Midweek: beautiful days, an unplanned project, and reading

 

Lots of sunshine, mid-70's, no humidity = ideal for walking!  2.7 miles at Sun Lake on Monday afternoon.   It counts as two trails (because of the distance) for Hike Lake County. 

Lower right is white snakeroot, a poisonous plant. When cows grazed on it they absorbed the poison When people drank their milk they contracted milk fever.  Here's the story of Anna Pierce, the white woman who learned about the relationship between the plant and the sickness from Native Americans. 

I had a woman's club board meeting Tuesday afternoon, so no walk.

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I am practicing avoidance on my two remaining August goals (hey, there's 10 days left!).  I had a box of 4.5" homespun HSTs.  I made a bunch of 4-patches and here's the work in progress.  (Yes, the two blocks at the upper left are mis-oriented.)  The blocks are 8.5" unfinished.  

Cynthia said her next block drive will use these blocks but in a different colorway.    

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My recent reading:  four novels, all published in 2024.

In 1960 Francesca Loftfield, an American field worker for a British aid agency, is sent to open a nursery school in the remote Calabrian village of Santa Chionia.   The villagers view her with suspicion.  She must figure out the power structure (men dominate but there are a few formidable women) and the relationships among families.   Because of its isolation the village has been neglected by the provincial and national government.    A flood washes away the rubble of a long-ruined municipal building and a skeleton is revealed.  Who was it?   A lost son? A missing husband?   Francesca tries to help.   

I found the story long and rather confusing.  There is a list of characters at the END of the book that I didn't discover until I was more than halfway through.  It would have been more helpful to have that at the beginning.

This fast-paced mystery is saturated with local color.  FBI agent Ryan Tapia is assigned to the Maine bureau, as far away as he can get from California where his wife and children were killed in a car wreck.  He is sent to Liberty Island (Deer Isle) to investigate the death of a lobsterman whose corpse washes up on shore of an Indian reservation.  The lobsterman was a thoroughly despicable person, as Ryan finds out, but who among the locals hated him enough to kill him?

The Weyward women are linked across five centuries in this absorbing novel that echoes the magical realism of Sarah Addison Allen and Alice Hoffman.

1619:  Altha is a healer, an herbalist, on trial for witchcraft.   1942:  Viola's father restricts her every movement, confining her to their country estate.  Then the dissolute cousin comes to visit and upends everything.  2019:  Kate inherits Viola's rural cottage, just in time as her controlling and abusive lover threatens her life.  

Yes, the connections and the outcome are obvious, but the story is so well-written that you'll want to read to the end.

I didn't know what to expect when I started reading this twisty thriller -- but it kept me in suspense. 

Esther is an accomplished artist who has the unfortunate tendency to make rash decisions that have affected her family and her career.  She and her partner are living in Asheville and looking forward to starting a family.  Without warning the partner departs without any explanation, leaving Esther not only adrift but with the mortgage.  Then a wealthy philanthropist offers Esther a job she cannot refuse:  take the documents stored in hundreds of file boxes and make them into scrapbooks, ostensibly as a surprise gift for the woman's husband.  As Esther works to recreate the woman's history she uncovers family secrets. Weeks into the project the woman dies. What is Esther to do?  She has to solve the mystery and pursues it to a most unlikely conclusion.  

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Linking up with Wednesday Wait Loss  Midweek Makers