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I heart this book!  It’s called Lucia Lucia by Adriana Trigiani.  It takes you on a journey to the middle of Greenwich Village in the 1950s to an era when everyone knows their neighbors’ names and clothes are still made by hand.  The main character’s name is Lucia Sartori; she’s 25; she has a great job working as a seamstress at a department store on Fifth Avenue.  And she wants to have it all (both a career and a family) at a time when her traditional Italian family expects her to only choose the latter.  This book is about Lucia’s struggle to figure out what, as well as who, she wants in her future.  What a beautifully written page-turner full of such vivid characters!

I really enjoyed Sara Gruen’s book Water for Elephants.  It was such an interesting tale!  Gruen introduces us to Jacob Jankowski, a young man who is studying to be a veterinarian in the East when his whole world gets turned upside down.  He finds himself aimless and penniless at the beginning of the Depression.  He decides to jump on the train of what turns out to be a second-rate circus and the true adventure begins!  Gruen does an extensive amount of research about Depression-era circuses to construct this interesting, surreal, and sometimes desperate traveling world.  I enjoyed every minute of this book, and couldn’t wait to find out what happened.  If you need any more convincing, this book received 4.5/5 stars on Amazon which is very rare!

People always look at me sideways when I tell them about this novel:  Octavia Butler’s Kindred.  Now I am not usually a sci-fi girl, but every now and then I dabble in the genre to broaden my horizons and read something a little bit different.  This one packed a powerful punch!  Imagine that you are a young, African-American woman living in San Francisco in 1976.  You’ve led a pretty normal life, until one day you find yourself transported inexplicably back to the South (and the year of 1815) – YIKES!!!  Meet the main character of this novel, Dana, who is terrified to discover after her journey that she is now a slave…and she does not know how to get home.  Butler reveals that this is the first of several journeys, and that there is a person responsible for summoning her whenever he is in grave danger.  This novel was absolutely captivating!  Check it out.  Go ahead.  I know it’s a little different, but it’s healthy to suspend your disbelief every now and then.  It keeps us young at heart!

I love it when an author uses a unique approach to tell a story as David Nicholls does with the novel, One Day.  Nicholls introduces us to Dex and Em on the day that they’ve graduated from college in the UK in 1988.  They’re young, they’re idealistic, they’re attracted to one another, and they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them.  A one-night stand turns into a lifetime connection, and Nicholls inventively gives us a view into what they’re up to on the very same day every year for twenty years.  Pick it up; you won’t be able to put it down!  :)