Book Amnesia – Reading Books Twice

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, MemoryLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago someone (unidentified) posted a comment to one of my book reviews of March 2022:

The first book, Time Tunnel: Twin Towers was well done. Empire was not. I know science fiction can be interesting, but Todd’s “Empire” is molded into pure unrealistic fantasy. Worse, it shows a real left leaning bias. It portrays southern people, particularly Texans as far right nationalists and stupid. Todd chose “Empire” to change history at Wounded Knee. He even uses the “stolen land” phrase as if the native Americans were not as bad, when in fact the war like tribes, stole land, murdered, raped and enslaved peaceful tribes. Todd’s preachy revisionist utopian fantasy is just that. One army female officer is portrayed as a special forces soldier. Fantasy yes, plausible? No. It is a shame Empire was science fiction with ridiculous plot. I haven’t read ” Eclipse”yet, I hope it is not looney left wing propaganda again.

I had to check, because I didn’t remember the books, so I checked my trusty log and found that I reviewed the series of three Time Tunnel books all within a week in March of 2022. Here are the reviews:

Time Tunnel: The Twin Towers

Time Tunnel: The Empire

Time Tunnel: Eclipse

I wrote those only about four years ago, and when I read them again, I could not remember anything about those books. Is it my memory that’s failing? Is it that I just read too many books and they all blend together over time? Is it that these books were not very good and therefore didn’t leave a lasting impression? Whatever it is, I was intrigued, and I simply picked up The Twin Towers again last week and read it again. I liked it again. Re-reading it, there were passages that I remembered, vignettes only, that reminded me I had read the story, but I didn’t remember enough that it spoiled my second reading.

One of the passages I remembered was good enough I thought I’d quote it here:

Annika is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot, flying a General (an African American) out of a battle zone in Iraq. To pass the time during the flight, they chat:

“Forward Operating Base Cobra. Roger that,” repeated Annika as she banked the Blackhawk east-northeast toward the new destination.

“So, what’s your story, Captain?” asked the general.

“The short version is that I tried to get into Special Forces, but I was denied because of a birth defect.”

“What’s that?”

“Born without a penis.”

The general nodded. “If it’s any consolation, Captain, we black folks know a thing or two about bias.

I have read a number of books multiple times – I’ll have to do a post about that sometime – but never because I could not remember the first time. This was unique.

I have committed to myself that I review every book I read partly for this reason – so I read more conscientiously and remember more about the books. It certainly didn’t work this time, for these three books. But it did validate my practice to review and log all the books, so I can quickly look them up and re-read if necessary.

And now for my memory…..

 

 

Fear – Never Forget

On By Norbert HauptIn AtrocitiesLeave a comment

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse and U.S. citizen who was shot and killed by federal border agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026.

Pretti protested. He was a caring person who wanted to help others. He didn’t agree with the practices of the government. He believed the government had turned against its own citizens. He was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry a firearm. Video analyses and media investigations indicate that a federal officer removed his weapon from his holster or waistband seconds before he was shot. Pretti has been vilified by the right-wing media and the federal government.

In contrast, Kyle Howard Rittenhouse is an American man who gained national attention at age 17 for shooting three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, two fatally, amid protests and riots in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all five felony charges on November 19, 2021. He is currently working as a full-time employee at Gulf Coast Gun & Outdoors in Milton, Florida.

Rittenhouse is alive.

Pretti is dead.

Below an unfinished painting I did in 1980, showing a shooting of German Jews by government agents in the 1930s, titled “Fear – unfinished”.

12/80 Oil 45×65

Movie Review: The Weight (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half Stars1 Comment

Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) was a single father of a very young girl in 1933, four years into the Great Depression. He had no job, he lost his apartment, and in the desperate struggle to find a roof over their heads he was attacked by thugs and eventually arrested and hauled off to a hard labor camp in the back county of Oregon. Knowing that his daughter, in the custody of the state, would soon be adopted away from him, he was desperate.

When widespread bank failures during the depression made people lose trust in paper money and hoard gold, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933. It required U.S. citizens to surrender their gold coins, bullion, and certificates to the Federal Reserve for $20.67 per ounce, in an effort to control the economy by removing gold out of private hands. After the seizure, the price of hold was raised to $35.00 per ounce.

