I think that I'll finish at least two books in the next two or three days, but after that, I'm not sure how long anything else in my current reading pile will take me.
I first heard parts of Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls, on Radio 4's Book of the Week non fiction serial. It's partly a memoir about the author, her family and her best friend at school, Darci, and how their lives took very different directions. They grew up in a small town in Arkansas, with lots of poverty, religion and substance misuse. Monica and Darci did very well at school and hoped to go to college, but in their teens, Darci gets into parties, boys, alcohol and drugs and gradually drops out of school. Monica's family has its problems and losses, but she goes away to higher education. The two girls' stories are also given a context of a kind of sociological look at the society they've grown up in. Interestingly, while there are some differences between their mothers and families, Monica Potts also reminds readers that different outcomes can result from luck, good or bad, and that it's probably not that she was brighter or somehow better than Darci.
This is interesting, quite sad and thought provoking. She has worked as a journalist and strikes a good balance between an involving story with references to the social and economic context she and her friend grew up in. I really wanted to read this properly (in unabridged print) after hearing the radio serial (which is abridged into 5 15 minute instalments), and although I'm only about 75% of the way through, I don't think I'll be disappointed (or not by the writing anyway). I need to finish it and get it back to the library soon though, as I will already be paying a fine for returning it 9 or 10 days after the due date as someone else has reserved it.
I've also nearly finished Winifred Boggs, Sally on the Rocks, about a young woman who has returned to an early 20th century English village from an exciting life in Paris, worried about a future with no means of financial or other support unless she can marry - has she left it too late at the grand age of 31. She finds herself competing for the affections of a man she clearly doesn't like or find attractive with a widowed mother younger than herself. Worse, this whole scenario is being manipulated by a woman who makes a point of digging out gossip and scandal and then exposing it for her own entertainment. This is a reprint in the British Library Women Writers series - a book blogger friend who I first met on a book discussion website (in a group discussing Virago Modern Classics, and have met a few times, very generously passed on ELEVEN of the books in the series to me a few months ago - she's more disciplined about passing on books she has read than I am, and I thought this was really sweet of her.