Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

400 pages

Published June 2012 by Little, Brown and Company

Publisher's Summary: 

A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. What begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver, Penny Alistair, dead, and her twin brother in a coma. The other passengers, Penny's boyfriend, Jake, and her friend Demeter, are physically unhurt—but the emotional damage is overwhelming. Questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.

As summer unfolds, startling truths are revealed about the survivors and their parents, the secrets kept, promises broken, and hearts betrayed.

My Thoughts: 

I read my first Elin Hilderbrand book last fall, The Five-Star Weekend. You may recall I wasn't a fan and wasn't sure I'd read more of her work. But as I mentioned then, I own at least one of her books on my Nook and when I saw the cover of this one, I thought it might be perfect for the summer. It looks bright and light, does it not? 

I'd say it's a spoiler alert to tell you that this book is not, in fact, bright and light. But you'll know that if you've read the summary; clearly I had, once again, not read the summary before I launched into the book. 

Imagine that you're Penny's mother, who considered Penny her best friend. She is devastated, but needs to focus on her son, Hobby, who is shattered in the accident in ways that will change his life. Imagine, too, that there are a lot of questions as to why your daughter seems to have intentionally driven her boyfriend's vehicle over a cliff and what got said to her to upset her so much just before she got behind the wheel. Add to that the fact that Penny's boyfriend's father is also the man Penny's mom has been having a years long affair with - a man whose wife is deep in mourning still four years after the death of the baby she'd wanted for years before he was finally born. And Demeter, whose purse was found in the wreckage of the vehicle with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, who knows what made Penny so upset, who has no friends other than the three that were in the vehicle with her? She's about to spiral out of control without her parents having the slightest clue. 

Yeah, there's a lot going on here. Especially when you add in the fact that Nantucket is a relatively small town, where everyone knows everyone. It seems to make the healing more difficult instead of easier. 

Is it a perfect read? No. There were parts I thought dragged, maybe too much going on. But I was able to empathize with all of the characters and thought the relationships played out well. Even as dark as most of it is, I'm not giving anything away when I saw that things work out as well as they can. And, surprisingly for me, that's exactly what I wanted. 

Life: It Goes On - July 27

Happy Sunday! I really, really need to talk my boss into letting me work four-day weeks so the weekends aren't so short. Sunday always just feels like the day where you race around doing all of the things you didn't get done on Saturday and getting ready for the coming week. 

I still haven't even touched the desk I bought at that auction - it's living in my dining room, just off the front hall where it's a visible reminder that I need do something with it. I keep thinking "next weekend." It wasn't this weekend. Maybe I am getting old - I definitely don't get as much done in a weekend as I used to be able to get done!  The Big Guy, on the other hand, has knocked out getting the kitchen painted, which is making me so happy. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished B.A Shapiro's The Art Forger and just started Marie Benedict's Carnegie's Maid. Not too far into it yet, but I'm afraid I'm going to struggle with it. Fingers crossed because I really don't want to go to the effort of trying to find another book that I'm interested in that's available right now. 

Watched: We went to see Superman last night. Not the kind of movie that I usually pay to see in the theater, but it's summer so why not see a summer blockbuster. Still not sure if I liked it or not - maybe too much comedy in it and I'm not sure about the dog (that felt a little Disney-esque to me). 

Read: I'm about two-thirds of the way through Fredrik Backman's latest, My Friends. While I love his writing, this one took me a little while to get into the story. I am feeling like it runs on, but I am becoming quite attached to the characters. 

Made: It's summer and it's the week of Mini-him's bday so the food this week reflected that: caprese pasta, BLTs, Asian chicken salad (which is not a salad, but a pasta dish that Mini-him always wants for his bday) and red velvet cake. 

Enjoyed: Dinner Thursday night with Miss C's parents, the movie followed by dessert and drinks last night with friends, and birthday dinner today with Mini-him and Miss C. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I have a renewed interest in genealogy so I've pulled out all of my old paper files and I'm working on getting those organized so I can get everything uploaded and start researching again (let's be honest, I'm alway already researching because that's really the fun part!). 

The zinnias are bring in the 
monarchs! 