There were many gold mines in Oregon, and people tried to steal or smuggle gold away before the government could take it from them.

Murphy and several of his companion inmates were coerced into smuggling a fortune in gold from one mine across impenetrable wilderness in rural Oregon. With fortunes of gold in their backpacks, and lawlessness all around them, things quickly got out of hand.

The Weight has a powerful soundtrack. Sometimes it was not music, but just loud noise to create tension and pressure. The music and noise were so loud, I wished I had brought my earplugs (which I use at every concert). Loud it was, but it was also immersive and intensive and it helped the movie. I walked out in a daze, glad I didn’t have to live through the Great Depression, aware of the fragility of our economic system, empathetic to the love of a father for his daughter and the length to which he will go to save her. The movie left me stunned for a while, not sure what to think of it.

My wife gave it two stars, I am upping it a bit.

 

Book Review: Calder Chronicles (Book 1) – by Robert W. Lamont

On By Norbert HauptIn Books (not finished reading)2 Comments

A friend recently mentioned that he had read a book “about sailing” by a local author in Fallbrook, California, where he lived. Reading the work of local authors, someone you might run into at a gathering, is something I will definitely do. I picked up Book 1 of Calder Chronicles. It is a series of four books.

The story starts in 1680 in Guildford, England. Delmar Calder is a 12-year-old boy, the second son of a landowner. In those days, the first son inherited the estate, daughters were married off to hopefully rich men of equal or higher station, but the other sons had to fend for themselves. Delmar was dyslexic and therefore didn’t excel academically. Without his father’s permission and blessing, he got himself a post as a midshipman on board of a royal warship and sailed away. It’s a coming of age story.

It is well-written and entertaining. When I got to about 30 percent I realized that while it was a fairly good book, and while I learned about history in the 1600s, I still was somewhat uninterested. The book was just – entertaining. Nothing more. So I put it aside and left it as a “book not finished reading.”

If you really want to read a superb book on sailing and some history of California, I highly recommend Richard Henry Dana’s book Two Years Before the Mast.

There is nothing wrong with the Calder Chronicles. But there are too many books to read and not enough time, so I have to choose. And I chose to move on.

As always with books not finished reading, I don’t rate them.

 

Book Review: Theo of Golden – by Allen Levi

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Four Stars7 Comments

Bestow: to convey as a gift

Usually used with on or upon
Example: the university bestowed an honorary degree upon her.
— Merriam Webster Dictionary

I came in possession of Theo of Golden under circuitous circumstances. My good friends Jayne and John bestowed upon me the hardcopy book for my birthday last month. It was in a hotel lobby. My wife surprised me with their presence for my birthday dinner out. When I got home, I put the book onto my reading stack in the living room, committing to pick it up when I finished what I was currently reading. Then I went on a trip and during the trip I finished the audio book I was then listening to, and while on the road, I randomly picked up the next recommendation in my queue in Audible: Theo of Golden.  I started listening while driving. I didn’t make the connection that the hardcopy book from Jayne and John, sitting on my reading stack at home, was the same book, until I got back days later.

As a result, Theo of Golden came to me in two different channels fortuitously at the same time. It was definitely meant for me.

When you read my ratings key for books with 4 stars, you find:

Must read. Inspiring. Classic. Want to read again. I learned profound lessons. Just beautiful. I cried.

Normally I start my book reviews with an excerpt of the book, before I give my opinions. Here I just have to start the other way around.

I cried – Bill, a friend of ours, as we discussed getting older, said that all he had to do is watch a movie with a dog dying and he teared up. As I get older, I find myself much more emotional, too. Is it just age or am I really getting softer? Be that as it may, I don’t remember ever having that many tears when reading a book as I just did reading (and listening to) Theo of Golden. The last time might have been in the fall of 1992 reading The Bridges of Madison County.

Just beautiful – Theo lives in an idyllic world of music, art, nature, books, friendships and love. While there is adversity in his life, like in all of ours, there is mostly beauty, and I picked up some of that beauty in the book.

I learned profound lessons – Theo of Golden made me think about my life, and the stage my life is in. What could I change today to make my world better for me, and  more importantly, for the people in my life, and for those people, I have not met yet but I am due to get to know next. One night after listening to the book during a long walk, I came back into the house, sweaty and hot, eyes still teary. My wife was sitting on the couch immersed in something on her phone. I walked over, kissed her, and said I loved her. Later that night, she asked if all was ok, because the way I had gone about telling her I loved her had made her suspicious that something was wrong. The only thing that was “wrong” was that I had learned some profound lessons during the walk from Theo of Golden.

