Book Club - Now Reading: A Good Hard Look

Coming Soon!

The First Husband
by Laura Dave
 
May 30
My Artist's Way Toolkit
 
June 13
What Alice Forgot
by Liane Moriarty
 
June 27

A Discovery of Witches
Deborah Harkness
A Good Hard Look
Ann Napolitano
A Jane Austen Education
William Deresiewicz
Born Wicked
Jessica Spotswood
Caleb's Crossing
Geraldine Brooks
Diary of a Mad Fat Girl
Stephanie McAfee
Faithful Place
Tana French
Getting to Happy
Terry McMillan
Girl in Translation
Jean Kwok
How to Be an American Housewife
Margaret Dilloway
Lost and Found
Geneen Roth
Love at First Bark
Julie Klam
Lunch Wars
Amy Kalafa
Rules of Civility
Amor Towles
Sea Change
Jeremy Page
Slow Love
Dominique Browning
The Beach Trees
Karen White
The Book of Jonas
Stephen Dau
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
The Kid
Sapphire
The Lake of Dreams
Kim Edwards
The Magic Room
Jeffrey Zaslow
The Rules of Inheritance
Claire Bidwell Smith
The Underside of Joy
Seré Prince Halverson
The Weird Sisters
Eleanor Brown
Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore
Stella Duffy
What Happened to Goodbye
Sarah Dessen
Where She Went
Gayle Forman
Why Women Need Fat
William D. Lassek, M.D. & Steven J.C. Gaulin, Ph.D.
You Have No Idea
Vanessa Williams & Helen Williams
More >

Meet Book Club Host


Karen Ballum
Karen Ballum has been blogging about books on her blog Sassymonkey Reads since 2005 and on BlogHer since 2006.

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Reading Next!

A savvy, page-turning novel about a woman torn between her husband and the man she thought she'd marry. Stay tuned for The First Husband!

Recent Comments on Book Club

 
Now Reading: A Good Hard Look
Ann Napolitano (permission given by Penguin)Author: Ann Napolitano

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Get to Know Ann Napolitano

Ann Napolitano: The Story Behind My Online Life

A Good Hard Look: Flannery O'Connor, Choices & Consequences

Book Reviews

A Good Hard Look: MAJOR SPOILERS Edition

9/2/11 3:00pm by morrisonlane
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<[Editor's Note: You want to know everything you need to know about A Good Hard Look? Read this spoilerific post!]  Read more >

A Good Hard Look Is a Nice, Easy Read

9/2/11 9:00am by beckytcy
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After reading three or four dark, depressing, serious books (including the Diary of Anne Frank) in a row, A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano felt like a breath of fresh air. The easy-to-read style and intertwining-storyline structure reminded me a bit of Maeve Binchy, although the characters aren't quite as likeable.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look Is Too Pretty

9/1/11 3:00pm by Jana Llewellyn
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As someone who admires and has taught the writing of Flannery O'Connor, I was excited to get my hands on Ann Napolitano's fictional account of her life and the lives of inhabitants from her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. A Good Hard Look starts out describing the squalling of O'Connor's brazen peacocks the night before a wedding.  Read more >

Take A Good Hard Look at Your Life

9/1/11 9:00am by BalancingMotherhood
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I’ve been looking for a book to recommend to my book club and I think I found it. Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look delivers with a writing style that lets you breeze through the pages wondering what is going to happen next.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look: What Goes Around Comes Around

8/31/11 3:00pm by kendalldog
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Set in a small Georgia town A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano involves a varied cast of characters. It all begins on the eve of Cookie and Melvin’s wedding with an unfortunate event that sets the tone for the rest of the book. Cookie, a committee-chairing social butterfly who grew up in Milledgeville, has high aspirations for her well-to-do, recently relocated husband.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look Is a Lovely Story...

8/31/11 9:00am by danascott96
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I judge a book by its cover. There, I said it. I took one glance at A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano and decided it was tacky. After reading the book, I don’t think the cover matched the feel of the book at all. The book was lovely.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look: An Emotional Novel

8/30/11 3:00pm by livytay
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When I finished Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look, I wasn't sure how to begin a review. It was so good I didn't think I could do it justice.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look: Why You Need to Be a Southerner to Write About the South (SPOILERS!)

8/30/11 9:00am by AdrienneRoyer
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"...anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." -Flannery O'Connor. When BlogHer announced an opportunity to review A Good Hard Look, a novel about Flannery O'Connor by Ann Napolitano, I jumped at the chance.  Read more >

The Women of A Good Hard Look

8/29/11 3:00pm by susanfujiki
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"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it" -- Flannery O'Connor Ann Napolitano does a fantastic job of bringing the women of Milledgeville together in A Good Hard Look to create a story that is rich, colorful and tragic. I will be honest, upon reading the book I had no idea who Flannery O'Connor was and I thought her character was complete fiction.  Read more >

A Good Hard Look - A Tapestry of Characters Almost as Complicated as a Peacock Feather

8/29/11 9:00am by KimO
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I’ve only heard of Flannery O’Connor and seen the movie Wise Blood based on one of her novels (never read her novels), but I read a bit about her before reading Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look. I was fascinated by her obsession with peacocks, and how her devout Catholicism shaped her novels.  Read more >