Books, Fiction

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan

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Reading Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery with Beau in my favorite pajamas.

Read Yes
Length 320
Quick Review Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery is the last book in Jenny Colgan’s trilogy. It’s a giggle worthy story about love and morality.

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan is an adorable book. I don’t think you can read this without smiling a little bit. It’s the right combination of sweet, funny, and sassy.

Polly is the owner and baker behind the bakery in Mount Polbearne, a teeny island in Cornwall. She has a hunky, American fiancé named Huckle. A puffin named Neil decided to stick around. They all live in a very, very cold lighthouse. It’s Christmastime and everyone is bustling about dealing with family and friend drama.

I don’t want to give too much away because Christmas at Little Street Bakery is adorable. Jenny Colgan has a way of making a sweet story not Hallmark ridiculous. She is funny and smart in her usage of language. There’s a certain amount of conversational tone in her writing, which draws in the reader. It’s very enjoyable reading her writing; it’s not overdone nor underdone. I like that she includes a few recipes at the end of the book.

It’s a great read for Christmas.  

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Memorable Quotes
“Then he’d accidentally fallen madly in love with this strawberry-blond whirlwind of baking powder and capability”
“It sounds a thousand years ago, but it wasn’t really.”

Title: Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
Author: Jenny Colgan
Publisher: William Morrow (HarperCollins Publishers)
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9780062662996

Books

I Must Say; My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend

Read Yes
Length 336
Quick Review Martin Short is a comedy legend. I grew up watching his hilarious antics. His book is an emotional rollercoaster.

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I grew up in a cool house. We laughed a lot. I remember watching SNL, and I don’t mean the new stuff. We’re talking Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, and Martin Short era SNL. I Must Say; My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short has been on my reading list for a little while. I finally used vacation to read a little of the fun stuff.

Martin Short is funny. He has an enchanting quality about him that keeps you watching and, in this case, reading. Starting at the beginning of his life, the Short household was a happy, odd house in Hamilton, Canada. He was the youngest of several and always had a penchant for singing and entertaining. As a young Canadian, entertaining did not seem like a realistic or even possible career choice, but, luckily for us, he found his way to it. His book is full of huge name drops. Not because he means to, but because he genuinely grew into adulthood with a crowd of insanely talented people ie: Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Paul Schaffer, John Candy, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Nora Ephron, and many, many more.

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There were some intensely laugh out loud moments. For the most part, it was a genuine retelling of the fundamental moments and people which helped him grow into the humble comedy legend he is today. Throughout the book there are pictures of him, his family, and his friends. He sprinkles some of his most iconic characters throughout the book allowing them to have their moments in their own voices. Short comes off as a fantastically self-aware flawed man. He knows he’s not perfect, but he has dedicated his life to the arts, his friends, and most importantly his family. He comes across as the man I thought he was as a kid: a good and funny man with a bawdy sense of humor. So in other words, the perfect comedian in my eyes.

I don’t cry often. Books rarely, if ever make me cry. I did here. I Must Say may be his story, but his story is not complete without his wife, Nancy. It isn’t just a memoir, it is a love letter to his wife. From the moment he mentions her, it is evident he is still head-over-heels for her. The last chapter had me in tears.  

Memorable Quotes
“Kim Kardashian. Not so bright. She thinks “soy milk” is Spanish for “I am milk.”

Title: I Must Say; My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend
Author: Martin Short
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9780062309525

 

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Books

Purple Hibiscus

Read Yes
Length 307
Quick Review Set against the backdrop of a Nigerian coup, a 15 year old Kambili learns about love and life outside of her childhood home controlled by a religious zealot.

I love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is my favorite author, and I have now officially read all of her books. Purple Hibiscus is her first novel, and it’s beautiful.

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Nigeria is in the midst of a complete upheaval. Kambili, a 15 year old girl, and her brother, Jaja, stay with their aunt and cousins in Nsukka. Kambili begins to realize the extent of her father’s religious fundamentalism and abusive nature when she compares it with the loving, open household her cousins flourish in.

Adichie explores so many interesting themes throughout the progression of the novel. Christian fundamentalism is a looming presence as Kambili struggles with her father’s oppression even when she is far out of reach. She is unable to engage with her surroundings, family, and even herself because she lives in perpetual fear of her father’s wrath and eternal damnation. The physical and psychological abuse Kambili, Jaja, and their mother live with is intense. Aunt Ifeoma and her children are the voice of progressivism.

I love Adichie’s inclusion of Igbo words peppered throughout the narrative.

I seriously suggest this novel to anyone interested in reading. It’s a beautiful and moving novel full of hope and heartbreak speaking to the resilience of the human spirit.   

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Memorable Quotes
“I was not sure what my laughter sounded like.”
“We didn’t scale the today because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified we couldn’t.”

Title: Purple Hibiscus
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Collins (HarperCollins Publishers)
Copyright:  2004
ISBN: 9780007345328

Books

Cancel the Wedding

Read Yes
Length 416
Quick Review After her mother’s death, a young woman realizes how little she knows about her mother and herself. She goes on a journey to find both with her niece by her side.

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In Dingman’s debut novel she writes a sweet novel filled with family ties, mystery, love, history, and southern small town charm. It’s an easy read which screams to be read on the beach during a hot summer vacation.

