Ladies with Prospects

Ladies With Prospects

Cynthia Hartwick

I picked this up about a week ago in Barnes and Noble, not because it grabbed me, but because the woman standing next to me said, “That was a really great read. I always wonder if things are any good, so I’ve decided to tell people when I see them looking for new things to read.”

I thought that was delightful, and I recommended The Red Tentin return, since it was sitting on the same table.

In any case, Ladies With Prospects is the second book to feature the Larksdale Ladies Investment Club, a group on Minnesota women who formed an investement club back in book one, and since then have made it big, and are now controlling stockholders of a company in the midst of the tech boom from a few years back.

It was a fast novel, well written, and funny in spots, and the characters were believable, especially if you’ve ever spent time in the midwest. I definitely recommend it as a summer novel, because it’s light without being stupid. And I liked it enough to go back and find the first book.

Bee Season

Bee Season: A Novel

Myla Goldberg

I picked up Bee Season not long after I’d finished reading The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, but, as happens, I didn’t read it for a long while later.

It’s a stark story about a young girl who is looking for something to excel at, something to pull her away from a rather tragic, and extremely dysfunctional home life. She finds it in the form of a spelling bee, which she wins on a fluke.

I had a hard time reading this book, because the lack of communication among the family members made me want to throttle them, and because the depression in it is completely unrelenting.