Thinking About: We're required to take five days of our PTO in one block and I need to figure out when I'm going to do that and what I'm going to do in that week. A vacation would be nice, but I think our kitchen was our vacation this year! I may end up painting cabinets during that week. Or trying to knock out a big organizing project around here - like the garage or photos or the basement. I'd say that would make me as happy as sitting on a beach, but nothing makes me happier than sitting on a beach. 

Feeling: Tired. My anti-depressant seems to be helping in the way it should be helping, but it makes me so tired that I tend to nap as much as possible. Not sure that's tenable long term. 

Looking forward to: Visits from family this week. 

Question of the week: If you had to take a week off of work but weren't going anywhere, what would you do? 

Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallander Series #1) by Henning Mankell

Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallander Series #1) by Henning Mankell

Read by Dick Hill

8 hours, 59 minutes

Published March 1997 by The New Press

Publisher's Summary: 

It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. 

Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.

My Thoughts: I've been hearing about the Kurt Wallander series for years (heck, I've even seen some the  PBS adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh). When I was looking for an audiobook that was available immediately, I wasn't so sure that this was going to work for me, though. I didn't know how graphic it might be, how tense it might make me. Lately I've been drawn more and more to softer fare in books. 

This one surprised me. I didn't find it overly graphic; which isn't to say that there's not some very brutal violence, but Mankell doesn't dwell on it or make it the focus of the book. Instead, Mankell spends a great deal of time focusing on developing his characters and the relationships between them so that while the tension is enough to pull the reader through the book, it is never overwhelming. 

Wallander is a complicated man. His mother died when he was young, his father (an artist who has painted essentially the same painting 7,000 times and makes a living doing that) is beginning to suffer from dementia and never lets Kurt forget how disappointed he is that Kurt chose to become a policeman, his wife has left him, he and his daughter are estranged and Kurt is not entirely sure why, he drinks too much, he eats too much junk food, and he has no moral qualms with having an affair with a married woman. He loves opera, has very few friends, is devoted to solving crimes, and, in this book at least, has a real problem with immigrants (which makes it a timely read but didn't help me to like him). 

Wallander screws up, puts himself in peril repeatedly, and doesn't solve the crime nearly as quickly as they do on television. Months pass between the night of the murder and Wallander and his team solving the case, but I appreciated that things didn't just fall into their laps - it felt much more realistic that way and allowed time to develop the relationships between Wallander and the other characters. 

Will I read more Kurt Wallander? Definitely. Although I wasn't ready to listen to the next book right on the heels of this one, it won't be long because I don't want to lose my familiarity with these characters. 

The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

352 pages 

Published April 2025 by Sourcebooks

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond recognition. Two days later, he dies in the hospital. His name is John Gilbert Hartman and he's just turned 15 years old. The police quickly arrest four suspects, all under the age of 21 and of Alaska Native and American Indian descent. Police lineup witnesses, trials follow, and all four men receive lengthy prison terms. Case closed. 

But journalist Brian Patrick O'Donoghue can't put the story out of his mind. When the opportunity arises to teach a class on investigative reporting, he finally digs into what happened to the "Fairbanks Four." A relentless search for the truth ensues as O'Donoghue and his students uncover the lies, deceit, and prejudice that put four innocent young men in jail.

The Fairbanks Four is the gripping story of a brutal crime and its sprawling aftermath in the frigid Alaska landscape. It's a story of collective action as one journalist, his students, and the Fairbanks indigenous community challenge the verdicts. It's the story of a broken justice system, and the effort required to keep hope alive. This is the story of the Fairbanks Four.

My Thoughts: 

Ever since Mini-me and Ms. S moved to Alaska, I've been drawn toward learning more about that state and its people, which is why this book initially caught my eye. But the subtitle is what really pulled me in. The more I read in general, the more aware I am of how often our justice system fails us as a society - corruption, racism, sloppy work, reliance on people who have a lot to gain by saying what the system wants them to say, society's expectation that crimes will be resolved quickly (fueled by watching it happen that way on t.v.). 

