when Rob Ryan, a Dublin Murder Squad member, and his partner and good friend, Cassie Maddox, are assigned to investigate the murder of a little girl whose body is found at an archeological dig site bordering the remains of those woods.  Since the detective goes by “Rob” vs “Adam” no one except his partner knows this history. 

In the third book, Faithful Place, the body of the long missing girlfriend of Frank Mackey, a squad leader in the Undercover Unit, is found murdered in a unit of the neighborhood in which Frank Mackey grew up and in which his parents and brother still live.  Frank is not officially part of the investigation, led by Detective Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, a Dublin Murder Squad member, but he actively investigates anyway.

In the second book, Likeness, Cassie Maddox is our protagonist.  We had learned in In the Woods that prior to joining the Murder Squad and partnering with Rob Ryan, she had been in an Undercover Unit.  She switched to the Murder Squad after being injured in a case.  She left the Murder Squad after the case we followed in In the Woods for reasons discussed there and not here and is working in a domestic violence unit.  Her boyfriend, Sam O’Neill, was part of the investigative team with Cassie and Rob Ryan in In the Woods and is still part of the Murder Squad.  Their relationship complicates her desire to return to the Murder Squad.    When a woman, who looks like Cassie’s twin and has adopted the identity Cassie used while undercover, is found murdered Frank Mackey, Cassie’s squad leader while in the Undercover squad, inserts himself into the case.  He convinces Sam O’Neill, lead investigator on the case, and Cassie that the investigation would benefit from Cassie posing as the murdered girl under the premise that the police found her injured and she has recovered.  Thus, Cassie returns to the house the dead girl had shared with three other graduate students to determine whether and how they might have been involved in the murder. 

This reader finds the structure of the series interesting, the stories compelling and complex, and French’s writing stunning.   This reader expects to finish this series and likely read the author’s other series. 

Case Histories

Published 2004

Read Jan 2025

One Good Turn

Published 2006

Read March 2025

When Will There Be Good News

Published 2008

Read May 2026

Started Early Took My Dog

Published 2010

Read May 2026

Big Sky

Published 2019

Read May 2026

Death at the Sign of the Rook

Published 2024

Read June 2026

Books 1-6 of the Jackson Brodie series

By Kate Atkinson

Putting these books together for a single essay does not indicate they are all alike or that they are lightweight in any regard.  Rather they are NOT lightweight, and the stories are all quite different.  And as you can see by the “read” dates, this reader has been reading versus writing! 

This reader managed to start with the first in the series quite by accident.  This reader had enjoyed   Behind the Scenes at the Museum and needed an audiobook to read so this reader tried another Kate Atkinson novel noted as part of the Jackson Brodie series.  However, in this book, as with many of the books in the series, running into Jackson Brodie takes quite some time/pages. 

Jackson Brodie is a former police detective and former member of the army.  He is now using his highly honed investigative skills in private practice.  In some of these books he’s been hired to investigate something.  In other books he gets involved in cases nearly accidentally.  In all cases, he is quite knowledgeable about police protocol but doesn’t necessarily follow it.  In some cases, he quite blatantly misleads the police regarding what happened to protect one or more people who stumbled into committing a crime and whom he thinks shouldn’t be prosecuted.  Generally, this reader agreed with his decisions and found them refreshing. 

As mentioned, Jackson Brodie often arrives in the story quite far into the book.  Something characteristic of all these books is that the reader must be patient for the story, or usually stories, to unfold during which time characters are introduced, crimes may be committed or not, story webs become tangled, and the reader becomes thoroughly involved.  If you’re looking for a straightforward power through read, these are not books for you!  Eventually Jackson Brodie arrives and somehow gets involved. 

There are a few characters that show up in several books.  We meet Julia initially in Case Histories as a young girl whose youngest sister disappears.  Jackson Brodie gets involved a few decades later in that book, helps solve the mystery, and by the end of the book there is a connection developing between Jackson and Julia.  In later books Julia is a girlfriend (One Good Turn), as an ex-girlfriend (several books) or as part of a chorus of women in Jackson’s head (several books).   Teen-aged Reggie saves Jackson Brodie’s life following a train wreck in When Will There Be Good News and ends up involved with him in other parts of this book.  Jackson Brodie encounters Constable Reggie in two later books when both of them are older.  Louise Monroe appears in several books as well, sometimes as a pivotal character, sometimes in a supporting role but there is always a little electricity between her and Jackson Brodie that the reader hopes will ignite.  Across the books she rises in position in the police force.    

