March 2026 Book Recaps

 March 2026 Book Recaps

Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

 

Kathryn Stockett is coming out with a new book!! (And I was able to read an advance copy🎉)

 

Oh my heart, how I love this book! Eleven-year-old Meg is the center of an unforgettable cast of characters. She's a little spitfire—smart, resilient, and larger than life, battling her way through unimaginable struggles set during the damn (one of her favorite words) Great Depression. The story is filled with desperation, heartache, ingenuity, warm hugs, and laugh-out-loud moments that flew by in the blink of an eye. I loved it as much as, if not more than, "The Help." Meg and the ladies will continue streaming through my mind for a long, long time. They feel like newfound friends.

 

This book will be released on May 5, 2026, right before Mother's Day. So drop hints for this perfect gift now!🎁💐

 

If you get a chance, read this book with a friend, like I was lucky enough to do, so we could share the unexpected shocking moments 🤯, our fury with one particular evil character 👿, our heartbreak 💔, and laughter 🤣 together. There will be a lot of “remember-when” flashbacks for us.♥️

 

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor 

Holy cow! I had no idea what this short story was about when I thought I’d try reading something by Flannery O’Connor. This was my first foray into her works, and it was definitely unexpected. It’s story about a family on a road trip gone wrong. Enough said. Read it. It’ll stay with you. YIKES!  

 

 

Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft

This was an entertaining and imaginative short story about a man whose great-uncle dies and he inherits a box in which he finds studies of an odd creature who haunts people in their dreams and who is worshipped by some cults. The locked box is filled with documents, news article clippings, and a bas-relief of an evil creature. Cthulhu is a terrifying being with an octopus-like head sprouting feelers on his face; it has a scaly, rubbery body, vicious claws, and enormous dragon wings.

 

The more Francis learns, the more frightened he becomes. At first, the stories and research leave him incredulous, but then reeling that such a thing exists in this universe. 

 

Lovecraft’s writing is unexpectedly sophisticated—an older style that I would have thought it was written in the 1800s, not in the1920s. 

 

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

A charming book about an American hired to catalog the many treasures of a 92-year-old eccentric Italian Baroness. Besides the memorable olive harvest, a stop in a small village where eel is served as many ways as Bubba served shrimp, and a jaunt to Venice, there were a couple particularly poignant moments that cinched it all together. Bravissimo!

 

Pub date: June 9, 2026. 

 

Andrew Sean Greer won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2017 novel, Less, which I really enjoyed!

 

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This classic kids’ book is one of the most popular in the world with 140 million copies sold, and translated into more than 600 languages and dialects! It’s about a stranded pilot who meets a prince from a planet that’s hardly bigger than a house. The prince goes planet hopping and meets a vain man, a drunk, a businessman, and more. 

 

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but this kids book just didn’t do it for me. The end is tragic and I should have felt something….but nope!  Not one of my favorites. 

 

Madama Butterfly Opera by Giacomo Puccini

My mom had told me about this opera ages ago. I’ve never seen it and don’t think I’ve even heard the music, but I thought it was high time I read the libretto (written text). It was well worth it.  

 

It’s about an American Navy officer who marries a 15-year-old Japanese geisha named Butterfly. Soon he’s called to relocate and promises he’ll return. It’s been three years since he’s left and she’s been raising their baby son in poverty. Such an honorable man, though, he kept his promise and returns—with his American wife!  And the kicker is that they’ve come to take her son!!  That’s all I’m gonna say about that, but you can imagine like many operas, it doesn’t end well. Get out the tissues!

 

March Classic Challenge:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I have to admit that I chose poorly for the classic read this month. I chose the cult classic, On the Road, and I am sad to say that I only made it half way through the book before I gave up. The Beat Generation movement just didn’t grab me. There really wasn’t much happening other than migrant work and casual sex.

 

The main character, Sal, was attracted to Dean Moriarty’s craziness. “… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

 

To Sal, the man he idolized was a superstar; to me Dean was a thug who stole cars and slept around—juggling 3 women at once, one of those women being his wife! Yippee-ki-yay!

 

I was not impressed.

 

I didn’t stick around for part 2 to see if there was some kind of point to the book. Life is short, and I have to move on. The other side of the coin is that I now have room for one more book on my shelf!

Happy Reading!

Annette