I want to read again – This is one of the most beautiful books I had read in a long time. I’ll wait a few years, and I’ll read it again.

Classic – The author, Allen Levi, in the epilogue, tells the story of how Theo of Golden came about. He says if any book ever got written “accidentally” it’s this one. It’s his debut book, and as such it’s a masterpiece. I predict will be a classic in due time.

Inspiring – If this book is one thing, it is inspiring, to live a fulfilling life, to help other people, to listen more and talk less, to lead by example, to do the right thing even when nobody is watching, to see beyond the outer shell and find the person inside, to love.

Must read – well, here is a book review about a book you must read, and I am telling you very little about it.

An old man arrives in the Southern city of Golden in Georgia. During his first stroll through downtown he stops at the local coffee shop. While he waits for his coffee, he notices hand-drawn, framed portraits of people from town all over the walls. They are for sale. He decides to purchase them one at a time and give them to the person depicted. Hence the word “bestow” that I have used several times in this review. The only thing he asks in exchange is to have a conversation where he can hopefully hear their stories. Theo of Golden is a powerful story about the importance of personal connection, depth of relationships, generosity, friendship and love.

I won’t tell you anything else about the book, other than I have learned to call my bicycle my “noble invention” and I will go to Bevmo soon and buy a good bottle of port wine. I long for the taste.

Gas Price in San Diego September 2026 – $6.35

On By Norbert HauptIn Are We Great Yet?, EconomyLeave a comment

I had to get gas. This was the best I could find. It was the first time ever I had to spend over $100 to fill up my car.

$6.35 for regular unleaded.

Are we great yet?

Book Review: AS1 – by Trevor Lewis

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two StarsLeave a comment

A brilliant young electromagnetics engineer fortuitously gets a research job at Green Bank Observatory, working on the country’s most powerful radio telescope. He notices a faint signal from a fixed point in space and through some out of the box thinking manages to decode it sufficiently to understand it is an artificial signal. When he tries to publish his findings to the scientific community, looking for validation of his conclusions, the entire security and law enforcement apparatus of the United States government seems to descend on him.

He quickly finds himself part of an elite international scientific team tasked with decoding the signal and understanding what might be happening. Long story short: aliens are making contact with humanity.

What follows is what might happen if in our world of today, aliens contacted us and were interested in exchanging information. No one country would be able to lead these efforts. It would take the entire international community, and the role of the United Nations might become more important.

AS1 speculates on what might happen if aliens suddenly were among us. As you may surmise, the bureaucratic inefficiency of the United Nations, the hype machine of the media, the insanity of cults, the insecurity of religions, all would cause an apocalyptic panic of the masses and would transform humanity. The world would never be quite the same again.

Visiting Rockefeller Center in New York

On By Norbert HauptIn Travels, Wisdom1 Comment

Our company’s financial partners are headquartered in offices in Rockefeller Center in New York City. We have quarterly board meetings there, so I travel to the City usually once every three months, if not more often. A few steps away from the office is the plaza where the famous Christmas tree is erected every winter. On the plaza is the famous statue of Prometheus. Designed by American sculptor Paul Manship and completed in 1934, it is an 18-foot-tall, 8-ton gilded cast bronze figure floating inside a ring representing the zodiac. It seems that every tourist visiting New York comes to see that plaza and that statue. They all stand on the opposite side at the top of a staircase and have their picture taken.

Here I am, doing the same. My wife was with me this time, and she took my picture. I am holding on to the banister that guides down the stairs. This was on September 9, 2026.

It so turns out that the very first day in my life that I set foot in New York City was July 8, 1975. Here I am with a few friends, all foreign exchange students just days before returning back to their home countries. I am the one with the blue shirt. I was 18 years old. The girl in front of me, Eva, is hanging on to the same banister you can see me holding in the picture above.

The City is still there, timeless. As I watched the sea of people walking the streets of New York, as I observed the endless stream of tourists taking that iconic photo of the Prometheus statue, it occurred to me that most of the people walking the streets of New York now were not even alive yet when I stood there in 1975.