Most of the stories cover many years, often decades.  There is some to and fro of time setting, sometimes between the early and late parts of these stories, sometimes between times differing in only a few weeks.  It’s easy to follow even when listening to audiobooks (the format this reader used for all of the books).  

Just as the stories within a given book take time to be reeled out, they generally take awhile to be wound up as well.  Patience from the reader is well rewarded, however.  It’s clear that this reader became quite drawn to the series:   a few months lapsed between reading the first and second books, nearly a year until the third book, then followed by rapid digestion of the last three.  This reader was lucky as these books were published over a twenty-year period.  This reader hopes that the next installment appears on the horizon within the 2020’s but it’s not a given as this author finds many other interesting things to write.  So, this reader will likely investigate (pun intended) some of these Kate Atkinson book next.   

American Dirt

By Jeanine Cummins

Published 2018

Read Dec 2025

This book was nominated for a slot on this reader’s book club schedule three times before it was accepted as part of the 2025-2026 schedule.  This reader did not vote for the book the first two times it was nominated due to the controversy that surrounded the book—should a non-Mexican author write this book.  The third time it was offered, this reader did vote for it for two reasons.  First, the person who nominated it thought it was well written and well worth reading.   Second, a comment from this person was very compelling “If I read her account in the newspaper, I would not believe it.  Reading it through her skillful telling made it real, and the more haunting.  I have never felt the same about refugees since I read it.”  Having now read the book, this reader agrees with her statements.

The refugees this book follows are fully middle to upper-middle class.  The protagonist owns a bookstore.  Her husband was a journalist.  Her mother had money in the bank.  The protagonist meets and befriends a man who comes into her bookstore and with whom she has interesting conversations.  It turns out that this man is head of an up-and-coming drug cartel who is wreaking deadly havoc in the city as it asserts itself to become the dominant cartel.  The protagonist’s husband publishes an article about this man and cartel, and the family becomes a target of the cartel leader.  All of the protagonist’s family members except her son are killed during a family celebration.  She and her son survive when they are in the house in a bathroom and go undetected during the slaughter.  The rest of the story follows the protagonist and son as they slowly make their way to the United States, hoping to get to relatives in Colorado. 

This reader was very engaged by the book.  The characters were well developed and believable.  The protagonist makes both good decisions and bad ones; the young son behaves ways one would expect from a young boy.  The descriptions of getting on and off the train they ride are done very well—this reader felt fear along with the refugees as they made these moves. 

This reader does not believe that only “true members of the community” can write about a community or its members.  Certainly, being a “member of the community” may make writing about that community easier.  However, imposing this restriction would limit what is written and so what we can read—historical novels couldn’t be written for instance, as the authors were not alive when the action occurred.   What Massie Knew, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Anna Karenina are examples of novels that couldn’t exist since male authors wrote about female protagonists.  Etc etc.  Perhaps the real issue in this case was how the book was marketed.  In the case of American Dirt, somewhat like the situation in Yellowface, the publisher put a tremendous amount of effort into marketing the book to ensure it’s seen as a hit.  This is not an uncommon situation as is evidenced by books that are “highly anticipated” for some time prior to their publication.  Getting this kind of attention for newcomers, especially those without agents well connected to big publishing firms, is extremely difficult.  This is frankly true for probably 90+% of aspiring writers but the barriers for diverse authors may be especially high.  Hopefully blogs like this one, book discussion groups, and readers of all sorts can spread the word about books that are worthy of reaching a larger audience will play a role in getting less heavily marketed books the attention they deserve and help overcome criticism like that received by this author and this book.   

In summary, get past the criticisms you may have heard about this book and read it.  It will be well worth your time. 

Lonesome Dove

By Larry McMurtry

Published 1985

Read April 2026

This reader recalls there was an extremely popular miniseries on TV called Lonesome Dove.  This reader was aware that the book was a western.  This was the extent of this reader’s knowledge of Lonesome Dove prior to reading The Correspondentt.  The Correspondent somewhat regularly wrote to book authors, and she wrote to Larry McMcurty about the book.  This reader was struck by three things her letter discloses.  1) She was writing after her third reading of this (843 page) book.  2) She was congratulating the author for his courage to cause his characters pain.  3) Despite the pain, the two main characters had great vitality.  These points made this book quite intriguing.

This reader listened to the audiobook read by Will Patton.  This edition had a forward by Taylor Sheridan, a writer and director whose TV series this reader has greatly enjoyed.  He indicates in his forward that 1) he’s read the book countless times; 2) reading this book made him change his life course towards being a storyteller.  So, a second major recommendation for the book.

