Slow Start, Fantastic Finish

There are many books on my nightstand waiting for me to open. My “To Read” list is so long, and over my long reading life I have started many books I put down after 20 pages because it didn’t hook me. Sometimes I’d pick it up again awhile later – sometimes years later – and have the same experience. However, if a friend recommends a particular after I have attempted to read it, I’ll try it again just based on their good recommendation. Because I’m not one to give up on a book easily, my last resort is to listen to the audio version. This third tactic often works and I get hooked to the point of sitting in my car at my destination and not be able to go into where I was headed. I just can’t “put it down” or “turn it off.”

Here are my recommendations for books that start slow but have fantastic finishes. I hope you enjoy them as much as I eventually did.

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

The stirring saga of a man's journey to free his sister—and himself—from a tragic family history. Tom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide again. At the behest of Savannah's psychiatrist, Tom reluctantly leaves his home in South Carolina to travel to New York City and aid in his sister's therapy. As Tom's relationship with her psychiatrist deepens, he reveals to her the turbulent history of the Wingo family, and exposes the truth behind the fateful day that changed their lives forever.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. 

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns

One thing you could depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, was that word got around—fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat showed, the ladies would make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things took a scandalous turn. That was the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, eloped with Miss Love Simpson—a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee. On that day, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy's adventures began, and an unimpeachably pious town came to life.

The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve

A dazzling story about marriage, forgiveness, and chances not taken, by the bestselling author of Body Surfing and A Wedding in December. At a literary festival a poet named Linda Fallon meets for the first time in years a fellow poet, Thomas Janes, whose fame has grown during a decade of seclusion. This is no chance meeting. Thomas saw that Linda was scheduled to appear, and chose this moment to re-establish contact with a woman he had passionately pursued years earlier. Their affair was disastrous for them both, a turning point in their lives, and the damage they did in those years still haunts them both.

-KF