Bijal P. Trivedi (2020) Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever [Audible] Deepti Gupta (narrator)
My great-niece has Cystic Fibrosis. Her grandmother, my sister-in-law, lived to age 46 with it. In the short time since its discovery, CF has morphed from a sure death sentence to a manageable disease, and treatments improve every year. What this book does well is illustrate just how important speaking up is for any treatment to evolve for any disease. Research costs money. Pharmaceutical corporations are profit driven. If any progress is to be made in any rare or uncommon disease, parents, donors, and volunteers need to be persistent and loud. Without the passion of a few scientists and a LOT of families, CF treatments would be decades behind where they are. There are other "orphan" diseases that will require the same tenacity to find better treatments and cures.
I was not a fan of this narrator, but the book was too compelling not to complete.
Catherine Grace Katz (2020) The Daughters of Yalta. Mariner Books.
This is the book for the WW2 history buff who had no idea that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harriman brought their daughters to Yalta in February 1945. It’s also the book for readers who like a unique point of view for any historical event. Finally, it is the book to teach writer-historians how to take papers, letters, diaries, and interviews and create a well-rounded narrative with sympathetic characters.
There is a LOT of information in this book, very little of which is well-known. Each of the daughters. Kathy Harriman, Anna Roosevelt, and Sarah Churchill played unique roles in serving their famous fathers, yet their involvement was overlooked by other participants, reporters, and then the events that unfolded once the conference ended.
Katz maintains a balanced perspective throughout, sharing the good, the bad, and the tragic in each woman’s life. Other reviews decried the lack of political information about Yalta, but the focus of the book is the daughters, not the meetings. There is sufficient context to understand the importance of the meeting of the Big Three, but the relationships between fathers and daughters dominate.
A.R. Shaw (2023) In the Rough Times. ARShawbooks.com
With all the heavy non-fiction this month, I needed a cozy apocalypse to cleanse my literary palate. Shaw fits the bill nicely with a totally predictable and very short mystery featuring characters from her Times of Trouble series. This time, Hilda Jo is on her own to find two children missing from Silverdale. Could it possibly be the handsome stranger with chickens in his truck? Or someone closer to home? Does it matter?
Michelle Shocklee (2022). Count the Nights by Stars. [Audible] Narrated by Sarah Zimmerman.
Zimmerman is an award-winning narrator, but her Southern accent is so bad that it made my teeth itch. I listened to a sample of her reading another book and her voice was much more pleasant.
Aside from the narration, the story was refreshingly clean for a romance novel, which I appreciated. It would be appropriate for a YA audience. The setting of Nashville’s Maxwell House hotel alternates between the 1897 Tennessee Centennial in Nashville and the managers of the hotel in 1961.
There were a couple of unnecessary side stories, but the story of a young woman’s scrapbook from 1897 found in 1961 offered a way to glimpse both the bright lights and the dark underbelly of the Centennial. Add a little mystery, a reclusive old woman, handsome men, and strong women, and you have a book worth a few hours.
Sarah Ferguson (2022) Her Heart for a Compass: A Novel. [Audible] Narrated by Ell Potter and Sarah Ferguson.
I picked up this book because of the author. I knew Sarah Ferguson had dabbled in children's literature in the past, so I figured it might be fun to listen to her read her novel. As it turned out, She didn't actually narrate much of the book, but the actual narrator, Ell Potter, was quite good.
It didn't take long for me to see the parallels between Lady Margaret's life and Ferguson's. Like Ferguson, Lady Margaret eschewed the rules of comportment required by the aristocracy and royalty. Like Ferguson, Lady Margaret starts her literary career with children's stories before branching out to larger works. Similarly, Lady Margaret and Ferguson find themselves in the US after leaving Britain and the roles they were required to play there.
The interviews after the conclusion were worth listening to and validated my observations about the autobiographical sections--plus other interesting information about Ferguson's research. (No spoilers.)
The story itself was predictable and typical of historical romance. One unique device was the use of gossip columns and letters to fill in gaps in time. That way the story could jump ahead two or three months or years and the reader would know what happened in the intervening time. Clever.
I didn't love the book, but I didn't hate it, either. I was satisfied with the story, enjoyed the narration, and am glad I ended the month with it.