Just as with One Day, Nicholls surprised me. This book was so much more than I expected, even though Nicholls tells you in the first couple of pages exactly what it’s about. Us is the story of Douglas, in his fifties, whose wife wakes him up in the middle of the night to tell him…
I always appreciate hearing the views of other people who’ve decided not to have children. This is a collection of sixteen essays by writers about that choice, including one from Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin. What’s nice about this book is the variety of views and experiences. The authors are…
Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, and the basis for a recent miniseries starring Frances McDormand. It’s a book that falls somewhere between a novel and short stories, a trend I’m seeing a lot of lately. The stories take place in the small town of Crosby, Maine, and Olive is the…
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It has a lot going for it. The book is set on a remote island in Alaska, where Ray is raising his teenage granddaughter, Sitka, and mourning the loss of his wife. His daughter Jenny (Sitka’s mom) went to jail some years ago and…
When I was thinking about not having children, in my early thirties, Laura Carroll’s book Families of Two was one I found helpful — and believe me when I tell you there weren’t a lot of resources out there. Her book interviewed more than thirty couples who could be described as living fulfilling, happily married…
The Book Stop 