June: A Novel

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As for this one, the central storyline seems to revolve around a young girl currently living in a rundown mansion in a small town in Ohio, an inheritance from her grandmother (the June of the book's title), who took over raising Cassie when both of her parents were killed in a car crash.

June Quotes (94 quotes) - Goodreads June Quotes (94 quotes) - Goodreads

What better month to read a novel titled June? It's the first real month of summer, and that typically means easy, often mindless beach reading. All that's required is a good story to keep readers engrossed. Mysteries often fit the bill perfectly. This book, then, is both the story of a life derailed by abuse and a study into the ways abusers control their victims. It took Davies until he was 51 to go to the police which, he notes, made him “five years older than my dad had been the last time he molested me”. Davies says that the writing of Just Ignore Him wasn’t merely an exercise in healing. “Above all,” he writes, “I have set out to tell you the things you don’t know about me, in the hope that one day, perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don’t know about you.”and how it also show's you how difficult it was to being a woman who dressed like a man and loved women in the nineteen fifties and that it wasn't exactly a walk in the park and how far we came to day. Leave the World Behind was written before the coronavirus crisis and yet it taps brilliantly into the feeling of generalised panic that has attached itself to the virus and seems to mingle fears about the climate, inequality, racism and our over-reliance on technology. As the reader moves through the book, a new voice interjects, an omniscient narrator who begins to allow us gradual access to the terrifying events taking place across America.

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In her afterword to a new edition of Bette Howland’s 1978 story collection, Blue in Chicago, Honor Moore writes of “the exhausting formulaic epithet” that is “a lost woman writer”. I know what she means. All my life, “lost” women writers have suddenly reappeared, brought down from the attics where they languished, yellowing quietly. When I was young, I found this exciting: the green spines of my Virago Classics transmitted to me nothing but energy and pride. But with every year that passes, the idea of the lost woman grows more wearying. It’s not only that there are so many. The gap between disappearance and re-emergence is shrinking, something that suggests, at best, a certain collective carelessness on our part and, at worst, that the patriarchy is still snoring quietly away in its favourite library chair. This amount is not enough to repair all the items in this old house and sustain her for long without a job. Every day she had good intentions of calling repairman; however, she continued to ignore the mail, the bills, and phone calls, curled up in her bedroom dreaming. Her father, Adelbert Lemon Danvers would be fifty-nine if he had lived. Soon she begins having dreams of earlier days in this house. A house with a past. Did she really ever know June, her grandmother? Houses don’t always dream. In fact, most don’t. But once again, Two Oaks was dreaming of the girls—the one called June, who looked like a woman, and the one called Lindie, who looked like a boy. I would like to thank Blogging For Books for a print copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.* I enjoyed reading about the author’s personal connection, inspiration, and research behind the novel--personally, a lover of preservation and historic properties. Highly recommend June as well as Bittersweet!

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At night, Cassie dreamed of colorful people and events occurring in the house, but her days were troubled by the encroaching weeds in the garden and the mail piling up in the foyer.

June 2021 Book Releases (79 books) - Goodreads

Hungry is a story about food, class and families and the distance travelled between a terraced house in Carlisle and multimillion-pound London restaurants that quake at your arrival. Above all, it’s a gorgeous, unsentimental tribute to the relationship between Dent and her father, George. It’s about the ways in which love is communicated in a working-class family that doesn’t do “touchy-feely” and what happens when a man who has never been one for intimate talk slowly slides out of reach into dementia.Loved, love June’s character. A mix of talented artist, Bohemian, wanderlust, romantic, unselfish personality, mysterious, and a true loyal friend. Finding her own version of happiness and true love. In Barnes’s lavishly illustrated account, Pozzi proves an illuminating figure in this rare company. He was a politician and senator as well as a precociously talented surgeon, first specialising in gunshot wounds. He transformed the practice of gynaecology, setting the first guidelines to a woman’s comfort in examination, and writing a definitive two-volume treatise that established the specialism in its own right. He found time to translate Darwin, become a connoisseur of all manner of art, travel extensively to everywhere from Buenos Aires to Beirut and became a lieutenant-colonel in the Great War. He married Thérèse Loth-Cazalis, a “provincial virgin of 23”, heiress to a family that had made a sudden fortune from the railways. Their eldest child, Catherine, a novelist and compulsive diarist, provides Barnes with invaluable insights into her parents’ unhappy marriage, and a shifting, intimate commentary of her father’s prodigious abilities and flagrant infidelities. What makes the novel sing is how Roffey fleshes out these mythical goings-on with pin-sharp detail from the real world, as Aycayia, hidden away in David’s bedroom, navigates the perils (and pleasures) of life on land. After her tail rots, she relearns to walk in an old pair of David’s green suede Adidas. Her nostrils bleed “all kind of molluscs and tiny crabs”.

June Books | Current | The Criterion Collection

Norah is a reluctant if expansive narrator, pushing herself to consider intractable things. She is already the author of five novels, in which, she says, there is not much sex or violence: people “just realise things and feel a little sad”. But the story “shouting out to be written” is that of her famous mother, who went crazy and shot an influential film producer in the foot. Babalola isn’t afraid of the cliches of romance. In fact, a highlight of this collection of love stories is that for a moment, readers forget to anticipate the ending and instead get wrapped up in the warmth these stories offer. This is a collection for those of us, like Babalola, who love love. Currently reading Margreete’s Harbor and liking it. It is kind of off the radar, which is fine by me. Interesting family dynamics.

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As I mentioned earlier, the characterization in this novel was top notch. As were the use of apt and charming descriptive phrases. I loved the language of the novel with many of the sentences almost artistic in their rendering. (“on her bicycle, she turned in to the Elm Grove Cemetery, speeding past those gray headboards of eternal rest”) and (“her lustrous hair had grown thin and her face had been swallowed by a conspiracy of chins.”) To previous generations, glaciers were seemingly eternal, their scale of change measured in centuries. Now glaciers are melting within a person’s lifetime. During the 20th century Vatnajökull shrank by 10%, and it’s losing 100 cubic kilometres of ice a year. By the time Magnason’s young children have grown old, many more will have gone: “where the glacier once touched the sky, there will be only sky”. Indeed by the end of this century, “the life of almost all the glaciers outside the Arctic will end”. Iceland will be a land without ice. I received an advance reader edition of this book from Crown Publishing via First to Read for the purpose of providing an honest review.