Hello Beautiful

Tragically, I got Hello Beautiful on my tablet so no photos of the book. This one was a huge hit with The Book Club. Ann Napolitano, was absolutely amazing. This book deserves awards of every kind. It is the story of a family and how it fractures and then knits itself back together. It is told almost from the perspective of several of the characters. Except Napolitano, elevated her story by not having the characters talk to you in the first person opting to put us at a step removed and having a narator discussing each character’s experience. The book club found that this strategy worked quite well for this book.I spent the last third of the book in tears. It took me days to get through the very small last section. Days. Every time I would read it I would cry and then I would have to stop because I would find myself blinded by tears. This book truly was that good. If you read it and you don’t like it seek therapy something is wrong with you.

Based loosely on Little Women, this story is about 4 sisters, a boy, and a family with strengths and weaknesses. Like all families. If you don’t find a piece of your own family in this I would be shocked. It begins with William, a boy who grows up in a house that is silenced by tragedy. There is so much we don’t realize we learn from watching our parents and interacting with them. Take all that away and hand the boy a basketball and a growth spurt, and how do you think this boy interprets the world? Everything for him is basket ball. Everything he comes in contact with he views through the lens of the sport that raised him when his parents decided not to bother because getting close to him after the death of his sister was too much for them.  This boy is a good ball players and goes to College to play ball where he meets a young woman in his history class. He thinks he falls in love with her… He certainly likes her and finds her interesting. Then he meets her 3 sisters and her parents. For the first time he has a family. He marries this girl Julia. Then something unexpected happens one of Julia’s sisters gets pregnant too young. Her mother throws her out, and her father dies leaving the hospital room just after the baby is birthed. So tragedy strikes. The glue that held them together disappears. The man who used to greet them saying “hello beautiful,” is no more. Julia has a plan for her family. She has a plan for just about everything. Celia destroys the plan and to get it back on track she insists on having a baby with William who has no idea how to deal with a kid. No one raised him. A basket ball raised him. Soon their marriage goes the way of the dodo. And it is around this time that Sylvie, Julia’s oldest younger sister starts staying with them because her mother has packed up her Chicago home and gone to Florida, leaving Sylvie with nowhere to live. Emeline, one of the two youngests Celia’s twin moves in with Celia, at the neighbor’s to help with the baby. Each character has their secrets and tells lies at times… When Julia’s marriage fails, William has a mental health breakdown and it is Sylvie and his basketball team that pull him half dead out of the lake he walked into to die. He spends time in the hospital and eventually a relationship that is actually right comes to exist between him and Sylvie. But it further fractures the family…. Celia, follows her dreams of being an artist, Emeline, finally shares her big secret and the response is not what she expected. Julia, does well in New York, and Rose their mother stays in Florida…. Until… They all must come back together again.

This is a book that explores families, and friendship. It goes very deeply into mental health and it really was well done. This is one I can totally recommend and everyone in the book club would back me up. Do you know how rare that is??? We are all individuals, we all have our own tastes. But this one, we all absolutely adored. This is truly one of the most important books I think we have read together as a book club. It hits the nail on the head of the moment in time we find ourselves in and speaks to something that lives in most of us. What an amazing read. But what a difficult read.

We have read a few really good books lately. I won’t discuss the rest of them in much detail. The blog hasn’t been working so I had to let this section go for much too long. But a few others we really liked were, The Glass Castle a memoir of a very difficult childhood.  The Lilac Girls, about strong New England women, the second world war, Poland during the second world war and a young woman who ended up in a terrible place and became one of the Rabbits as a test victim for the Nazis. It was about the Nazi doctor that tortured that young woman. It was slow to start but brilliant and a great read. North Woods, was like Hello Beautiful, in that everyone loved it. Everyone. Even the dog was quite taken with it when she heard about the catamount. It is the story of a place through time and the inhabitants that pass through. It was unbelievably well done and like Hello Beautiful deserves every amazing award in literature that exists. The Atomic City Girls was incredible in how well researched it was. Absolutely incredible. it was the story of the people developing the atomic bomb in the secret cities that were built for that purpose. It touched on many things and did a fabulous job of pointing out hypocrisy among other travesties. It too is totally worth the read. Ranger Confidential was another one we loved. It was all about the crazy stuff that goes down in our national parks told to us by a ranger. We read a number of other books too, but these are the ones that deserve to be mentioned since I only have so much time to blog.

After Hello Beautiful, many of us found ourselves unable to pick up a book. Fortunately at our meeting, one of our members had known exactly what to do after such a sad read. She picked up a comedy and read it next. She was kind enough to recommend it to all of us. While this isn’t really a book club read, I thought I would mention it here because it truly is helping me get past Hello Beautiful, which was so well done and good and beautiful and sad that it might have stayed with me forever. Which ad great as it is is a bit too long. A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, is the absolutely hilarious story of of what happens to a town in New Hampshire, the town of Grafton, once a place the Moonies called home among a number of locations they called home, the next to invade would be a group of Libertarians, who took over town and well…. Read the book. You may laugh so hard you give yourself a coronary. I am only about half way through and I am just so grateful for this recommendation that I thought it should be passed on.

Well, that is all from me tonight.
I am seriously thrilled to be able to update this blog again.
It has become a part of me over time, I miss it when it breaks down
Then it can take a while to get it back up again…
So it is nice to be back at it.
Thank you for reading.
Amanda Of Wildflower Farm