Olivia has it all a stable fiancé, a high powered career, a life in Washington DC, and now a wedding date. When everything in her life couldn’t seem more stable, she decides to head south to a small town in Georgia with her niece to discover the past her mother left behind a long time ago. She has no idea what she will find and even less of an idea of how to find it. Guided by a short note in her mother’s will and determination, she sets off on what was meant to be a long weekend.

Behind the sweet façade of a story, Dingman explores the complex issue of a mother-daughter relationship. She uses Olivia and her sister, Georgia, to look into the relationship daughters have with their mothers as adults, and Georgia and her daughter, Logan, to show the difficulty both daughters and mothers go through to establish a sense of self and a link to one another. 

As the title suggest, Cancel the Wedding, delves into idea of a wedding and a marriage being linked yet separate identities. So often, it is easy to focus on the traditional steps of creating a life – meeting, dating, engagement, buying property, wedding – that one can forget the life after the wedding, and also lose oneself in the planning. Because life isn’t simple, Dingman is able to complicate her characters’ lives, so they have to sort out what means the most.

Cancel the Wedding is not a literary feat, but it is a great first novel appealing to a wide scope of readers with a penchant for romance and mystery.

Memorable Quotes
“You really only have a passionate row if you feel completely confident that you can get through it, or if you’re using it as the hand grenade tossed over your shoulder on your way out the door.”
“It took a lot of smoke and mirrors and subterfuge to make the world see you the way you wanted them to.”
“I was starting to get that prickly feeling again about not wanting to get married.”

Title: Cancel the Wedding
Author: Carolyn T. Dingman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9780062276728

Books

The Bookshop on the Corner

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Length
Quick Review A sweet story about a young librarian hitting a low point in her life decides to follow her dreams, which lead her to new places, a van, people, and even herself.

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I liked this novel a lot more than I thought I would. I set the bar pretty low. I wouldn’t call it canonical, but I would call it entertaining and sweet.

From the very beginning, it is obvious Colgan loves to read. Her first words are the dedication different from most, the book is to all readers. The introduction spends eight pages describing all the best places and ways to read. She is a bookworm like the best of us. It becomes even clearer she has a passion for books because they are not only a central theme but become a character in their own right.

Nina Redmond is an introverted librarian in a big city who has devoted her life to books: reading them, acquiring them, and making sure the right book finds the right person. Nina finds herself jobless due to layoffs. Between friends joking she should and telling her she can’t, she finds her way to Scotland where she buys a bus renovating it into a mobile bookstore to bring books to those who have gone without for so long. Nina finds herself loving and becoming a part of her new home in spite of herself.

Nina starts out incredibly shy to the point of meekness in her actions and her thoughts. Throughout the novel she becomes more brazen and confident as she is met with obstacles beginning with friends telling her she can’t to sexism to being underestimated to a rude and sullen landlord. Nina finds her inner strength along her journey spreading warmth, kindness, and books.

When Nina first moves to Scotland, she has always had a book as a companion. She has spent her life reading and living within the worlds books provide, she has forgotten to inhabit the world she physically resides in. Leaving the city and entering a small town life, she is able to stop using books as a fortress against the constant barrage of noise, people, and activity. She becomes a part of something for the first time.

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Colgan isn’t just writing about books. She is making astute observations on the changing world we live in. A recurring theme she touches on is how the job market is changing. In a very short amount of time, there is an emphasis on youth, media, technology, and extroversion. There is also less interest in paying people living wages or caring about the generations who have not yet caught up to the new world. Colgan drives home the fact that libraries and bookstores are disappearing at alarming rates.

I really enjoyed how Colgan made sure each character was different than what they appeared. She took the effort to make each character human. There was no evil. Every character had redeeming and less than admirable qualities. Colgan ensures each character’s faults can be understood because we all have our quirks, and there is always a reason for said quirks.

I enjoyed the emphasis of the novel was not on love or finding love. Romantic love was a part of the plot; however, it took a backseat to Nina’s search for herself. Romance was not even mentioned until page 87.

I found The Bookshop on the Corner to be evocative of Nina (coincidence!) George’s Little Paris Bookshop. They both have main characters owning nontraditional bookshops: a bus and a barge, respectively. Each character likes to think of themselves as a purveyor of more than books: a matchmaker or apothecary – setting each person up with the correct book at the correct time. Although the idea is not groundbreakingly original, I much preferred Colgan’s story. It focused less on love and more on books.

The only real downside of the story for me is the fact that Colgan made up book titles within the novel. I just think there are more than enough books currently in print or out of print that could have been name dropped instead of creating new ones. But I’m being nit-picky.

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan is not a book requiring a great deal of intense thought or deep contemplation. It is a lovely summer read or quiet afternoon read. It is a great novel to pick up when you want to follow along on a sweet story.

Memorable Quotes
“But sometimes she felt the world wasn’t built for people like her.”
“…she bought stationery the way other women bought lipsticks…”
“It’s like an entire generation has been thrown into a world they don’t understand and where nothing makes sense, and. they’ve just been told, tough luck, learn how to type or you can just starve to death.”
“There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them.”
“Everyone’s love life went badly until the end.”

Title: The Bookshop on the Corner
Author: Jenny Colgan
Publisher: William Morrow Publishing (HarperCollins Publishers)
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9780062467256