How 'Bout Them Reads: The Air We Breathe

I was gifted this book and I have finally gotten around to reading it. I'm working my way through all the unread books on my bookshelves, and it is taking awhile. It turns out that I have little munchkin not yet running around but takes up a lot of my time (and rightfully so!). So I don't get as much reading done as I used to but I try to sneak in at least a little bit of reading each day even if it's just a couple pages. And I finally finished this book after starting it way back in December and not really getting to it until January and now in February I am done. Like I said, I have another things going on.

The Air We Breathe
Andrea Barrett

via

Set in the fall of 1916, the world is at war and the United States is feeling the pressures of what is going on around the world to enter the war. Isolated is a community at Tamarack Lake. A community of tubercular patients seeking treatment. The wealthy live in private pure cottage, and the rest (charity patients and mostly all immigrants) live in a public sanatorium. 

Miles, one of the wealthy private cure cottage patients, heads to the sanatorium and starts a Wednesday afternoon group that focuses on educating the group on whatever that person is interested in or knows about.  The group attracts more people with diverse interests. It gives the patients something to do and brings them closer together.

However, their world is ripped into pieces by an accident, which ends in the deaths of three patients. Questions surface and sudden anti-immigrant prejudice hits this quiet little community.

Honestly, I felt like this book was a little drawn out. I felt like there were moments when these were a little more wordy than they needed to be. The story was interesting, the world was different than one I have read about before, and the characters were complex, but it felt like it took much longer than necessary to actually get to the intense part of the story. I can't say I'll read this book again, but I'm glad I pushed through it (even if it took me two months of get through this book!).

2/15