Our book group's selection for January was Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, which came highly recommended by a bookstore employee. This book also got lots of good reviews on Amazon. Our group is made up of 4 dedicated readers, so when only one person has actually read the whole book (and that member was trapped in the house recuperating from surgery with plenty of time on her hands), you could guess that it definitely wasn't our "cup of tea". At first I thought it might be interesting: Castro trying to overthrow Battista, a gorgeous dame, an investigative reporter, money, revolution, etc. but by page 100 I still didn't care about any of the characters, so I just gave up. Doesn't sound like I missed anything!
Our group had read and been moved by Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, so I decided to read All Our Worldly Goods, which had recently been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. (A little background: a Russian Jew whose family had relocated to France in 1918, Irene became a successful French author. As the Nazis came to power, her success could not help her--she was denied French citizenship in 1938, arrested in 1942 and shortly thereafter died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.)
All Our Wordly Goods is the story of a French family between the world wars with its concerns about heritage, class, change, family ties. Her writing style is descriptive without being sentimental, and I enjoyed her look at the "circle of life" in this book. Perhaps being an outsider and a keen observer helped her to really see and understand the people about whose lives she wrote.
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