Book review

I'm giving a book review this evening for the Women's Club at Our Lady of Humility church. It's become an annual event, which is nice because I have gotten to know many of the women. (You know you're settling into a community when you see people you know at the grocery store and the post office.)

Here are the books I'll be talking about:

*American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld -- a novel about the first lady of the U.S. (not quite Laura-and-W, but almost!)

* Broken for You and Sing Them Home, by Stephanie Kallos -- she writes like Anne Tyler with quirky characters you are so glad you're not related to, whose stories are so compelling that you have to keep reading

* Emily Post, by Laura Claridge -- "daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners"

* The Red Leather Diary, by Lily Koppel -- this is a one of my favorite books this year. Koppel found a diary in the trash and was able to find the woman who wrote it.

* Unfinished Desires, by Gail Godwin -- to be published in December, an intriguing, un-putdown-able story about the alumnae of a Catholic girls' school

* Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog and Script and Scribble, by Kitty Burns Florey -- the first is about diagramming sentences, which she and many people (including me) liked to do; the second is about penmanship's heyday and its decline

* I Feel Bad About My Neck, by Nora Ephron -- this is a collection of essays with some spot-on observations. My favorite is about purses.