A little visitor and a couple of more books read...

 

Hi there book friends!  Can you believe that today is the first day of August?  I can't.  And yet, since I'm kind of ready for fall, it's OK.  Hope you like my picture above of a sweet little visitor we had right below our back porch area.  I took this shot a couple of months back and had forgotten that I was going to share it here.  I suspect this little one was only a few hours old.  Very tiny.  We have a bunch of deer that wander around our area and the fawns in the group have grown much bigger since spring.  Don't worry.  The 'mama' deer was very nearby, though the does will sometimes tuck their fawns in a sheltered spot and leave them for a bit to forage.  They always come back for them.  

I've still been reading up a storm and have a couple of books to share thoughts with you.  The first is The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner.  I did like this book so much!  It was just the right book for me to read after several thrillers.  I love anything about Jane Austen.  The Jane Austen Book Club is one of my favorite movies.  This book is about a group of people who come together in the English village of Chawton to try to preserve Jane Austen's final home and some of her possessions as a gift to society in general.  The time period is the late WWII period, though the war itself plays very little part in the story.  There's a doctor, a teacher, a farmer, an actress, a housemaid, and others who form the Society.  Each of them has a story and we get to know them gradually.  Their struggles are eased by their personal journeys reading Austen books and I like the way the themes of the novels and characters are used to support and tell this tale.  

I'll be discussing this book with our 'Historical Fiction' Book Group on Thursday and I'm excited to hear what others thoughts about it.  This is Natalie Jenner's first book, but she has a second that was published in late spring, The Bloomsbury Girls.  Set in the 1950's, the new book tells of a bookstore and three women who work there.  There is a character from The Jane Austen Society who is part of the book, but I won't tell who.  Have you read either of these books?  Do tell!

The second book I read recently was The New Neighbor by Karen Cleveland and it was another thriller.  I think I've read all of this author's books.  They usually include people who work for either the CIA or the FBI, sometimes both.  I've enjoyed all of them and that was the same here.  As a former CIA counterterrorism analyst, Karen Cleveland brings a sense of authenticity to her books that I like.  This story was set in a neighborhood cul-de-sac and tells of Beth Bradford, a CIA analyst, who has been hunting for a spy for over 15 years.  However her life is going to change - rapidly.  Her children are now grown and gone and she and her husband are selling their house on the 'perfect' street.  She goes to work and finds big changes to her job - she's being taken off her primary case.  What has caused this action and how might it be connected to her own neighborhood?  Well, you'll have to read The New Neighbor to see.  This was a quick read for me.  

I'm now reading Tess Gerritsen's new Rizzoli and Isles book, Listen To Me.  Good so far.

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Come back tomorrow when I'll have a guest post by J. G. Schwartz, an author from San Antonio who had an event at our local library a couple of weeks ago.  She had an interesting presentation and I look forward to reading her books.