Charity's Reading Log

True Love and Other Lies by Wendy Gaskell - Claire Spencer is a travel writer (Sassy Seniors magazine, thankyouverymuch!) who has little use for those fairy tales about love at first sight. Claire doesn't fit the mold of a typcial beauty, tending more toward Amazon than Cover Girl. On a trip to London to gather fodder for a story, she meets Jack, the heart-breakingly handsome man in the next seat. Ulitmately Jack asks her to dinner, and Claire automatically starts looking for "the catch." Claire accepts, and finds herself head-over-heels for Jack.

On the flip-side, Claire is also in London to see Maddy, her best friend. Maddy is exactly the opposite of Claire...beautifully gorgeous. Cover Girl incarnate. Maddy's life, however, has been turned upside down by a man for the first time, too...one that she wants but doesn't want her. Whodoya think it is? Of course....Jack! How is Claire going to maintain her friendship with Maddy when for the first time she's beginning to believe in the fact that love actually might have found her?

This was a fun, light-hearted read that, honestly, confirmed many of my more covert suspicions about "love". Gaskell uses her wit to make sense of the absurdity of it all.


The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd - I waited for this book for ages and couldn't get it read quickly enough. Sue Monk Kidd is one of my most favorite authors, usually quite a feat to achieve, and usually never after only writing one book. However, The Secret Life of Bees was a piece of artful writing and so anything she writes, ever again, will be on my "to-read" list. This book, although a bit slow at the start, picks up with the wonderfully lyrical prose from her previous book.

Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged Atlanta housewife and part-time artist, has been in a funk since her daughter Dee left for college. When the phone rings one night, she is sure it is Dee, but instead it is a call beckoning her to her mother's side. Her mother, who never recovered from tragically losing her husband years earlier, has purposefully cut off her finger with a cleaver. So Jesse returns to Egret Island, the site of her childhood, to care of her ailing mother and, hopefully in the process, find her lost artistic inspiration and a renewed love for her husband.

The story unfolds as Jessie attempts to care for a mother who doesn't want to be cared for, with the help of her mother's quirky but faithful cast of friends. To complicate matters, Jessie finds herself strangely relieved to be free of a husband she loves-and undeniably attracted to Brother Thomas, a monk at the island's Benedictine monastery. Jessie, who has never understood why her mother is still so affected by her father's death, begins to suspect that she's keeping a terrible secret, and the unfolding of that secret is where this book is at its best.