I made the mistake of reading this on my phone. I should know better - I don't think any book I've ever read entirely on my phone has ever gotten the fair shake it deserves and I feel certain that my opinion of this book would have been different if I'd have read it on my iPad. It wasn't helped, either, by the fact that I read it during a reading slump and never read it long enough at any one sitting to really get immersed in it. For me, it seemed to drag a bit at time and I got bogged down in trying to keep who was who straight. There are a lot of people involved in this story, from the four young men initially convicted of the murder, to the witnesses, the police, the attorneys, the judges, those working to free the young men, and those working with O'Donoghue to get to the truth of the murder. If I'd have been smart, I would have made myself a list. 

Do you ever watch Dateline or 48 Hours or any of those kinds of shows? If you do, then you're familiar with the way that, as details emerge and depending on who you're listening to, the truth seems to sway first one way and then the next. Even knowing going in (because of course this book wouldn't exist if this weren't true) that the four young men would eventually be exonerated, I still swayed back and forth. Certainly none of these young men were perfect angels, but it was clear early on that a desperately understaffed police department was being pressured to solve this case as quickly as possible by any means possible and that's what they did. 

O'Donoghue, left; the Fairbanks Four, right

O'Donoghue, who had been a newspaperman and then became a college professor, was convinced to look further into the case and used this case as a learning tool for his classes. Others in the native Alaskan community also took up the cause. Even so, it took 18 years of pressure and hundreds of man hours and digging for these men to be released. It took almost another decade before O'Donoghue was able to get the book published; not until the men won settlements from the city did the publisher agree that there was an ending to the story that made it worth publishing. 

As much as I struggled getting through the book (again, my fault more than the book's), it's the first book I've read in a long time that made me want to dig deeper. I discovered that the victim's brother still believes that the four men initially convicted were the real killers and he's extremely angry that they've not only gone free but have won settlements. It was brought home to me, once again, that when someone is released, it's hard to assimilate back into society - imagine how the outside world changed between 1997 and 2015. One of the men had a young daughter when he was imprisoned; by the time he got out, he had two granddaughters. Nothing can bring back everything that these men lost while they were behind bars. 

Life: It Goes On - July 20

Happy Sunday! We are having a very slow start to our day; I've even taken a short nap less than two hours after I crawled out of bed. Felt good but it's time to get productive now. 

First up, get things back up on top of the cupboards. I had to take everything down so Big Guy could paint the walls above the cupboards. Now the paint is dry and everything has been cleaned and I can put that part of the kitchen back together. It would be quick work if I just put things back up where they'd been...but, of course, I'm not doing that because why would I do things the easy way. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers and then spent a couple of days trying to land on something that grabbed me quickly. Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men didn't do it. Neither did Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisted (even with Jeremy Irons reading it), both books I've been wanting to read for a long time. Neither did Tracy Chevalier's The Glassmaker. Finally I landed on B. A. Shapiro's The Art Forger which did stick; a little road trip yesterday has me about half way through that now. A friend recommended Marie Benedict, so I've queued up her Carnegie's Maid to listen to next. 

Watched: I had the t.v. to myself a lot this week so I watched some Queer Eye, Geek Girl (so not my usual thing but mindless so easy to watch while I'm doing other things), Oklahoma (when you've seen something a couple dozen time, it's easy to "watch" it from other rooms) and Once, because I wanted to see the movie that has a song I've loved for years in it. 

Read: I'm happy to report that I'm actually reading again! I finished Elin Hilderbrand's Summerland (so unlike the book cover!) and started Fredrik Backman's My Friends. 

Made: A sausage and veggie pasta, kielbasa and sauerkraut, fettuccine Alfredo, and caprese spaghetti. Wow - until just now I didn't realize how much pasta I'd eaten last week!

Enjoyed: Book club Tuesday, three evenings to myself (love BG but also love quiet nights to myself), and dinner and drinks last night with friends. We went to a Greek place that's beloved here...where I had pastichio (which includes pasta!); then we grabbed drinks at the bar where Miss C works a couple of nights a week. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: Yesterday I picked up a desk I "won" on an auction (that was an adventure!) to replace the one Miss H has been using since I bought it on Facebook Marketplace twelve years ago for $10. If I were keeping it, I'd just clean it up; it's in great shape and pretty. But she's not a fan of its color so it will either get stripped and stained a different color or painted. 

