The "In Case You Missed It" Booklist Challenge: Introduction and Explanation

I recently discovered a Facebook page and website called "The Book Girls' Guide" (Facebook page is here). The group encourages readers to check out new books by posting challenges and asking members to rate the books and post reviews. Some of the challenges are year-long programs with a monthly prompt or list, such as "The Decades," where readers choose a book each month that is set (not necessarily written) during a particular decade, either from their list of suggestions or your own choice; or "The Book Lover's Challenge," which might include anything from books written under a pen name, to modern retellings of classic stories, to books with characters who connect through books, or anything else the moderators think of! I'm not sure I'll stick with any list for a whole year - I might, but I'm not making any promises - but the prompts as well as the suggestion lists are interesting enough that I'll probably read something once a month inspired by some part of the site. 

One of the lists that I thought was particularly interesting, especially as a new discoverer of the site, was a challenge called "In Case You Missed It." This challenge involves choosing a book each month that was written in a specific year, starting with 2013 (for January) and ending with 2025 (for December). One of the reasons this challenge caught my eye is that the 2024 suggestion list included a book that I literally finished reading last week - and really enjoyed. It's called The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese. 

I won't give a full review, because the challenge goes in reverse order by year so I may end up reading a different book next October, when publication year 2023 comes up. But I will post a summary and a few comments. 

Covenant of Water is set in various locations in India, but it centers around a small town and a family who lives there. The book opens as a fearful 12-year-old girl is married to a much older, widowed man with a young son. The first few chapters seem to jump around to unrelated characters, but the threads eventually come together to connect all the people we've met, some through past connections and some through new meetings. We follow the girl as she becomes "Big Ammachi," a nurturing, wise, and confident matriarch, seeing amazing changes in the world around her as well in her own family and community over her lifetime. 

I enjoyed Verghese's descriptive writing style, which brings to life the sights, sounds, and smells of rural India; the varied emotions experienced by the characters, from the deepest of grief to the most exuberant of joy; and the experiences of multiple generations of a family plagued by troubles which seem to earlier generations to be a curse but which eventually prove to have a scientific - and treatable - explanation. The characters are well-developed and relatable, with both admirable traits and lamentable failings. Some readers may find the 700-page length daunting, but it never felt bloated or overwritten to me; it's more like a trilogy of books packed into a single volume. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would happily have continued reading for another 300 pages and another generation's worth of stories. 

Stay tuned for my monthly (or maybe more frequent) reviews based on the Book Girls' prompts!