When this reader started the book, she wasn’t sure she would enjoy Will Patton’s Texas accent, but her worry was quickly felled.  Will Patton is a distinguished movie actor as well as audiobook reader and his acting capabilities were well demonstrated by the voices he gave to the many characters in this book. 

McMurtry created two remarkable lead characters, Captain Augustus (Gus) Macrae and Captain Woodrow F Call.  The men served in the Texas Rangers together for twenty years, “civilizing” Texas by eliminating attacks on white settlers by the indigenous population.  After the US Army took over this role, they started the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in Lonesome Dove, a very small-town Texas border town on the Rio Grande. Gus likes the ladies, gambling, and drinking.  Woodrow is happiest working.  Although the two seem unlikely partners, they have been partners for thirty years when we first meet them—20 years successfully fighting Indians and 10 years building this company.  We learn over the course of the book that their partnership is built on a friendship that runs very deeply in the hearts of both men.

The story starts when Jake Spoon arrives at the Hat Creek establishment.  He was a Texas Ranger with Gus and Woodrow but hasn’t seen them since the Rangering days.  He’s also a lady’s man and gambler who dislikes hard work and he’s running away from an Arkansas sheriff of Fort Smith Arkansas who is chasing him after Jake accidently killed the sheriff’s brother who is also Fort Smith’s dentist.  He speaks of marvelous land in Montana and the opportunities that would await the first cattle ranch started there.  Woodrow Call’s interest is stirred, and he decides that the Hat Creek company should be that first cattle ranch.  Thus begins the start of a 3000-mile cattle drive across multiple rivers and through a variety of perils. 

But the perils and adventures are, in some ways, a small part of the book’s attraction.  McMurtry fills the pages with a large, but manageable, cast of memorable characters to whom this reader became attached in addition to Gus and Woodrow.  Some of them, like Jake Spoon, aren’t very sympathetic, generally due to their treatment of other characters.

 Most of the characters, as expected for a cattle drive, are men—Gus and Woodrow of course and their various cowboy cattle handlers and cook. Pea Eye and Deets were Rangers with Gus and Woodrow and have worked with their Hat Creek company ever since.  Pea Eye isn’t very bright but he is kind and loyal.  Deets eventually remembers his first name is Joshua.  As a black man, others on the cattle drive look a bit down on him.  But Deet’s ability to tell the weather, find water, and track anything and anybody makes him invaluable and respected.  Newt Dobbs, a teen-ager, has lived with Gus and Woodrow since his mother, Maggie, a prostitute died when he was a child.  Newt doesn’t know the identity of his father.  Bolivar, a Mexican, is the cook at the Hat Creek company.  He starts out on the cattle drive but leaves to go back to his family in Mexico.  There are a variety of other men that Woodrow recruits for the cattle drive who play various roles in the story, including being killed by some of the perils.

A parallel story develops around July Johnson, the Arkansas sheriff pursuing Jake Spoon.  As soon as he leaves town to pursue Jake Spoon, his wife of only a short time leaves Fort Smith to head north.  Roscoe, Jake’s deputy, is hounded by his sister-in-law to either chase after the wife or find Jake and tell him about his wife.  He pursues the latter course with his horse, pack, and no knowledge of how he will find Jake.  This story eventually intersects the main story in addition to the Jake Spoon connection. 

 McMurtry gives us four notable women characters.  Lorena Wood is a major character.  She is a beautiful young woman who ends up in the “sporting life” and is the only whore in the small town of Lonesome Dove.  She is captivated by Jake Spoon when he comes to town.  She demands Jake to fulfill his promise to her to take her to San Franscico.  They follow the Hat Creek cattle drive for awhile but Jake leaves her and she is captured by Blue Duck, a wicked Indian.  Gus, with whom she already had an interesting relationship—he loves to talk and paid Lorena well to spend time with him after the poke,–rescues her. 

Clara Allen is a second major character although partly because Gus talks about her as much as she is active in the story.  She is still loved by Gus even though she chose a dull horse trader over him to marry.  Gus is willing to go on the cattle drive in part so that he can stop and see her in Nebraska.

Janey plays a role in the Roscoe subplot.  She is a young girl who escapes from the man who bought her.  Her skill with throwing stones keeps alive Roscoe when she joins him.  Finally, Elmira Johnson escapes her marriage to July Johnson, the Arkansas sheriff, when he leaves to chase Jake Spoon. 

Each woman demonstrates strength and courage but in very different ways.  Lorena and Clara are the female characters most completely developed. 