Thinking About: Cabinet colors...still. Some color samples arrived this week so they have been moving around the kitchen, trying different times of day and light. I think I have the base cabinet choice narrowed down to two colors but I'm not at all sure about the uppers yet. You wouldn't think picking a white would be so hard, would you? 

Feeling: I sort of accidentally stumbled into some family genealogy stuff a week ago and now I'm feeling the pull to get back to researching BG's father's side of the family again. I'd done a lot of work on it many years ago and then set it aside entirely. Now I've found some new information from almost 350 years ago that has me excited. 

Looking forward to: Hoping to have our first big tomato ripe this week - there is nothing better on a BLT than a freshly picked tomato! 

Question of the week: Do you garden? If so, what's your favorite thing to grow? 

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Read by Arthur Darvill and Vanessa Kirby

9 hours, 54 minutes

Published January 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped.

Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story…

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.

My Thoughts: 

Recently I've had the television to myself more and I've been searching for rom-coms like the ones they made in the 1990's (think Notting Hill, Two Weeks Notice, 10 Things I Hate About You) to no avail. I'm not necessarily looking for that same kind of story; I'm looking for those stories that truly match up romance with comedy, especially those with snappy dialogue. While a movie adaptation of Good Material won't have that same kind of happy ending, there is plenty of heart and humor here that I think would make a great movie. 

I listened to this one and was very much enjoying Andy's side of the story. Sure he's a grown man that needs to accept the fact that it's time to get a big boy job that he can support himself with, notably because his comedy career is going no where and he's unwilling to make any change to his routine. He's grown comfortable with his life and that's part of the problem. In the aftermath of the breakup, he falls into all of the usual traps. But I couldn't help but like him and root for him to grow up...and get over it, to be honest. 

In the back of my mind, as I listened to Andy's story, I kept wondering when that female narrator was going to come in...and then she did, telling us the story from Jen's point of view. And here's the thing, Jen does still love Andy. But Jen can see that, even if Andy changes, theirs is a relationship that simply won't give either of them what they need in life. 

I feel like I may have liked this book more than a lot of other reviewers, many of whom found that Andy was a flat character. But he was surrounded by characters, in my opinion, that helped flesh out his side of the story and make what had happened between Andy and Jen clearer. One reviewer, who read the book in print, felt the switch to Jen's voice was jarring; but, of course, knowing that there were two narrators, I was expecting it and looking forward to hearing her side of the story. Because there are always two sides to a story. 

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Read by Edoardo Ballerina

15 hours, 23 minutes

Published July 2024 by Random House Publishing

Publisher's Summary: 

“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

My Thoughts: 

I saw this one on numerous best-of-2024 lists (and have heard great things about Brodesser-Akner's Fleishman Is In Trouble) so I requested it from the library. It ended up being a read/listen combination because I struggled with this one and my loan timed out. 

The book opens with the kidnapping and return of Carl Fletcher and the immediate aftermath. It's fast paced and drew me in immediately. And then we moved to sections about each of his children as grown adults. To say they were screwed up is an understatement. Reading Beamer's story was, for me, very uncomfortable and a little disturbing and I almost gave up on the book before I finished reading his part. If something bad could possibly happen, it did; but each of the kids (and their mother and grandmother) brought a lot of it on themselves. I began to feel less and less sorry for these people. I get that their lives had been irrevocably changed with the kidnapping, but I couldn't help but feel that at least one of them might have overcome it all. 

There was a part of me that really hoped that things wouldn't work out for them. That they would all have to learn how to get real jobs and live like normal people. But, of course, rich people hardly ever have the roof fall entirely in on them and this story is no exception. The thing that saved this one for me was that Brodesser-Akner had a couple of surprises up her sleeve that totally took me by surprise and I always do like a book that can surprise me. 

Life: It Goes On - July 13

Happy Sunday! What a noisy week we've had here between several nighttime thunderstorms that woke us up and work being done in the kitchen for three days. One night we had no water in the kitchen, the next we had no stove or microwave, every thing that's normally in the top drawers or out on the counters is in boxes in the dining room. I don't know how people survive months long renovations! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers. Next up is Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men...I think. At least I'm going to start it on audio, but I'm wondering if it might be one I'd be better off reading digitally. 

