Book Review:


I will start off by saying wowwww “The Bright Side Sanctuary of Animals” by Becky Mandelbaum is the kind of book you pick up and can’t put down. I was enthralled with every page of this book. If you are an animal lover you will fall in love with this book from the start. Be sure to have a box of tissues ready.

We watch as Mona Siskin steals a sign from her neighbors house which is politically related to the election of Trump and shortly after this The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals barn goes up in flames in St. Clare, Kansas. Mona is in the process of putting the sanctuary up for sale on top of all this.

This is a small town where anti-semitism and judgmental attitudes run rampant. Mona is Jewish and swatiskas are painted on the outside of one of the buildings and causes the death of a horse and her foal. Her neighbors brother Sydney is caught red handed in this destructive act.

Ariel finds out through her friend of the fire and returns to this small town after 6 years away to see if she can help her mother Mona with the sanctuary and possibly mend personal fences that might be irreparably damaged with her mother and includes those broken with her first love Gideon who works for her mom at the sanctuary.

Ariel ran away from home when she was 18 to go to college but life doesn’t always work out the way you think it might. She loves Gideon and her mom but once she is away in Lawrence, Kansas at KU and meets Dex time runs away from her and she begins to change. She just wants to have fun and learn new things about living and not from going to classes. This destroys her free ride to KU and as time goes on keeps her from talking to her mom and Gideon.

Now we have Dex whom she meets when she is away from school and lonely. Dex is hopelessly in love with Ariel but something in her does not allow her from completely allowing Dex all the way into her heart. Dex asks Ariel to marry him and she says yes but just doesn’t seem to show her love the way Dex does. Dex becomes fearful of losing Ariel because of this and she is his number one person. Does this fear of letting people in have something to do with her father leaving her mother when Ariel was a child? Or was it Ariels’s belief that her mother only had love for all the animals she had to take care of and no longer showed love to her husband and daughter?

Now we can’t forget the animals at the Sanctuary because they are the reason Mona works tirelessly to save, heal and try to eventually to find them their forever homes. This beautiful menagerie includes horses, donkeys, sheep, chickens, cats, dogs and more. They all share a place in Mona, Gideon and Ariel’s hearts.

Ms Mandelbsum has created a book with such depth and emotion through her exquisite writing abilities that she is able to get the reader to feel the raw emotions of each of her characters. I give this book 5/5 stars. There is so much more to this book but it’s now your turn to dive in and take this beautiful adventure at The Bird Side Sanctuary for Animals.

The story opened with an interesting premise. Someone who is an animal lover and liberal in a town that is mostly conservative. Throughout the book, i was interested in the relationship between humans and animals. And this book delivers on that.

It took me about two pages to bond with Mona. She loves animals and hates Trump. She is my kinda gal. Mona runs the Brightside Animal Sanctuary in a small town in western Kansas. She’s recently been hit by a hate crime - the burning of her barn and graffiti on the walls of other buildings. She’s been estranged from her daughter, Ariel, for six years. But when Ariel learns of the hate crimes and that Mona has put the sanctuary up for sale, she returns home.
The book made me realize my east coast prejudices. You mean there are actually liberals in Kansas?
None of the characters are perfect. Both Mona and Ariel make dumb mistakes that hurt the other. They have no idea how to communicate with each other and neither can really forgive. The book made me feel incredibly sad for these two hurting and hurtful souls.
At times, the book drags. But Mandlebaum has an ability to paint a scene so I could easily see it with my mind’s eye. She reminds us of all that animals have to teach us, if we would only pay attention.
My thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book.

Ok, how can I not love a book about a pet rescue? How is that possible?

The main reason is that the two main characters were not likable. At least for me. The secondary characters were great, though. I would probably like to have read stories about them.

The secondary reason, how are animals not the main part of the story? These were such a small part of the book. And when mentioned, they were being mis-treated by the main characters or were living in filthy conditions, because the main character couldn’t keep up with the necessary cleaning and care, or they were dying. This was really frustrating to me and overshadowed the entire rest of the story.

Definitely not my favorite and if there was a second book (I don’t think there is), I would not read it.

Thank you #NetGalley for offering this book for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. When I first started it, it was strewn with political elements. I know Trump supporters would probably have been turned off from the very start.
I think it is an enjoyable story. My favorite element was that of the animals. My biggest struggle was that I just really didn't care about any of the characters. The story ended with a few unanswered questions. What happens to the animals? Does Ariel stay there?

This was a cute story with a great all around plot. This is something that is out of my normal reading scope, however I chose it to gain a little more diversity. I literally could not put this book down once I picked it up and found that it had a lot of mystery to it.
I like the detail that was used and found it was easy to get into the story and relate to the characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an eARC of this book!

The Bright Side Sanctuary has run into a bit of trouble, and Ariel hasn’t been back since she left in the dead of night six years ago. Ariel’s estranged mother, Mona, is selling the sanctuary and finding new homes for its animals. In the midst of her own personal struggles, Ariel decides it’s the right time to come home. This upends everyone in Ariel’s life. Chaos ensues!

I sat with my feelings on this one for a bit before writing my review. Oh, how I wanted to love this book. Ultimately, I felt the characters were haphazardly developed and there were no resolutions to the multiple crises introduced.