Lonesome Dove is likely re-read by people because it is a character-driven book that has a great story.  The author lets readers in on the internal conflicts that various characters are working through as they face various external issues driven by the geography they are travelling—the weather, the rivers they must cross, the availability of water, the threat of attacks by Indians and bad white guys.  Readers can luxuriate listening to the internal thoughts of Gus, Lorena, Clara, Newt, Woodrow, and others as they move along the trail, or in Clara’s case, make their way through the chores of the day. 

Theme topics abound including unrequited love, loyalty, marriage, friendship, death, betrayal, violence, and more.  McMurtry packs a lot into 843 pages and it’s clear some readers are willing to read it multiple times to bathe in his story-telling that wraps these themes around such believable characters.  This reader committed 36 hours to listening to this book and is glad she owns this book so she can listen again. 

The Boston Girl

By Anita Diamant

Published 2014

Read April 2026

Addie Baum, at eighty-five, is asked by her granddaughter to explain how she became the woman she is.  Thus starts the tale of Addie Baum, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who came to Boston from “what must be Russia now”.  Her father had come with their two daughters, Betty and Celia in about 1896.  Her mother came about 3 years later.  Addie was born in Boston and lived her entire life there.

Addie jumps into her story in 1915 when she was fifteen.  It chronicles her family’s struggles with living in this new country and concentrates on her teens and early twenties.   While the family no longer lived in a small abode with dirt floors and no running water, they had to deal with financial difficulties and an extremely different culture. 

The book is essentially a coming-of-age story for Addie.   We learn much about her late adolescence and early adulthood as her sister Betty leaves the household to take a job and live in a boarding house and her sister Celia gets married.  Celia’s departure requires Addie to leave school and find work so that the family can pay the rent and buy food.  Despite first her family’s strictness and then the burden of working, Addie finds a way to pay for stays at the Rockport Lodge a (real!) a tourist house founded in 1906 to provide chaperoned holidays for Boston young women of limited means.  Here Addie makes life-long friends that support her and each other through various tragedies that befall them.  We cheer for Addie as she too leaves her parents’ home to live in a boardinghouse and ventures through a series of jobs while always contributing substantially to her parents’ expenses. 

Coming of age stories are not as interesting to this reader as they once were, which is not surprising given this reader’s stage of life.  However, this reader found this book quite engaging as Addie’s teen and young adult years occur about the same time as this reader’s two grandmothers.  This reader finally learned as a retiree that her maternal grandmother (born 1911) was forced to leave school at age 16, in this case to take care of the family after her mother died in childbirth.  After her father remarried somewhat hastily, this grandmother married to get out of the household and took one of her siblings to live with them. That knowledge helped explain her adamant declaration that this reader not entertain involvement with men until this reader had at least her master’s degree!  This reader learned that all of this grandmother’s siblings were farmed out to various family members at the demand of the new wife.  This reader’s paternal grandmother (born 1911) also did not complete high school and left home to marry a farmer’s son who lived across the field from her family’s farm.  Neither grandfather farmed full-time, but did both did part-time, and made most of their living otherwise.  Both grandmothers worked in factories during WWII but returned homemaking after the war. So, this reader’s grandmothers from rural communities followed a more “standard” path of not leaving home until they became wives and mothers and stayed in the workplace for only a relatively short period of their married life. 

Addie’s story was more influenced by being in a city.  Her family was dependent on wages to buy food, clothing, and shelter vs a rural life that allows much of the family’s food being raised in their gardens, chicken coops, and the like.  While Addie’s parents wanted their daughters to contribute monetarily to the family, they didn’t want them leaving home until they married.  Both Betty and Addie made use of boarding houses for single women that were available in Boston at that time despite their mother’s objections and corresponding verbal abuse.   

This reader was given pause by this book about whether and when children become interested in their parents’ lives before they had children.  In this book, it’s not a daughter asking Addie about her life, but a granddaughter and her school assignment.  This reader did have some conversations with her mother about her youth, all of them occurring only once this reader was retired.  Interestingly, many areas were left unexplored, the barriers to these areas neither acknowledged nor broken.  The environment to discuss the past with grandparents may be easier, as the narrator suggests.

This was a nicely engaging book for this reader.  Learning about Boston and its culture during this time period was fascinating:  multiple immigrant populations who brought a diversity of religious and secular practices; the role of newspapers and other periodicals as the “social media” device as well as a source of news; the rapidly changing mores in the city and in the country; and the impact of war and a pandemic.  While Addie’s parents apparently didn’t venture beyond their own immigrant population and its mores much, Addie and members of her generation did and did so through the local “Saturday Club”,  at Rockport Lodge, and their workplaces.  Although the author deftly lets us know about Boston culture of the time, the story is grounded in themes of family, friendship, courtship, marriage, mother/daughter conflict, and maturation of a young woman balancing many stresses.  This book will be a rich source of discussion for many book groups. 

