Reading Highlights from Young at Heart Book Club

We had an interesting mix of great reads to report at Young @ Heart Book club today!

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland. Hard to classify, but an interesting novel about sisterly love and transformation. Seeking the truth about her sister’s death, Esther follows a trail of fairy tales from her home in Tasmania all the way to the Faroe Islands. Full of sparkling descriptions and intense, moving writing it is almost over the top, but somehow draws you into the story and then stays with you after the end.

 A well-researched, award winning, and engrossing detective novel is The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny. It is set in a fictional Gilbertine Abbey in Quebec where the silent monks’ transcendently lovely chanting has become world famous. But beneath the harmonious surface, someone is contemplating murder. This is the 8^th in a series of 18 books (so far!) about Inspector Gamache but can be read on its own. Other Gamache mysteries have been made recently into a TV series called Three Pines.

Tina Clough is a writer from Napier who has departed from her successful women’s fiction and written a series of thrillers (The Chinese Proverb, One Single Thing, Folded).  They feature Hunter Grant, ex-army, who gets things sorted – legally or not.  The books are set in a pseudo-NZ – in a city that has elements of Auckland and Wellington, resonating with our Kiwi hearts, but tantalisingly just out of reach. The intertwining plots journey through kidnapping, murder, trafficking, and drugs and the chases are excellent!

One of our members is encouraging her grandson with his English studies for NCEA level 1, so she read one of his listed books. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is based on a real reform school for boys in Florida in the 1960s. The story follows the lives of two very different boys – how they came to be at Nickel Academy, the abuse and corruption they are subjected to, and their inner turmoil – one taking to heart the peaceful messages of Martin Luther King, the other turning to cynicism and violence to equal their oppressors. The decisions they make will have consequences for decades afterwards.

Posted by Elizabeth

11 October 2023

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