Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck

 This historical fiction provides a descriptive and poignant story that focuses on two women who participated in the WW2 resistance effort in France. Their courage despite ever present danger to move among the Nazi occupiers and rescue downed Allied pilots, or deliver and collect important information for the Allied leadership enabled them to participate in a vital part of the struggle to defeat the Germans. The two main characters come alive in this skillfully balanced portrayal of their lives that highlights their resistance work but also places them in the context of family life with all its competing responsibilities. 

Forever Young by Hayley Mills

 A poignant memoir by this actress whose father was a famous actor, and mother was a playwright, and she was signed by Walt Disney to a multi-film contract at age twelve. She describes both an exciting life filled with celebrity and celebrities but also haunted with the anguish and typical insecurities of an adolescence spent alternating between intense months of film making and then returning to a boarding school where she was often behind academically and out of sync with her schoolmates. This memoir is also filled with generous and admiring portrayals of many of the accomplished people she worked with, or met at parties and events she attended. Her peripatetic life sounded glamorous but was clearly also exhausting for a young girl who enjoyed spending alone time riding her pony in the English countryside. Her iconic film, The Parent Trap with its infectious song, let's Get Together, yeah, yeah, yeah remains a pleasant memory from my childhood, and I enjoyed reading this memoir.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

 Descriptive, pensive, often melancholic vignettes of the author's life. Ruminations on the significance and meaning of her experiences. Beautifully written. 

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

 I have returned to this book multiple times over my lifetime, having first read it when I was a teenager back in the sixties. Today, as human beings slaughter people in the Ukraine, I felt the need for it once again. It is often hard to see beyond the horrific headlines which relentlessly record the cruelties we humans inflict upon other living beings and the destruction we wreak upon our Environment as we pursue our goals in life. I awaken in the predawn in my comfortable home, my mind filling with the anguish I feel everyday as reality again intrudes with its evidence of horrific suffering. My propensity to despair does not accomplish anything but feed my ever present depression. Frankl offers his readers, a pathway to responding to this anguish reminding his readers that our freedom to make choices even under the unbelievable suffering Holocaust survivors endured is the freedom we can never relinquish. What choices can I make today that might propel my anguish into meaningful actions to make our World a better place?

Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik

 A poignant story about the Iranian female poet, Forugh Farrokhzhad, which describes her struggle to live, create, and publish her astounding poetry in the patriarchal society and totalitarian state of Iran under the last Shah. Forugh tells her own fictionalized story, enhanced by the inclusion of excerpts of her poetry, giving the reader a very visceral exposure to her remarkable life. 

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

This is a deeply moving story that leaves me feeling and thinking intensely about, "there but for fortune go I". The author takes us back to the beginning of a criminal life unfolding, the tragedy behind a horrific mistake that sends a fifteen year old boy to prison. The consequences that ensue for the many, a girlfriend, a best friend, even future generations fill a back story that is both engaging and disturbing. This is a story about the incredible complexity of human life, impacted by events and other people with their emotions, actions, choices, pain and hope that sends the reader both to a place of sorrow and also to experience a level of compassion that is significant and uplifting. 

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

 Quite a story about Bella da Costa Greene, the woman who worked as J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, taking over the acquisition of famous old books for his private library. An African-American, she passed as White in Racist America in order to be free to accomplish what her intelligence and talents supported. This narrative poignantly describes her daily fear of being exposed that she had to overcome to operate confidently in the male dominated, high stakes world of auctions, and to make essential contacts with the wealthy elites. Facts and fiction blend harmoniously to give the reader an appreciation for this incredible woman.

The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan

Delightful, uplifting story about four women who start out as competitors and end up friends. World War 2 brings stringent food rationing to England. Learning to cook palatable food with limited ingredients is difficult so the Ministry of Food provides recipes for women on the "kitchen front". Competitions become a significant entertainment and this story describes in delicious detail, a competition to choose a co-presenter on a radio food show. Evocative descriptions of nature, honey extraction, preparation of food and scary recounting of war planes flying overhead provide the reader with a visceral experience of life in England on the home front.

Something Worth Doing by Jane Kirkpatrick

 An inspiring historical fiction about Abigail Scott Duniway, a strong accomplished woman who advocated for suffrage for women during the forty years leading up to the 19th Amendment. A pioneer, a teacher, a businesswoman, a writer, she did it all.

House of Sticks by Ly Tran

So disturbing and so poignant. This memoir of a Vietnamese refugee who arrived in New York as a three year old tells an excruciating story of a family struggling in poverty, living in an unheated apartment, and often experiencing hunger. Ly and her three older brothers attend school but then spend their evenings helping their parents produce clothing in an appalling home-based sweatshop operation. The father, a political prisoner for ten years, not infrequently lashes out at his family members which makes for additional difficulties. This story while not likely unique reveals an world of hardship and also achievement in a family sponsored to come to the United States, and then largely abandoned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in a foreign country that makes that an onerous process. Ly Tran generously shares her childhood years with her readers in this heartfelt memoir.

 

Winter Sisters by Robin Oliveira

 I did not realize this was second in a series until after I finished this absorbing mystery and provocative story. The reader can pretty soon guess who the culprits are but the gripping part of this book is the engaging backstory and  character development, and then the gripping courtroom drama that starts with one person on trial, and then eventually brings two more into the spectacle. The horrific crime is front and center, and as the full extent is revealed, the denouement becomes spellbinding. Recommended.