I am ready for a new beginning. My September prompt is not in need of any tweaking at all this time around. I could use a story with characters looking for a new situation or a new path in life or some kind of a new start. My stack was much larger, but I have managed to whittle it down to a (mere six) novels. There is a modern classic, some historical fiction, a couple with romantic leanings and one YA.
Josephine Kamm's Peace, Perfect Peace -- "Set just after World War II, Peace, Perfect Peace is a poignant and humorous tale about women readjusting and rebuilding their lives after the upheavals of war."
Virginia Bailey's The Fourth Shore -- "Liliana is sure she was on the brink of a great adventure, but what awaits her is not the Mediterranean idyll of cocktail parties, smart dances, dashing officers and romantic intrigues she had imagined. Instead she finds a world of persecution, violence, repression, corruption and deceptions both great and small."
Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion -- "Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life."
Nicky Pellegrino's Delicious -- "Italy, 1964. Maria Domenica is the eldest daughter in the Carrozza family from the tiny southern village of San Giulio. At 16, Maria's life is limited to the confines of her mother's rural kitchen (where she bakes bread every morning, the way the Carrozza women always have), and the Caffe Angeli, a place of friendship, strong espresso and famous ricotta sfolgliatelle. Her parents have high hopes for their beautiful first-born, but she has other plans."
Rosy Thornton's The Tapestry of Love -- "A rural idyll: that's what Catherine is seeking when she sells her house in England and moves to a tiny hamlet in the Cevennes mountains. With her divorce in the past and her children grown, she is free to make a new start, and her dream is to set up in business as a seamstress."
Dandi Daley Mackall's Eva Underground -- "The year 1978 has been a pretty good one for Eva Lott. She has a terrific best friend, she's dating the best-looking guy in school, and she just made the varsity swim team. So when her widowed dad says it's time for them to move, she's not exactly thrilled. And when he tells her that he intends to move to Communist Poland to help with a radical underground movement . . . Well, it's all downhill from there. Soon Eva has been transplanted from her comfortable Chicago suburb to a land that doesn't even have meat in its stores, let alone Peter Frampton records."
They all sound good. Maybe I will choose more than one to make up for a month or two this year where the book sits unread or languishing. I have mostly thrown up my hands in submission that this year is just an off year for a lot of things (reading included), but that does not mean I can't make the best of what is left and just enjoy the stories that do pull me in! Fresh books for a fresh month for a hopefully fresh start to the rest of my reading year.