We don’t get to own the city. We just get to visit it occasionally, generation after generation. We come and we  go. But the City lives on.

I guess I am a little nostalgic today.

Book Review: Yesteryear – by Caro Claire Burke

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Natalie Heller Mills is a young Christian woman raised in a Christian family with typical Christian values. She marries a “rich boy” she meets in college. She becomes a “traditional wife” in a “godly” family. Her husband does not have any ambition beyond playing video games and surfing chatrooms. Their marriage is doomed from the very start. Natalie, in order to make a living, wants to become an “influencer” and tries to turn her Instagram account into a business venture. With money from her mega-rich father-in-law, also a United States senator, she buys a farm in rural Idaho where she portrays the idyllic housewife, with a cowboy husband, baking bread, milking the cow, living off the land, and producing lots of children.

One day she wakes up in an alternate reality, in the 1850 timeframe, in her farmhouse as it would have been in that era. No electricity, just an outhouse. Her family looks like her family, but things are off. Her husband seems to be her husband, but he is older. She is trying to figure out if she actually time-traveled, or if this is some elaborate hoax. Is she an unsuspecting participant in a reality show? When she tries to escape through the woods she steps into a game trap and severely injures her leg. Her husband rescues her and carries her back to the house. He beats her. Now she knows she is a prisoner in this life.

The plot of this story is well-structured, and it kept me following the book. I wanted to know how it would end. But that was the only thing that kept me going.

I listened to Yesteryear as an audio book. It was painful. There was not a single character in this story that was likable. I severely disliked all the people in the story, and most of all I disliked the protagonist. If I ran into Natalie at a social event, I would quickly turn away. I would not want anything to do with her.

Yesteryear is a book without any joy. I don’t have an Instagram account and I am now more glad than ever that I don’t. The whole influencer thing is not something I am interested in. I am not a Christian,  and now I am more glad than ever that I am not. The stuff that Natalie constantly spews about “the Lord” just makes me roll my eyes.

Yesteryear is a book about a severely dysfunctional family, all the way from the grandparents on. The victims of that dysfunction are her brood of children. And that’s where the plot hits the hardest.

This is a book that I would normally have abandoned listening to about 20% in, just because it was so distasteful.  But the suspense of how this mess could possibly end kept me going and I eventually finished it.

Very distasteful.

 

Book Review: The Only Woman in the Room – by Marie Benedict

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a young Austrian Jewish woman, born in 1914. She grew up in a well-to-do family with a doting father who taught her critical thinking and scientific methodology. She was very smart but also beautiful. In her youth, she was attracted to acting, first in motion pictures and then in the theater.

The story starts in 1933, when Hedy was just 19 years old. While on stage playing an Austrian empress, a mystery suiter showered her with elaborate displays of roses night after night after the performances. It turns out the suiter was Austrian arms manufacturer Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl, who was at the time Austria’s richest man. Not only was he a businessman, but also well connected at the highest level of Austrian politics. At that time, Hitler had just come to power in Germany and his antisemitic policies were feared in Austria. When Fritz proposed marriage, Hedy’s parents advised her to accept, both to not upset a powerful man by refusing his wishes, but also to be a protector to Jews. They sensed that they might need it.

Very quickly, starting even during the wedding preparations, Hedy realized that her future husband was extremely possessive, jealous and both emotionally and physically abusive. She had sold her life to protect her family. While married to Fritz, however, she was exposed to high level discussions about arms developments, including shortcomings and problems with guidance systems for torpedoes. Posing as a demure wife, never speaking, she was always the only woman in the room, but the listened very carefully and learned.

Eventually her outwardly opulent life became an unbearable prison, and she escaped to America. There she restarted her acting career, taking on the name of Hedy Lamarr, in order not to seem Jewish. There was strong antisemitism in Hollywood during the 1930s. She quickly became a movie star.

But that also was not enough for her. In an effort to help the American military with its lacking guidance technology for torpedoes, she and composer George Antheil developed a frequency-hopping communication system intended to help prevent enemy interference with radio-guided torpedoes. Their patented work later became an important precursor to technologies used in modern wireless communications.

The book The Only Woman in the Room is based on Hedy Lamarr’s life, but the author fictionalizes dialogue, private thoughts, motivations, and many scenes, so you should not read it as a literal biography.

