A few Reviews from Connie.

   Two of my all-time favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver and Kate Morton, each published a book last October and it was wonderful reading/listening to them simultaneously. While generally very different story tellers, in this case, they actually share 2 important things: 1) the story line shifts back and forth from past to present - common with Morton but not Kingsolver and 2)a house is a central part of the plot. And because the queue of my reads always holds a mystery, I was delighted to read last fall’s best seller, Lethal White. All 3, not to be missed if, like me, you are late to this party. Connie

       Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver  (pub 10.16.18    500K     Harper)

Alternating between the present and the 1880’s the plot is centered in Vineland, NJ.                                  

Present: When Willa Knox’ husband takes a teaching job nearby, Willa’s family moves into an old house she inherited, but which is in the process of literally falling down around their ears. That family consists of Iano, her college professor husband, Nick, Iano’s cantankerous Greek father, Nick, Zeke, her ivy league education son who becomes a single parent to Dusty when his gorgeous bi-polar wife commits suicide, and Tig the feisty daughter. Can she literally save her home by proving its historical significance?                                                                                                                               1880’s: Thatcher Greenwood is the local science teacher who finds himself the target of his creationist boss when he speaks about a new theory posed by Charles Darwin. His wife and mother-in-law (in whose run down home they are living) are more interested in status and ignore Greenwoods financial problems. His only relief is spending time with Mary Treat, the amazing woman scientist living next door and a rebel newspaperman who see through the fallacy of the Utopian community that is Vineland.

Kingsolver’s environmental and political beliefs, as she always manages to do in her stories, land seamlessly in the plot.

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The Clockmaker’s Daughter  by Kate Morton  (pub.  10.09.18)

In her recognizable format of past and present set in England, Ms. Morton sends us from the present to the past beginning in 1862 and moving through WWII with Birchwood Manor as one of the main characters and a ghost as another

While told in several voices, the ghost begins her narration with:

My real name, no one remembers.
The truth about that summer, no one else knows.
This narrator tells the story of how she came to be there, of the young artist Edward Radcliffe who owned the home, of a missing priceless necklace, and of murder. Today the ghost follows Elodie Winslow, a London archivist who uncovers a satchel containing an artist’s sketchbook with a drawing of a twin-gabled house along a river and a photo of a woman in Victorian clothing. Elodie knows this house, but how?