Lush Library discussion

This is the info I put in the other thread: It has occurred to me that it would be easier to make a decision on which book to vote for if the information for each nominated book is contained in one thread. Please read about each book - you can change your poll vote (as long as the poll is still open)if you want to. I have changed my mind about mine already.

One of the things I love about this site is the ratings and reviews however they are both subjective so I think to help with comparisons if the book doesn't have a large number of ratings then I make sure to read a variety of the reviews it has.

Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 · 33,018 ratings

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.


Praise for Olive Kitteridge:

“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”
–O: The Oprah Magazine

“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”
–USA Today

“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”
–The New Yorker(less)
Paperback, 270 pages
Published September 30th 2008 by Random House Trade Paperbacks (first published 2008)
ISBN
0812971833 (ISBN13: 9780812971835)edition language
English
setting
Crosby, Maine (United States)

literary awards
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2009), Premio Bancarella (2010)

The Help - Kathryn Stockett

4.45 of 5 stars 4.45 · 270,871 ratings

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends - view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.
(less)
Hardcover, 451 pages
Published February 10th 2009 by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
ISBN
0399155341 (ISBN13: 9780399155345)
setting
Jackson, Mississippi, 1962 (United States)
Mississippi, 1962 (United States)

literary awards
Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction (2009), Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Debut (2010), Puddly Award for Fiction (2011), Southern Independent Booksellers Association's Book of the Year for Fiction (2010)

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 · 859,398 ratings

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel—a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice—but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

One of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many dis-tinctions since its original publication in 1960. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. It was also named the best novel of the twentieth century by librarians across the country (Library Journal). HarperCollins is proud to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication with this special hardcover edition.

Paperback, 323 pages
Published March 21st 2002 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published 1960)
ISBN
0060935464 (ISBN13: 9780060935467)
setting
Maycomb, Alabama, 1935 (United States)
Alabama (United States)

literary awards
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1960)

Roots - Alex Haley

4.3 of 5 stars 4.30 · 21,285 ratings


When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell him stories about their family--stories that went back to her grandparents, and their grandparents, down through the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." She said he had lived across the ocean near what he called the "Kamby Bolongo" and had been out in the forest one day chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men, beaten, chained and dragged aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America.

Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew up and became a writer, Haley began to search for documentation that might authenticate the narrative. It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of "the African"--Kunta Kinte--but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.

Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African sixth cousins. On September 29, 1967, he stood on the dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great-grandfather was taken ashore on September 29, 1767. Now he has written the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him--slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workers and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects--and one author.

But Haley has done more than recapture the history of his own family. As the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their names and their identities. But Roots speaks, finally, not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all people and all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitability of the human spirit.

From the book jacket(less)
Hardcover, 688 pages (paperback 729 pages)
Published August 17th 1976 by Doubleday (first published 1976)
ISBN
0385037872 (ISBN13: 9780385037877)
edition language
English
setting
United States

literary awards
ASJA Outstanding Book Award (1978), National Book Critics' Circle Award Nominee (1976)

Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 · 12,169 ratings

Sex and drugs and shlock and more--Jacqueline Susann's addictively entertaining trash classic about three showbiz girls clawing their way to the top and hitting bottom in New York City has it all. Though it's inspired by Susann's experience as a mid-century Broadway starlet who came heartbreakingly close to making it, but did not, and despite its reputation as THE roman á clef of the go-go 1960s, the novel turned out to be weirdly predictive of 1990s post-punk, post-feminist, post "riot grrrl" culture. Jackie Susann may not be a writer for the ages, but--alas!--she's still a writer for our times.

*First published in 1966, Valley of the Dolls rocketed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list and went on to sell an unprecedented eight million copies. Unavailable in paperback for over fifteen years, Jacqueline Susann's sensational story of three pill-popping, Gucci-clad show-biz women (whom she modeled after Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe) is back!

Hardcover, 467 pages (paperback 467 pages)
Published January 1st 1966 by Grove Press, New York (first published 1961)
ISBN
0739418378 (ISBN13: 9780739418376)
setting
United States

I have tried to find equal info - The Valley of the Dolls was very short so I've pasted 2.

This is an open thread so everyone is more than welcome to post any quotes, reviews or anything else related to the books.

Oh no! I voted for but now I want to read too argghh help...

I've gone for - I don't think I'd heard of it and I'd like to read something different. It'd be interesting to go through so many American eras and read how they affected the characters in the book.

I have already read the help and want to read roots as I have only seen the tv series many years ago