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Book Reviewed by:From San Francisco to Savannah, Montana to Texas, Amanda Eyre Ward’s characters are united in their fervent search to find a place where they truly belong. Her stories are imbued with humor, clear-eyed insight, and emotional richness.
From San Francisco to Savannah, Montana to Texas, Amanda Eyre Ward’s characters are united in their fervent search to find a place where they truly belong. Annie, a librarian in a small mining town, must choose between the only home she’s ever known and the possibility of a new future.
Casey, a suburban New Yorker with a wry sense of humor, braves the dating scene after losing her husband. And in six linked stories spanning a decade of her life, Lola Wilkerson navigates elopement, motherhood, and lingering questions about who she wants to be when she grows up.
Whether exploring the fierceness of a mother’s love or the consolations of marriage, Amanda Eyre Ward’s stories are imbued with humor, clear-eyed insight, and emotional richness.
Ward’s stories offer entertaining, light reading punctuated by spurts of messy reality. The mix of heartache and humor, blended with sometimes outlandish circumstances will likely appeal to female readers like me, and most especially to those who are mothers... Negative and positive are nearly balanced in these stories and though we cannot expect the same in real life, this evenness makes for hopeful reading...continued
Full Review
(755 words)
(Reviewed by Stacey Brownlie).
Saudi Oil Communities
One of the stories in the Lola series finds Lola and her husband living in a Saudi Arabian compound for employees of the British Petroleum oil corporation. Oil companies have operated such managed communities in strategic areas of operation around the world for much of the 20th century and continue to do so today. Dhahran is the largest of four communities run by the Saudi oil company Aramco. Children of Aramco employees ("Aramcons") call themselves "Aramco brats," and their communities resemble military bases in many ways, with common areas, swimming pools, shopping centers, and schools. Aramco even produces its own magazine called Saudi Aramco World, which is published in the United States by an Aramco subsidiary....
If you liked Love Stories in This Town, try these:
by Mary McGarry Morris
Published 2010
Nora Hammond is a woman blessed with the perfect life: a charming husband, two bright teenage children, a successful career. But Nora's comfortable existence threatens to unravel when she learns of her husband's longtime affair, and a sordid incident from her youth returns with terrifying force.
The School of Essential Ingredients
by Erica Bauermeister
Published 2010
A lesson in cake-making leads to reflections on a marriage; tortillas teach a girl to believe in herself. A man learns about love while creating tiramisu. The School of Essential Ingredients follows the lives of eight cooking students and their teacher in a class that meets in Lillian’s restaurant kitchen.
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas--a place ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
