Books Set in North America; Washington State

Between Sisters, by Kristin Hannah (2003)

Read:  September 30, 2025

3 Stars

Books Set in North America; the United States

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, by Suleika Jaouad (2021)

 

This book is a memoir of a young woman who, at age 22, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.  It started with an uncontrollable and annoying itch.  Shortly after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad set off for Paris to begin a career as a journalist.  When she collapsed, she soon found herself on a flight back to New York where she was given a 35% chance of survival.

 

While isolated in the hospital, she began to document her treatments, first in a blog, and later in a regular column in the New York Times.  The response to her columns was phenomenal and soon she began receiving letters, emails and beginning correspondences with others who were similarly situated.

 

Shortly before being diagnosed, the author met “Will”.  They instantly fell for each other.  She feared that he would leave her when he learned she was so ill.  He didn’t.  He stuck by her throughout her treatments, stayed with her in the hospital, and ensured that she was getting proper care.  [Spoiler Alert:  When she is nearly in remission, their relationship began to faulter when he needed space for his well-being.  She gave him an ultimatum, and, to her surprise, he left.  Within months, she had found another lover, and when will wanted to reconcile, it was too late.]

 

Once Jaouad was deemed in remission, she learned how to drive and decided to set out on a 100-day solo road trip across the country to experience her new freedom and to meet some of her “pen-pals” who responded to her blog and newspaper columns.  The time alone on the drive allowed her to reflect on her life and her relationships formed during her illness.

 

The book’s title comes from a line in Susan Sontag’s memoir, Illness as a Metaphor, where Sontag noted that everyone is born with dual citizenship in the kingdom of wellness and the kingdom of sickness.  As Jaouad recounts her experience, she realized just how hard it was to adjust in moving from one “kingdom” to the other.

 

Read:  May 11, 2022

 

4 Stars

 

Books Set in North America, United States, Seattle, Washington

Firefly Lane, by Kristen Hannah (2008)

 

This is a novel about a life-long friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different.  They became friends as young teens, when Tully Hart and her hippy mother, Cloud, moves into the house across the street from Kate Mularkey.  Although Kate and her mother have the normal teen mother-daughter struggles, she comes from a stable middle-class family.  Tully, on the other hand, lives mostly with her grandmother unless her mother floats into her life for brief periods.

 

Tully is a risk taker.  She decided early on that she was going to become a star reporter.  Nothing will stop in her way.  As teens, both girls were going to pursue that path, but that wasn’t the route that Kate wanted.  Kate knows that Tully always gets what she wants.  When both young women intern at the local television station, both are smitten by Johnny.

 

Sadly, this book is filled with cliches.  I quickly tired of the constant pop culture references beginning in the 1970s and continued throughout the length of the book, which ended around 2008.  The author constantly teases the reader into thinking that a rift will divide the friendship, and hints that the rift will be over Johnny.  The rift, which the reader knows is coming, is actually over another matter.

 

As Kate and Johnny’s daughter, Marah, becomes a teenager, she and Kate enter into their own teen-age mother/daughter struggle.  Marah turns to her “Aunt Tully”, who typically takes Marah’s side.  Hence the rift, which actually came about when Tully basically accused Kate of being an overprotective mother on live television.  After this event, the two women didn’t speak to each other for some unspecified years.

 

The point the author is trying to make is that in life, family is what matters most.  This comes only in the last 30 or so pages (and this is quite a long book).  As the book nears the end, we learn that Kate, who married Johnny after she became pregnant, has inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and is dying.  She thinks that Tully is after Johnny but has reconciled with that thought.  Although Johnny had a one-night stand with Tully before he and Kate married, he was truly in love with Kate.

 

I read the book in its entirety.  If this had been the first book I read by Kristen Hannah, it would not have been inclined to read her other books.

 

Read:  October 10, 2021

 

3 Stars