Peachy Reads

Not since Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle has a memoir of a hard-scrabble childhood taken the literary world so by storm.  Tara is "home-schooled" by her fundamentalist Mormon parents in the hinterlands of Idaho.  Never entering a formal educational setting until she is 17, it becomes the turning point in her life.  But her childhood was a education in its own right, and this memoir lays it bare-- the end-of-days cult of her father, the rejection not only of public schooling but also the medical profession, the isolation from relatives, the cruel inter-sibling abuse she suffers.  Nevertheless, it's a beautifully written story.

French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani has crafted a plot that is every working couple’s worst nightmare—a nanny who walks into the life of their family and seems to make everything perfect… until it all goes so utterly wrong.   The novel is not for the faint-hearted, but it is skillfully written and a suspenseful, horrifying tale that the reader will not soon forget. The Perfect Nanny  has become something of an international publishing sensation and won the Prix Goncourt,a big literary prize in France which is sort of the equivalent of the National Book Award.   

Juliet is a young woman in war time London.   She is recruited by the secret service, at first to transcribe recorded conversations of Nazi sympathizers, but then bit by bit she becomes more involved in the game of counterespionage, which eventually escalates with an unplanned murder.    Atkinson bookends the story with some timeshifts, which seems to be her signature.   I liked the story well enough, but the characters were a bit one-dimensional, in my opinion.   Well written and plotted, but maybe not her best.

I never saw the movie, but I saw the trailer enough times that it piqued my curiosity.   I’ve given up on edge-of-your-seat movies for many years now, but intense books I can still handle.   So when this title was available for download from my library’s ebook service, I was ready to read it.   Apparently the movie took many liberties with the book, seems like really only the concept survived the translation.   Anyway, here’s the gist of the novel—an exploratory team of several women researchers goes into the mysterious Area X where strange goings-on hint that nature is becoming monstrous, and humans are unwelcome intruders.   There is some pretty weird stuff going on, and when the biologist inhales some suspect spores, she begins to leave the human world behind.  Part of a trilogy.