This was one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read and it totally absorbed me. Paula McLain writes beautifully. While I read I did some research and often had to remind myself that it was actually a novel and not a biography. It is a book I really recommend. Her description of places and peo...
I couldn't disagree more with the readers who gave this book a low rating because it was "flat". This is real life, this isn't a soap opera. You're talking about a girl who spent most of her childhood being shuffled from one house to the next. Of course she's detached from the story, it's a defen...
Remember that girl? The one who was impossibly cool, who taught you how to blow smoke rings, cut school, sneak out of the house? Remember how you turned yourself inside out trying to be just like her--and then she broke your heart?Set in the long, hot summer of 1973, Paula McLain's lyrical debut ...
Out past her wide lawn, frangipani trees bloomed yellow-white and deep pink. There were palms and mimosa trees, stands of bamboo and thorn trees and banana groves. Six hundred acres of the lower slopes of the ridge had been groomed and tiered for bright green coffee plants. Another portion of her...
These were boys with hands like fine-grained sandpaper, slightly sweaty and yellowish. They spit their Skoal into Dr Pepper cans or right out the window onto two-lanes as George Strait sang it sad and too true. One of them wore Wranglers, thirty-two by thirty-six, with a fade mark on the back rig...