I think I might need to start making a list of where I heard about certain books, that way once they are finally available at the e-library I will know why I wanted to read them in the first place. This book overall was fairly good, but it was strange an a bit manipulative and I wonder who told me to read it. “The Lonely Hearts Hotel” is a book set in and around the Great Depression and follows the lives of two orphans in […]
Too many subplots that could have been novels themselves
Seems like books about orphans are a “thing” lately. Well, I can only think of Orphan Train, which I read last year, and of course the main character in A Little Life, also read last year…but I digress already. This orphan is a Jewish girl in a New York City Jewish orphanage system in the 1920’s and onward, placed there with her brother after her father accidentally murders her mother and takes off for the road. Early in her life, Rachel Rabinowitz and her other […]
Premise of US orphan history: awesome. Book: less awesome.
This was the first selection of the new year for my book club, chosen somewhat for length, something short to start off the year, and because there were book club questions in the back of the book. I have picked books to read for worse reasons, so away we went. Though fiction, this book is the fictionally telling of what to me was an unknown part of American history From 1854 to 1929, orphan children in New York were placed on trains by a group […]
Catching up on the classics: Silas Marner
I always find it hard to rate and review classics. Usually they’re classics for a reason, I usually enjoy them just fine, and at the very least I appreciate them. Earlier in the year I read Middlemarch, which was wonderful and long, and I thought I should expand my Eliot horizons. Silas Marner is much shorter than Middlemarch, and a much easier read. You probably know the basics: old, miserly bachelor happens to become the caretaker of an orphan, who teaches him the True Meaning […]