Watched: The first season of Running Point, a couple of episodes of Only Murders In The Building, and Wicked. 

Read: I'm still reading Elin Hilderbrand's Summerland, but I'm going to have to get that one finished up soon because Friday I picked up Fredrik Backman's My Friends, which I'm anxious to get to. I wanted to get the audiobook version but I'd be waiting months for it yet. 

Made: I haven't cooked a single thing all week! The Big Guy cooked a couple of nights and we've eaten out the rest of the week. 

Enjoyed: Guys, I picked out the materials for our kitchen weeks ago and since then I've been afraid that I wouldn't like them or they wouldn't look good. Now that everything is in, it makes me so happy to walk into my kitchen! 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: It's not that we weren't planning on painting the kitchen walls, but now that the new tile is up, I'm going to have to paint sooner than later. Luckily we already have the paint so we can get started today. 

Thinking About: Paint colors for the cabinets. Because we can't stop once we've started! 

Feeling: Not as relaxed as I had expected to feel after a four-day weekend. When I scheduled these days off, there was nothing on the calendar and I thought it would be a nice, quiet time. Instead, because BG was off visiting clients the better part of the time people were here, I had to be "on" AND it was non-stop noisy for the big chunks of the past three days. I'm going to need to schedule another long weekend soon. 

Looking forward to: Book club this week, where we'll be discussing Remarkably Bright Creatures. 

Question of the week: Now that we've past the half way point of the year, what's your favorite book so far in 2025? 

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

384 pages

Published May 2013 by Skyhorse Publishing

Publisher's Summary: On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme—better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry—and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora’s determination to keep them apart. Their incredible story made shocking headlines around the world and would provide the subject for Peter Jackson’s Academy Award–nominated film, Heavenly Creatures. 

A sensational trial followed, with speculations about the nature of the girls’ relationship and possible insanity playing a key role. Among other things, Parker and Hulme were suspected of lesbianism, which was widely considered to be a mental illness at the time. This mesmerizing book offers a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial and shares dramatic revelations about the fates of the young women after their release from prison. With penetrating insight, this thorough analysis applies modern psychology to analyze the shocking murder that remains one of the most interesting cases of all time.

My Thoughts: 

I'm playing catch up on reviews so I'm going to just do a quick bullet point on this one. 

• I don't remember where I first heard about this book but the idea that a well-known author had been involved in a murder as a young woman intrigued me. How, I wondered, had she gotten past that to become a respected writer? 
• By the time I actually got around to reading the book, I'd forgotten that Anne Perry was actually Juliet Hulme and thought that she was involved in some other way. Except that I always, always look at the photo inserts in a book before I start reading so I quickly figured it out. 
• Both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker had difficult childhoods that caused them to have attachment issues with their mothers. Neither mother was ideal - Honorah Rieper ran hot and cold and Hilda Hulme struggled to connect with her daughter at all. Juliet was considered quite pretty and very bright - she thought perhaps even more highly about herself because of this than did anyone else. Both girls clearly struggled with mental health issues. 
• That being said, so little was known about mental health as recently as the 1950's that both doctors and the judicial system struggled to explain how two girls who showed no remorse and clearly understood that what they did was wrong could also be mentally ill. Also, the idea that these two young ladies might be lesbians was a big story - inherently this seemed to make them worse people but did it mean that they were just worse people or even more mentally ill? It seemed that it must be one or the other. 
• If this happened today, it would still be big, international news. We'd still struggle with the idea of matricide and how two young girls could be so remorseless. 
• As bad as the penal system was in the 1950's, as terrible as the conditions in the places where these young women were sent were, they were both allowed to continue their educations and actually served very little time, relative to the crime they'd committed. What was even more strange was the fact that they were both treated so differently when they were released. Parker was force to stay in New Zealand on parole, while Hulme (who took on the name Perry because her mother had taken that name on after she became involved with a new man by that name) was allowed to travel to Britain. 
• The two women dealt with the aftermath of what they had done very differently. Parker appeared to be very repentant and lived a quiet, religious life, trying to stay out of the spotlight. Perry (whose name evolved to Anne Perry) was able to live without anyone knowing about her past and became quite wealthy and well known with her writing. In many interviews, after it was discovered who she was, she showed very little remorse. 
• Director Peter Jackson got his big break when he and his wife produced a film adaptation of the case. Heavenly Creatures starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. Now I want to track that movie down. 
• Reviews on this one are very mixed. Some think it's terrific. I thought it particularly dragged in the middle and that Graham tried to stuff in everything that he'd learned about the case. At the end of the book, we learned what had happened to all of the people who had played a part in the trial - honestly, I didn't really care. I don't know what that says about me. Did I want it to be more sensational? Not particularly. But I also thought it was a story that should have better held my attention. 

