The Mother's September Reads

September reading was a fantastic month of reading. Please read on and see what I have read during this early month of fall.

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The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

“Courage is fear you ignore.”

Writer, Kristin Hannah has done it again. After her mega-hit Nightingale, a book I absolutely loved and devoured in only a few readings, I couldn’t wait to read Hannah’s latest novel The Four Winds and determine if it too would captivate me in the same way – it most certainly did.

The Four Winds begins in northwestern Texas in 1921 and is centered on Elsa Wolcott, the eldest daughter in a middle-class family that treats her like an ugly heirloom. Her unloving parents keep Elsa cloistered in her room reading.

Outwardly, Elsa is a frail, young woman without a voice or courage, controlled by her parents; inwardly Elsa is a heroine, girded for unimaginable, harrowing adventures. The meat of The Four Winds and Elsa’s adventures take place in the 1930s, a traumatic era in American history. Elsa—abandoned by her husband—forsakes the only people that love her to travel with her two young children to find survival as a migrant worker in California.

Sometimes with relentless pacing, one tragic event after the next, sometimes mellow dramatic, The Four Winds will transfix you. Remember to have tissues nearby.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

If you are someone who likes stories about the underdog, then this is for you, because this book is chock full of them. James McBride’s Deacon Kind Kong is a novel filled with warmth and personality; it is alive with fondness and love between imperfect, downtrodden, underdog characters and their disregarded and neglected community. Despite its urban setting of southern Brooklyn, Deacon King Kong is a village novel; an ensemble piece about the way a small community of flawed characters who think they know one another all too well cope with their own capacity for change.

Deacon King Kong is told in a playful way with numerous vivid characters. Most of the book’s humor bubbles up from the small congregation of Five Ends Baptist Church, which operates out of a cinderblock building by the Brooklyn waterfront. The story’s inciting incident is a shooting—more whydunit than whodunit—when 71-year-old church deacon Sportscoat shoots the ear off of 19-year-old Deems Clemens, “the most ruthless drug dealer the projects had ever seen.”

Sixteen people see the shooting, but no one talks. Still, the shooting sets off a comical and dramatic chain of events. Deacon King Kong turns what first appears to be stereotypes—the church deacon who is an amiable drunk, the teenage drug dealer poisoning his own neighborhood—into vivid, three-dimensional characters with engrossing life stories. Sportcoat is a brilliant, self-made botanist; Deems is a gifted baseball pitcher.

As its characters' lives intersect, Deacon King Kong tells a vivid story that's humorous but also full of warmth, energy and hopeful humanism.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

“We don’t always get what we deserve. Sometimes we get more; sometimes we get less. At least we get something.”

The Friday Night Knitting Club is the Steel Magnolias for the 21st-century. Set in a little yar shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it is a laughs-and tears women’s novel about a group of females of different ages, different backgrounds, and very different personalities who surprise themselves by forging an unbreakable bond of friendship.

Synopsis: The Friday Night Knitting Club follows Georgia Walker, a single mother in her gorgeous late 30s, and a quirky group of women who gather at Georgia’s shop every Friday for food, gossip and tips. The story follows the threads of their crisscrossing lives, some more dramatic than others in your standard romantic plot type of way. The novel's most successful stretch takes place in Scotland, far away from the knitting shop and the club, when Georgia visits her wisdom-dispensing grandmother with her 12-year-old daughter Dakota and her spoiled, ex-socialite best friend in tow.

If you’re looking for a sunny and fun read, with likeable characters and the idea of knitting as a metaphor for life, then this is the book for you!

A Bookshop in Berlin by Francoise Frenkel

A Bookshop in Berlin is the incredible and harrowing true story of book lover and bookshop owner Francoise Frenkel—a Jewish woman from Poland—who owns La Maison du Livre, Berlin’s first French bookshop. In 1938, Nazi ideology forces Francoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris, then across southern France. Though she witnesses countless horrors and sacrifices, she survives at the hands of heroic strangers.

I felt it best to introduce this book by using Francoise own words in the foreword.

“It is the duty of those who have survived to bear witness to ensure the dead are not forgotten, nor humble acts of self-sacrifice left unacknowledged. May these pages inspire a reverent thought for those forever silenced, fallen by the wayside or murdered.

I dedicate this book to the MEN AND WOMEN OF GOODWILL who, generously, with unfailing courage, opposed the will to violence and resisted to the end. Dear reader, accord them the grateful affection deserved by all such magnanimous acts! In my thoughts, too, are those Swiss friends who took my hand just as I felt myself sinking, and the bright smile of my friend, who helped me continue to live.”

Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered seventy years later, A Bookshop in Berlin reads like a personal diary. Even during her misery, there are no complaints in her writing, just facts, reported with a sense of decency in a measured fashion.

Most compelling of all is no one knows what became of Francoise Frenkel after she touched freedom and published A Bookshop in Berlin. The story is a glorious and brief encounter with Francoise that ends too soon; time runs out before she can tell you everything.

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If you would like to purchase any of the books listed above, please use our Amazon affiliate links below here:

The Four Winds - https://amzn.to/2ZG0mEJ

Deacon King Kong - https://amzn.to/39JS0gO

The Friday Night Knitting Club - https://amzn.to/3kMqdmw

A Bookshop in Berlin - https://amzn.to/3lXTVEi