I have loved reading for as long as I can remember. I can remember when I was very little my parents reading to me; the memories are so firmly etched in my brain that I can vividly recall not only the stories and words themselves but also the pictures on the pages. Fast forward a few years and I can’t count the nights during elementary school that I’d park myself under the covers with a flashlight and read past my bedtime. I’m lucky that my parents were happy to feed my “addiction” and took me to family night at the public library, let me order from every Scholastic form that came across my desk and bought me the entire series of the Babysitters Club books (and that’s a lot of books).
I still love to read, I just have much less time to do it. The invention of the e-readers has definitely made it easier, at least for me. Now I can just load up my Nook color with all the books that I am interested in, and when I catch a spare minute while waiting in the doctor’s office or to pick A2 up from football practice or on the couch after Baby C has fallen asleep on my lap, I can flip through a few pages of one of them.
Recently I had the opportunity to read a new book called The Fine Art of Insincerity by Angela Hunt. Ms. Hunt is the author of more than 100 books, including the New York Times Bestselling novel The Note which was filmed as the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movie for 2007 (it was the highest rated television movie in the channel’s history).
 |
| The Fine Art of Insincerity |
This book centers around three sisters – Ginger, Pennyroyal and Rosemary – who return to empty their late grandmother’s cottage where, after losing their mother at a very young age their father would send them to spend every summer. Between them they had nine marriages, causing them to wonder if they had inherited “the Grandma Gene” as their Gran had herself been married seven times. They each also had a number of secrets that they were keeping from their spouses, each other and, in some cases, themselves.
I had a feeling that I was going to enjoy the book after reading the first sentence of Chapter 1 that reads “Even without a calendar, I can feel MondayIt’s these secrets and the relationships between the sisters that really draw you into the book. settling into my bones.” I mean, who hasn’t woken up and had the same feeling at one point or another in their lives? While that was Ginger’s chapter (each chapter is written as coming from a different sister and bounces back and forth among them), as you get to know all the sisters you feel that it was a sentiment that could easily have come from any of them. One sister is about to find out that her husband is unfaithful, another is bored with hers and is tempting herself with thoughts of another, and the last is plotting the end of her own life in search for freedom.
The book is a fairly quick read. It’s the kind of novel that you’d want to take out onto the hammock or to the beach and finish it off in a day or two. There are a lot of interesting webs both holding the family together and keeping them apart at the same time, and these webs keep the pace moving right along. The overall themes may seem a little less than light, but the lessons learned and conclusion make any “sniffly” parts worth it.
I received a free copy of this book to facilitate my review but no other compensation. All thoughts and opinions are 100% mine.
or at 
. (You may be familiar with Heather and her “Home-Ec” ways