Her actual life was even more colorful than is depicted in the book. If you are interested, you can look up her Wikipedia entry here. She was married a whopping six times and divorced every time. She was even arrested several times for (believe it or not) shoplifting. Eventually she passed away at age 85 in Florida in 2000.

Hedy later wrote an autobiography titled Ecstasy and Me ghostwritten by Leo Guild and Cy Rice. Later she disavowed the book and condemned the book’s contents as “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous and obscene,” and claimed it was “not her book.”

To supplement your reading, you might also be interested in the Wikipedia entry for Fritz Mandl, who also had a colorful life at the fringes of fascism.

Painting: Yellow Hibiscus

On By Norbert HauptIn PaintingLeave a comment

Yellow Hibiscus is the state flower of Hawaii.

This painting was sitting unfinished on my easel for over a year while I went through a slump of no painting. I finished it today.

Yellow Hibiscus, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24

Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling – by Robert Galbraith

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Cormoran Strike is a private detective in London. He is a former soldier who lost his lower leg in a landmine in Afghanistan. He is deeply in debt. His detective business is faltering. His long-time girlfriend has dumped him and he is sleeping on a cot in his office.

In walks John Bristow, a lawyer with a prestigious law firm in London. His younger sister was a London supermodel who presumably committed suicide a few months earlier by jumping from her apartment on the third floor of a luxury building. John believed it was murder and wanted Cormoran to follow some leads that he provided to that effect. But most importantly, he handed him an envelope with a bundle of cash as a down payment for the services. Cormoran couldn’t pay the rent, so he didn’t have much of a choice.

Even though the police ruled it a suicide, Cormoran quickly finds circumstances that make him think otherwise. In a world of supermodels, big-ego designers, hot-shot lawyers, movie producers and all their entourage, he gets a taste of a world that ordinary citizens like him can only watch in the tabloids. The intrigues mount.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a whodunnit crime mystery and nothing else. It is meticulously crafted like a crime story has to be. The storytelling is excellent, it keeps the suspense. The protagonist is a likable character.

Robert Galbraith is actually a pseudonym of J. K. Rowling, the author of the famous Harry Potter books. This is her debut mystery story that introduces Detective Cormoran Strike. She wanted this new line of books to stand on its own and not be affected by her fame from Harry Potter. There are currently 8 books in the series, with a planned total of 10. The Cuckoo’s Calling is book 1. 

It’s a very well written story with an intricate plot, obviously by a very experienced author. It is great entertainment. But that’s all. I didn’t learn anything, I just had fun reading. While I am giving this book 2.5 stars, making it a good read, I will not read any more of the Strike series in the interest of time. Too many books, too little time!

If you like crime novels, you’ll like this one and, I can only assume, the rest of the series.

Michigan State Capitol

On By Norbert HauptIn State Capitol BuildingsLeave a comment

Today I visited the Michigan State Capitol.

Here is a better shot of the building itself.

The first Michigan State Capitol building, built in 1847, was considered “an old rattle trap.” In 1871 Governor Henry P. Baldwin challenged Michigan’s Legislature to build a fireproof capitol to house the state’s governmental offices, records, and civil war relics. Finished in 1879 and modeled after the United States Capitol, this building is one of the first post-civil war capitols to feature a lofty cast iron dome. Heralded a great success upon its completion, Michigan’s capitol became the model for statehouses across the nation.

Movie Review: The Dog Stars (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

I recently read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and then watched the four-episode 1989 miniseries based on the book. That miniseries followed the book closely.  Of course, the book has 864 pages with amazing detail, and the combined series was “only” six hours long, so the movies had to leave some plot details out and simplify the story. However, what was there followed the plot of the book to a level of accuracy and authenticity I have never seen before.

I watched The Dog Stars in the theater as soon as it came out, because I had just read the book in June 2026. Here is my review: The Dog Stars. It was a good book, and if you are interested in the post-apocalyptic genre, you should definitely read it.

It’s approximately 2035. A pandemic virus has wiped out humanity approximately 15 years earlier (think COVID in 2020). What remains are small pockets of survivors who all fight for the same limited resources left from before the world ended. Some gangs have dozens of people, some only a few. Hig and Bangley are holded up in a small airport in Erie, Colorado. Bangley is an ex-special forces operative and has learned to shoot first and ask questions later. He is the “armed forces” of the team. Hig is a pilot and mechanic. His best friend left is his dog Jasper. Through his skills the two have been able maintain some solar power, keep simple engines running, and most importantly, keep his Cessna flying. This helps them with reconnaissance. Regular flights around their stronghold alerts them to marauders before they can creep up on them. Hig also flies into Denver to find medical supplies, groceries like soft drinks that survived looting, and general gear they need.

