The Mother's March Reads

March was an excellent reading month, and happens to be The Mother's birthday month as well! Many fantastic books were read this month so please read on and enjoy!

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Memoir of a Misfit Mediator, A Novel by Joseph P. Folger

When it was suggested I read Memoir of a Misfit Mediator, I must admit I was unconvinced. As a volunteer mediator myself, I thought for sure this topic was too narrow to have much appeal. Well…what an unexpected surprise this book turned out to be. It’s certainly a novel about mediation and key questions about mediation practice. But more importantly, as it unfolds, it’s a story about the struggles, differences and dilemmas we all face, and the importance of dignity and human agency for people in conflict.

Synopsis: First person narrator Kent Foxe—an aspiring mediator and executive coach—grapples for his bearings during challenging conflicts and profound events that put him at a crossroads personally and professionally. The novel begins with Kent unsuccessfully mediating a violent gang dispute and subsequently developing grave doubts about his abilities. Then Kent is confronted and physically threatened by fellow mentor and nemesis Thomas Binder. The current running throughout the story is the crisis Foxe and his husband Gio deal with involving extended family members. Memoirs of a Misfit Mediator is a solid read and one that raises the critical issues anyone must face if they intervene in the lives of others.

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Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

Valentine is a fierce debut novel by Elizabeth Wetmore. It originated out of two questions: What do you do when a stranger comes to your door, and how can the fallout from that encounter affect an entire town? From the first sentence, Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of race, class, and gender resentments told with an unflinching yet lively narrative with an ever present window of beauty and hope.

Synopsis: Valentine is set in Odessa, a rough-edged West Texas on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violences that always seems to follow. The novel centers on a crime. The morning after Valentine’s Day, 1976, Mary Rose Whitehead, the 26-year-old Odessa ranch wife answers her door to find a 14-year-old girl named Gloria Ramirez on her front porch, crying for her mother, only half alive having survived a savage attack in a nearby oil field. The crime and its consequences run through to the end with intricacies and perspectives shared through four women whose individual chapters read like fully developed short stories.

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All The Ways We Said Goodbye by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White

All The Ways We Said Goodbye is a glorious historical adventure that moves from two World Wars to the turbulent years of the 1960s. Three women: Aurelie the heiress, Daisy the Resistance fighter, and Babs the widow, are the heroines of this fabulous story and whose bruised hearts and fates are joined by the legendary Ritz hotel in Paris, France. All three stories are beautifully told, and the book takes you back and forth between them until they all unravel together. I miss these characters already.

Synopsis: France, 1914. When war breaks out, Aurelie de Courcelles flees the safety of the Paris Ritz hotel and her American heiress mother to join her estranged father at their estate in Picardy, determined to defy the German invaders. As the Germans push forward, Aurelie’s plans are complicated by the presence of Maximilian von Sternburg, once a friend, now a perceived foe.

France, 1942. Raised by her indomitable American grandmother in the glamorous Hotel Ritz, Daisy Villon remains in Paris with her husband, a Nazi collaborator, after France falls to Hitler. Daisy agrees to act as a courier for a skilled English forger who creates identity papers for Resistance members and Jewish refugees. After relenting, Daisy commits increasingly audacious acts of espionage and the ultimate betrayal.

France, 1964. For Barbara “Babs” Langford, her husband, Kit, was the love of her life. Yet their marriage was haunted by a mysterious woman known only as La Fleur. On Kit’s death, American lawyer Drew Bowdoin appears at Bab’s door asking her to join him to find Resistance fighter turned traitor known as “La Fleur.” Babs joins Drew in his search, a journey that takes them to Paris and the Ritz.

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