MY HUSBAND'S SWEETHEARTS by Bridget Asher, 2008.

Silly but somewhat diverting piece of chick-lit that reads very quickly and is not that memorable. A woman discovers her husband Artie has cheated on her, leaves him, then finds out he is on his deathbed, returns to take care of him. She discovers his black book, and on a lark, calls all of his old girlfriends and tells them to come and take a turn at his deathbed. Somewhat shockingly, they do, and in the process of their visits, Lucy (the wife) becomes close to two of them, Eleanor and Elspa, as well as with Artie's long lost illegitimate son John (who has some secrets as well). Alliances are formed, secrets shared, there's forgiveness, blah, blah, blah. Some clever dialogue and witty remarks, but mostly it's kind of a drippy relationship story and not that convincing. Quick and forgettable.

THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake, 2010.

I found this to be a rather ho-hum novel. I enjoyed the writer's depictions of the bombings of London during 1940-41 and her descriptions of small town life on Cape Cod, Massachusetts during the pre-World War II era, but I found a lot of her writing to be just so-so, and the characters not all that compelling.The plot centers around three women: the postmistress of Franklin, Mass., Iris; Emma Fitch, the young and fragile wife of that small town's doctor, and Frankie Bard, a woman reporter in Europe who is trying to make Americans aware of what is happening overseas.These three had definite issues in their lives that they struggled to deal with, including pregnancy, midlife, workplace acceptance, loss, and emotional heartache. Parts of this were very good: the accident that befalls Emma's husband, the awfulness of the trainloads of refugees out of Germany and France, the horrific bombings at night in London, sirens blaring. But the story as a whole just didn't leave me feeling much for any of it. In the end, I don't think this book was worthy of all the hype it received.

PRIVATE LIFE by Jane Smiley, 2010.

After having my interest in it piqued by several reviews, I picked this up as I walked past the new book shelf in my library one day to read. I remember enjoying A Thousand Acres very much as a rich and satisfying story based on King Lear. The basic story in this novel concerns a young woman, Margaret Mayfield, born and bred in post-Civil War Missouri, who is taught in all ways by her mother Lavinia to be a good wife, and is at 27 an old maid with no real prospects for a husband. Into her life comes Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an astronomer who needs a wife. At the urging and manipulation of their mothers, the two marry, move to California, where he is posted to a San Francisco-area island to be in charge of the navy's observatory, and Margaret sets about making a life for them. His devotion to the study of science takes over his life, leaving little room for Margaret, who slowly realizes that everything is about Andrew and his professional and private needs and she must support him in every way by cooking and cleaning and typing his manuscripts, etc. Their lives change somewhat as they suffer the loss of a child, as they age, as they contend with new ideas and things like automobiles, and deal with important national issues and crises--the San Francisco earthquake, World War I, Pearl Harbor, the Japanese-American internments, and find their loyalties are tested. Margaret, so hopeful of having a fulfilling life as a wife and mother, eventually has to accept that her life is not what she would have wanted for herself. This story just somehow never quite involved me very much--lots of appropriate details and impressions of life during the period of post-Civil War to World War II, several interesting and likable characters, like Mrs. Lear and her sons, the Kimura family, and so on, but the two main characters just seemed rather one note: Andrew is hugely egotistical and often unpleasant; Margaret is at times almost disturbingly placid and accepting of everything. If Smiley's point was to show how a marriage can start out so promising and then over time descend into a sort of nothingness and emptiness, then she succeeded, as I felt very little for either Margaret or Andrew by the book's end. I have no complaint about Smiley's writing, as she's very readable; I guess it just wasn't a very enjoyable story for me and in the end not very satisfying.