Friday Finds (March 27)

What great books have you added to your wish list this week? Share your Friday Finds at Should Be Reading.


A friend lent me the November 2008 issue of The Writer magazine, which is all about writing memoir, and I was especially interested in an article by Catherine McCall, the author of Lifeguarding: A Memoir of Secrets, Swimming and the South. Her book is described thus: “There are two parents, three children and five ghosts in the McCall family.” Now doesn’t that sound intriguing? I couldn’t find any blog reviews of this book, but Beth Kephart has this to say about it: “There is, in every well-examined life, a turning point—a time when propriety yields to honesty and fear gives way to courage. This is Catherine McCall’s story, beautifully told, tenderly recollected.”

I was (again) in Indigo this week and came across two similarly titled but very different novels: The Sister by Paola Kaufmann and Blood Sisters by Barbara and Stephanie Keating. The Sister (originally published in Spanish as La hermana) is a novel about Emily Dickinson as seen through the eyes of her sister Lavinia and is based on authentic letters, journals and other documents from the Dickinson family. I love fictionalized accounts of authors’ lives, so this one is definitely on my wish list now!

I don’t normally read books written by two authors, but Blood Sisters, written by actual sisters Barbara and Stephanie, sounds very good. The story of three girls growing up in Kenya, this book is based on the authors’ experiences. It’s also the first in a trilogy (followed up by A Durable Fire; the third book is yet to come).