Kim’s Comments (group member since May 25, 2024)

Kim’s comments from the Big Book Summer Reading Challenge 2024 group.

Finished The Briar Club by Kate Quinn. I love historical fiction especially with women protagonists. This book included characters who lived in an all-women boardinghouse. Quinn is a great storyteller and references many of the historical events in the 50’s that we all remember.

Finished The Frozen River and L-O-V-E-D it. Great historical fiction about a midwife who delivered over 1000 babies and never lost a mother. Great storytelling.

I finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. This nonfiction book is about Louie Zamperini who ran in The Olympics as a teenager. He signed up with the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier. This story of survival is often times unbelievable because the struggles were horrific from a plane crash to being declared missing in action and surviving awful POW camp conditions and dehumanizing treatment. This was very eye opening to me.

I finished Pachinko. This was a family saga that included a lot of heartbreak. The theme around women are meant to suffer was difficult but certainly well-written. I felt for all these characters.

I just finished Shark Heart (408 pages). This is really a short big book because near the end there are just little snippets of thoughts of some of the characters day by day. It is hard to describe. The storyline is the most unusual and original that I’ve ever read.

I finished The Women by Kristin Hannah. It was a powerful story about a YOUNG nurse who went to Vietnam to make her Dad proud. I was surprised when she was back home from Nam and there was still half the book left. I couldn’t believe how many ways she tried to find help for her PTSD (they didn’t have that term at the time) and she was told there weren’t any women in Vietnam. Over and over this came up. What an important story for Hannah to tell. I was sobbing for several chapters at the end. I haven’t had a good book cry like that in awhile.

I finished my first big book today, Message from Nam by Danielle Steele (436 pages). I had read that it was the same subject matter as The Women and got it on my kindle first. I gave it 3 stars because as you would expect, it’s mostly a romance novel. All of the historical events from those years were mentioned but not too much in depth.