Meet Me at the Museum

By Anne Youngson

Published 2018

Read Jan 2026

This reader was introduced to this book while waiting in line to sign up for an immensely popular book discussion at a local library, the topic of which would be The Correspondent.   Interaction in the waiting line led to the recommendation of this book, another book written in the epistolary format.

Tina Hopgood, the wife of a farmer in England, and Anders Larsen, a curator at a Danish museum are the correspondents in this book.  A good friend of Tina has recently died and, it seems, their shared life-long dream of visiting the Tollund Man, a bog man from the Iron Age, at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark.  Tina writes to a professor at the museum who was involved in its excavation.  The professor has died but a curator at the museum, Anders Larsen, responds to her inquiry and suggests she visit the museum to see the exhibit as it’s never too late.  Thus commences a series of letters between these two individuals.

Over a long series of letters, the two correspondents evolve from information exchange about the Tollund Man and the like to sharing their losses and their disappointments as well as things they enjoy in their very different environments.  We learn that forty years ago, Tina’s unplanned pregnancy propelled her into a marriage with a farmer she likely didn’t even love at the time.  She discusses this early decision and the life she’s lived as a result.  Despite much daily activity and the gift of grandchildren, she finds herself lonely.  Anders’s wife had a number of problems and has recently died and he is now alone in his very neat and efficient home. 

The evolution of their letters led this reader to worry a bit about “emotional adultery” but an interesting twist in the story brings that worry to an end. 

Enjoy this fairly short read to learn about these interesting characters, their relationship, and the story twist.  You won’t be disappointed. 

The Correspondent

By Virginia Evans

Published 2025

Read Dec 2025

This book has been described as a “sleeper hit”.  Readers loved it and recommended it to others and the book’s readership increased like wildfire.  This reader put this book in the category of “my favorite book of the year”.  Why?

A.  This reader enjoys the epistolary style.  This website has already sung the praises of Lady Susan (read well before this book) and 84 Charing Cross Road (read right after this one).  In this book, most of the letters are by The Correspondent, but answers to some of her correspondence help flesh out the arc of several stories that are told in this book.  This reader finds this form of story telling quite engaging. 

B.  This reader really liked The Correspondent for a number of reasons.

1)  The Correspondent is aging.  At 73 she is beginning to suffer from congenital eye syndrome that is starting to impact her sight.  She is worried about her memory.  She is actively reflecting on her past.  The law partner with whom she spent her entire career, first in private law practice and then as his clerk to his judgeship, dies, and she is asked to speak at his memorial service.  She is confronting her role in the collapse of her marriage (which didn’t survive the accidental death of her youngest son at age 8) and in her strained relationship with her daughter.  She is dealing with new technology and its ramifications.  This reader is also retired and is attracted to interesting characters in this stage of their lives, especially those who are actively reflecting on their past. 

2)  Reading and writing are very important to The Correspondent.  Certainly, they were the primary tools of her trade while working.  But in addition to her law practice, she had used written correspondence throughout her life to interact with the world—her friends, family and people who interested her.  Her written words were chosen carefully and specifically to convey her thoughts and feelings.  Writing made her thoughts and feelings real. 

This approach resonates with this reader since she was trained as a scientist.  While creating tables and graphs and talking about them with others is useful work, the real work is not complete until the results and conclusions are documented.  The most critical work is deciding what words truly reflect the results and what conclusions can really be drawn and recorded.

3)  The book actually motivated this reader to a new action.  The Correspondent wrote to several authors and they responded.  This reader decided to try this.  In this case, the medium was email vs US postal mail because only the author’s email was readily available.  This reader spent quite some time formulating the letter.  The author responded! 

4)  The Correspondent and her sister-in-law both comment on the books they are reading, some of which this reader had already enjoyed.  The Correspondent’s fictional interaction with an author created another new action driven for this reader:  reading Lonesome Dove, a book she otherwise hadn’t considered, but will be recommended in an upcoming essay. 

4) There is quite a number of things going on in The Correspondent’s life which this reader will allow you to discover.  All of it quite believable for a woman her age.  Some of it resolved, some not, which is quite appreciated.  Not everything in life gets resolved and sometimes the resolutions are certainly not desired ones. 

In summary, it’s not surprising to this reader that this book has found its way into many readers’ hands and ears.  There is much to discuss!  Two of this reader’s book groups have already discussed it.  This reader will nominate it for her northern book group, after the waiting lines for library copies shrink.