WickedGirl's Book Notes

Willa Cather's American masterpiece about Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, told through the nostalgic memories of childhood friend Jim Burden. Luminous prose, elegiac tone, and one of literature's most enduring portraits of pioneer life and immigrant experience.

The second Kendra Michaels thriller from Iris and Roy Johansen opens with a multi-car pile-up on San Diego's Cabrillo Bridge that Kendra - a music therapist who was blind from birth until experimental surgery gave her sight in her twenties - sees instantly is no accident, and the case turns personal fast when the new killings start mirroring her own most famous past cases. Fast-paced commercial suspense with a strong premise undercut by formula and an obligatory romance beat.

The fifth installment of Alexander McCall Smith's beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series finds Mma Ramotswe investigating suitors, solving mysteries, and contemplating life's complexities with wisdom, humor, and her traditional build. Gentle, charming, and surprisingly profound.

Rainbow Rowell's beloved YA novel about two misfit teenagers who fall in love on the school bus in 1986 Omaha. A tender, painful story about first love, abuse, racism, and finding someone who sees you - praised for representation but not without controversy.

In 184 CE the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke the Han dynasty, and the next hundred years of warlord chaos resolved into three rival kingdoms - Cao Cao's Wei in the north, Liu Bei's Shu-Han in the west, Sun Quan's Wu in the south - before the Sima family quietly inherited everything and reunified China as the Jin dynasty in 280 CE; more than a thousand years later, in the 14th century, Luo Guanzhong took the long accumulation of historical chronicle, opera, and storytellers' embellishment around that century and produced one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which Moss Roberts has rendered into 2,300-plus unabridged English pages featuring the Oath of the Peach Garden between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei; the strategist Zhuge Liang treated as something close to a demigod; the Battle of Red Cliffs as the inflection point; and hundreds of warlords, surrenders, sieges, and stratagems any modern Western reader is going to have to commit to in a way most modern novels do not ask for.

Norman Paperman - a middle-aged Broadway press agent who has just had a heart attack and decided he is done with New York - flies to the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo (which the people who live there still call by its old British name, Kinja) with his millionaire friend Lester Atlas, buys a faltering resort called the Gull Reef Club, leaves his wife Henny and daughter Hazel back home while he tries to make a go of it, nearly drowns on his first day and is rescued by a Navy frogman named Bob Cohn, takes up with a former actress named Iris Tramm who lives at the club, watches the hotel's water and electrical systems fail in sequence, watches Atlas fire his irreplaceable handyman Hippolyte while he is briefly off-island, and ends the novel agreeing with Henny to sell the hotel and go home. Herman Wouk's 1965 comic novel, drawn from the six years he and his wife actually spent running a small hotel in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.