But Hig has a vision of more. When he hears a faint transmission on the radio from Grand Junction, a city far west in the Rockies, he packs up the plane and leaves to explore. Just as Bangley had warned him, things turn bad very quickly.

The movie changes the plot line significantly from the book with respect to the Grand Junction excursion, and the result is perhaps better movie action, but I found it just inappropriate and distracting. I think this would have been a better movie had it followed the book more closely, at least in the second half of the story.

The epic flying scenes in the mountains were spectacular. Most of all, the depiction of our world if all the people just suddenly disappeared was very worthwhile watching. Denver skyscrapers crumbling, overgrown with vines and trees, the roads taken over by weeds with just sections of asphalt remaining, wrecks of cars and trucks everywhere, and residential neighborhoods dilapidated and overgrown.

Most people won’t read the book, so they will watch The Dog Stars movie as a thoughtful reminder of what might happen if a pandemic actually did wipe out humanity. From that point of view, this movie is a valuable reminder that maybe we should not buy into the idea that we can let a pandemic burn itself out without vaccination.

Good luck with that!

Book Review: The Calamity Club – by Kathryn Stockett

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Four StarsLeave a comment

I tried to read the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett in 2011, and I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t choose The Calamity Club on purpose either. I wanted to try an audio book so I would have something to listen to on long walks – and I randomly chose the first book that popped up on my Audible app. I might note that this is the first time I have “read” an audio book. In written form it’s 640 pages long.

The story plays in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933,  during the height of the Great Depression. Nobody is doing well, and even many rich families are losing everything. The poor can barely survive.

Meg Lefleur was nine years old when she was abandoned by her single mother on  Christmas Eve. She was put into the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for girls where she spent two years being abused. The big girls don’t get adopted very often, so they are neglected until they are twelve, old enough to be shipped off to factories as child slave labor.  Eleven years old as the story unfolds, Meg has learned that there is nobody she can rely on and trust but herself.

Birdie Calhoun, at age 24 and unmarried, she is the older of two sisters in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, taking care of her mother and grandmother, living in poverty.  She works as a bookkeeper. When times get desperate, she travels to Oxford where her socialite younger sister Francis has married into a banker family. She has the humiliating assignment of asking her sister’s family for money to help them get by.

She find out that everything is not as it seems.  The Depression has closed in on her sister’s family and the banking business is not going well. She quickly learns that she appears to be the only one in the family who grasps the severity of the situation they are in – they are about to lose their house to foreclosure. As life around her collapses on all sides, Birdie is the only resourceful person around, trying to remain positive and holding things together.

The entire book is told from the points of view of Meg, the child, how she sees her life, and how she copes with the abuse in the orphanage, and Birdie, the young adult. The two cross paths as Birdie volunteers at the orphanage, and their tenuous friendship ends up with huge implications for both of their lives and the lives of many others they come in contact with.

Almost all the main characters are women. The story deals with racism in the south, segregation, hypocrisy, the abuse of women on all levels, legal, societal, at the workplace, and in the home. It makes life in the 1930ies in the American South come under a spotlight, bright, depressing and often frightening.

As I said above, I didn’t read this book, I HEARED it. And it made an amazing difference. The narrators are January LaVoy, for Birdie, and Jenna Lamia for Meg. Both are extraordinary. They change their voices to a lower octave to simulate the voices of men, they take on accents of the various characters, so you can actually see in your head who is talking by the voice and the accent. Both narrators are doing a phenomenal job in that respect. I wouldn’t want to read this book now, because I’d miss the voices. I want to hear it again.

To top it all off, I didn’t want it to end. It had to end, of course, but there was so much more to experience and live. There were about a dozen people who’d become part of my life that I would like to follow some more. I am already missing them.

This book is a perfect recommendation for my wife’s book club. It does not get any better than this. Only problem, their size limit is about 400 pages, and this, with 640 pages, is a tad above that.

Be that as it may, it gets four stars from me, which means: read this!