Three Great Reads You Don't Want To Miss

Contributed by Bettina Miller, Hive Overland Park

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As winter approaches and the weather gets cold, its so nice to snuggle down with a warm beverage a few good books. Here are three of my most recent reads that you don't want to miss...

The One Hundred Years of Lennie and Margot by Marianne Cronin

This was such a delightful novel to read, despite the sad setting.  Lennie is a 17-year-old essentially living in the hospital with a terminal illness.  Margot is an 83-year-old patient there as well.  They meet in a hospital art class. Lennie is an “old soul” and ends up preferring to join the senior group class rather than the class with folks closer to her own age. Lennie and Margo strike up a friendship and decide to create one hundred paintings highlighting stories of their lives that together span a century. The novel is funny, bittersweet, heartbreaking and uplifting all at the same time.  Highly recommend.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The novel is written in a totally different style as the entire book is essentially letters, emails and I think maybe even texts. Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer and has always used letters as her primary way of communicating as she finds it cathartic. There is also someone in the story to whom she writes letters she never sends. Some of her communication is even with people she doesn’t know that she ends up bonding with. The Correspondent is a lovely novel exploring Sybil’s character – a look back over her past as well as her life in current day.  Another wonderful book.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

This book is not one I’d have picked up on my own without a recommendation, but it was an interesting read and made for some good discussion.  The story revolves around artificial intelligence and moral responsibility. It starts with a family on a road trip where 17-year-old Charlie is the driver in an essentially self-driving minivan. His dad is in the front with him, his mom (who is a world leader in the field of AI) is in the back working on her laptop with his two sisters who are on their phones. They get into a terrible car accident and the rest of the novel is devoted to the impact of what happened that day; all of them harbor secrets that come to the forefront. This is the type of novel that really causes you to think – and to realize sometimes there are no easy answers in this new world we live in.