Turn, Magic Wheel

Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell is the latest book that I'm reading with my "rogue book club", the little offshoot of my main book club. I finished it two days ago and am still trying to decide what I think about it.


It's the story of an author who uses a friend, the jilted wife of a Hemingway-like figure, as material for his latest novel. It definitely wasn't a book that really pulled me in or kept me reading it nonstop, so in that sense I can't say that I loved it. There were a few times when I thought "this is it, this is where it's going to pick up and get good", but then it would slow down and my interest waned again.

On the other hand, I really liked the way the author develops the two main characters and their feelings toward each other. I especially loved the way that, during the last few chapters, she sets them up as parallels of each other and shows how the way they approach their lives is more similar than it initially seems.

In the end, I think I liked more than I didn't like about this book, and found some parts to be really intriguing. I can't wait to see what the rest of the club (okay...the one other member) thinks!

Rogue Book Club

One of my friends from my book club recently suggested The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe as the next pick for the group to read. It was vetoed, but we both thought that it sounded so good that we decided to strike out on our own and read it as part of a mini, rogue book club made up of just the two of us.

I'm glad we did because it turned out to be such a good book! It follows 5 young women living in New York and working in publishing during the 1950s. It's like a precursor to any modern chick-lit book ever written, but much, much better, with complex characters and an ending that you could never predict.

We had our discussion for this mini-book club over dinner at the Chat'n'Chew, a cute, 50's-ish restaurant near Union Square. It was the perfect place to keep with the tone of the book's era. I'm almost 99% sure that my high opinion of the book had nothing to do with the yummy mac & cheese and red velvet cake that I had there.