Mini-Review: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Read by Kirsten Potter

5 hours, 57 minutes

Published June 2016 by Hogarth Shakespeare Series

Publisher's Summary: 

Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.

Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.

When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?

My Thoughts: 

Vinegar Girl is the third book in Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare project, with contemporary writers retelling Shakespeare plays. Vinegar Girl is very loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. 

Here Kate is less a shrew and  more of a woman trapped by circumstances. While she is by no means a willing participant in her father's plot to find a wife for Pyotr to keep him from being deported, she's lured by the idea of a way out of her father's house, out of having to mother her fifteen-year-old sister. Truly, her father is something of a mad scientist, who has the family eating a hash meal every evening, who has no idea how to take care of himself or his youngest, who relies entirely on Kate to keep the household afloat. Can she be abrupt and a little too honest some of the time? Yes, she certainly can. But who can blame her? And Pyotr, while under the impression that he'll be the boss in the marriage, is also quite a nice guy when it comes right down to it. In this version of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate isn't so much broken, as she is presented with an opportunity that allows her to become a better version of her natural self. 

It's a little on the light side; but, overall, I enjoyed it. Now that I've finally gotten around to this one, I'll be looking for others in the series. 

The other books in the project are: 

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of The Tempest

Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, a retelling of King Lear

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson, a retelling of The Winter's Tale

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier, a retelling of Othello

Life: It Goes On - July 6

Happy Sunday! Hope you have all gotten to have an extra long weekend and enjoyed it. We enjoyed the neighbors' annual fireworks show on Thursday night then got up early Friday to go hear my dad give his annual Fourth of July speech at the facility he lives in. Then we headed down to Kansas City to see Miss H. Came home last evening so that we could have a full day at home to get caught up on things around here before we head back to work tomorrow - love when you can work both fun and productivity in to a weekend. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished Long Island Compromise and started Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers (definitely not my usual read but I'm actually enjoying it - it's the first in his Wallander series).

Watched: Friday night with Miss H we watched several episodes of Dateline and last night a couple of episodes of Shrinking. We're down to one episode and then we'll have to wait months before the next season is released. 

Read: I finally finished Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century and started Elon Hilderbrand's Summerland, expecting something light and fluffy. Nope - starts with the death of Nantucket's bright and shining teen. 

Made: Friday was Miss C's birthday so I made her a German chocolate cake, as well as a second chocolate cake (because I don't like German chocolate cake), and homemade ice cream. 

Enjoyed: Thursday we had Mini-him, Miss C, a couple of their friend, and a couple of our friends over to watch the neighbors' fireworks show and then enjoyed dessert at our place. Friday we got to spend some time with Big Guy's cousin and some of her family (they live not all that far from Miss H) - it's been far to long since we've seen them. Then we went out to dinner with our adopted K.C. family, which is always fun. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I have a couple of days off this week, which I'll spend putzing around the house while the crews come in to do their part of the renovations in our kitchen. Counters, sink/faucet and backsplash should be done by this time next weekend. 

Thinking About: Paint colors. Once the counters and backsplash are in, then it's time to start painting (ok, realistically, we should have done that first, but we didn't) and I still haven't decided on colors. The cupboards and walls will all need to be painted. 

Feeling: Excited and nervous - what if I hate what I picked out once it's installed?! 

Looking forward to: Another long weekend - I have been so bad about taking time off and the burn out is  really starting to show. 

Question of the week: Have you ever painted kitchen cupboards? We are going to do them ourselves, which might be the thing I'm most nervous about.