Forty-second challenge finish of the year.
This book won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (2025), The Winston Graham Historical Prize (2025), and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (2025). It also was New York Times Editors' Choice, NPR Best Book of 2025, New Yorker Best Book of 2025, and the Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2025.
I rarely like prize winning books. It always seems like I must be missing what the hype is about. This did not change that feeling. However, I listened to it as an audiobook, and I am almost tempted to read a hard copy just to see if that makes a difference. I kept falling asleep, and then would have to rewind to find the spot I fell asleep, so I may have missed something important. But I opted for the audiobook, because it was available through our library, and the library does not have the hard copy, or even ebook. The Kindle version is $12.99, and a hard copy or paperback are priced even higher than that. I don't want to spend that much just hoping that I might like it, when I'm pretty sure I won't.
So I'm going to call this good enough.
Forty-third challenge finish of the year.
I liked this more than I thought I would at the outset. It was about an abusive marriage and the children born into it. It started out with the abused wife being ordered to go to the registry office to add the newborn's name to the birth certificate. The abusive husband insisted on having the baby named after him (a family name of several generations), but the mother of the child believes that the choice of name will affect the life of the child given it. So she has a list of three possible names.
For the rest of the book, the chapters are from the point of view of the life of the child as his life would turn out with each of the three names. I'm probably not explaining that very well. I don't usually like when each chapter is from a different character's point of view, but this one was interesting, as each lifetime of the three child names lays out a complete change of circumstances for each.
I liked it very much. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not even sure which name was 'actually' chosen, but I enjoyed each of the 'lives' they lived.
Half of the year has gone by! I have nine prompts yet to fulfill for the challenge. Eleven of the prompts completed so far were with books that have been on my Kindle for a long while, and now they are read! It doesn't sound too impressive, but it's a full quarter of all the books I've read for the year so far. I'm not sure how I will do at filling remaining prompts with books already on my to-be-read pile, but will continue to strive for that goal.
