Book Club: September Edition

First an introduction. I run the Book Club at my local library. It meets once a month and is open to anyone who wants to attend. Books are chosen by the members two months in advance (in September we picked November's book) and no matter how much I wish it, book selection is not solely my choice. The result of that is books I would not normally choose for myself. Sometimes I love them (The Help by Kathryn Stockett, despite the recent craze, actually is good), and sometimes I can't stand them, but can still see how they would appeal to some people.



It's a pretty cover at least.
Kinda.



Which brings us to September's Book Club selection:

Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy

Set in Dublin, Dr. Clara Casey is tapped to build a Heart Clinic using an existing building and limited resources. What follows is a story about the community of friends and the far reaching positive effects created by the clinic's staff and its patients.

While the idea of this novel is a good one, the weaving of a bunch of small stories into an overall community story doesn't work for me here. It didn't really for my book club either. Their major complaint of this book was that there were far too many characters to follow and that by the time you finished one person's story, you'd forgotten the previous ones. While keeping up with the characters was a challenge, I found that overall the stories in the book weren't really believable. Normally that wouldn't be a problem in a fiction book, however it seemed as though that that was something the author was going for. Also with her writing she tended to flat out tell me things about a character when I wish she'd just shown me through the characters words and actions.

Is this your cup of tea?

Obviously this book was not my cup of tea to begin with, so I won't over criticize an author for choosing to write about subjects that don't really interest me. And I will recommend this book for those of you who need a feel good novel about a community looking after each other and the stories of the diverse lives of the people in the community.