As other reviewers have mentioned, I found the characters to be largely unlikable. I don’t know that I’ve ever come across a character in a book that I’ve actively hated (okay, maybe Dolores Umbridge) but I HATED Dex and Buddy. The chapters Dex narrated made me want to claw my eyes out. I almost stopped reading after the chapter where Dex compares his feelings of love for Ariel to IBS symptoms and his feelings of regret to flatulence on a cake. It’s been days and I’m still cringing about how bad the analogies were in that chapter.

I think this book had a lot of potential. I’m glad that we got a lot of insight into Mona and Ariel’s relationship. I wish the book would have focused more on that and the rebuilding of their family rather than spending so much time on Ariel’s romantic relationships just for nothing of substance to happen with respect to them.

This book is a quick read, and may be enjoyable for those who love animals and are looking for a breezy piece of women’s fiction.

A heartwarming lovely book. Sense of humor mixed in made it great. This book resonated with me, and left me feeling complete at its end.

Unfortunately this book was not for me. I thought there would be a heartwarming storyline about animals and the sanctuary since that’s basically what the name says. All I really saw was a bunch of politics and drama. I feel the title is very misleading. I do however encourage you to read this for yourself if you are looking for a whole bunch of politics in a book. There are a lot of great reviews, do get you might like it.

I was given this book in exchange for my honest review.

I requested this book without even reading the summary- due to the pretty cover and the title. I actually expected this to be a non-fiction book, but was pleasantly surprised that it was a novel. I really enjoyed the story and it was nice to read about Kansas since I’d recently moved away from there. I was disappointed, however, because there were quite a few loose strings I would have liked tidied up a bit more. Overall, it was a quick fun read! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this!

Writing: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5

After a false start I ended up loving this book — it just got better and better. Kansas. An animal sanctuary. The nature of home, love, forgiveness, and understanding.

Mona runs the “Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals” in rural Kansas with a single devoted employee on a shoestring budget. Her daughter Ariel left years ago to find a life of her own but is drawn inexorably back when news reaches her of a deadly fire at the sanctuary.

I almost stopped reading after the first chapters. Trump has just been elected, and the sanctuary fire is set by what appears to be a stereotypical “bad guy” (think swastikas, racists, Fox News). Not my kind of thing. Instead, the story delves into the people and all the connections between them. It looks at how personal histories (both good and bad) shape people and how each individual has to continually work to understand their own motivations, mistakes, and desires. The writing is excellent, depicting life in a (poorly funded) animal sanctuary in vivid detail — the animals, the work, the squalor, the caring.

The plot is unpredictable, all of the characters are engaging and fully fleshed out, and the environment is intriguing and very real. Highly recommended.

Some good quotes:
“…how unfortunate it was that they didn’t kiss the way humans did, how they could never really hold a loved one in their arms. So few animals even had lips.”

“…because caretaking seemed like the only reasonable occupation in a world that needed so much care.”

“She had always admired this type of woman — women like her mother, like Sunny — who naturally exuded authority. They navigated the world with confidence, looking for things to improve, whereas Ariel moved through the world on tip-toes, expecting someone to reprimand her, to tell her she was doing something wrong.”

“Out here, we have to work with nature. It’s our boss. Our livelihood. Out there, people see nature as this dying thing they need to protect — this thing totally separate from themselves, from the world of people.”

“The animals are weird at night. You’d be surprised how many of them are awake — like they’re all dressed up and ready for church.”

“Maybe that’s the ingredient they’d been missing all along — the ability to say the squishy stuff other families had no problem tossing around.”

“Even in the moments of greatest anger, behind the flames there was always love. If anything, love was the air that stoked the blaze.”

“It seemed both absurd and unjust, that murdering animals made you rich while caring for them made you poor.”

“You know, my mom used to have this saying. She’d say ‘Mona, sorry is like a sponge. You can use it to clean up your messes, but the more you use it, the dirtier it gets.’”

“Dex would catch her looking at him, a shimmer of contempt in her eyes, as if his penis alone had engineered the electoral college.”

“It was something she’d noticed since the election: everyone was eager to dole out little kindnesses wherever possible, as if, deed by deed, they might tip the scales of the world toward goodness and restore some measure of order.”

I’m honestly not sure why I am seeing so many good reviews for this book. I think 2 stars is generous but I didn’t give it one because I didn’t have to put it down and stop reading entirely. And the writing is good, just not the story. There is just nothing memorable about this story. The political rhetoric was unnecessary and added nothing to the story. Honestly it got a little annoying after a while. The story lines don’t really wrap up which is one of my biggest pet peeves in books. It was a mystery-type cliffhanger that left you wondering. It felt a bit like the author got bored with her own story.

This book had a lot of really great qualities to it, but also a few that I was not particularly fond of. Let's start with the good stuff!

I loved Becky Mandelbaum's ability to create complex characters and portray their confused emotions. After reading the synopsis, it is easy to understand just how confused some of these characters are feeling about their emotions. Ariel and Mona are trying to heal a broken relationship mother-daughter relationship, Dex wants to figure out who is fiancee is, and Ariel also has to figure out herself. Each of these storylines was just different enough to help the story come full circle.

I also loved the setting - Bright Side Sanctuary. It was easy to picture the work and love that went into working with the animals. The house and property were also prone to chaos and unsettling feelings, which lent itself to the personal aspect of the character's story.

It also wasn't just a simple place that had a few cats and dogs. The inner workings of the sanctuary in the ways that Becky described it, really helped open up my reader eyes to see what had been going on and what the roots of deeper-lying issues were.

Now to the part that I wasn't so fond of. This book has a lot of political statements peppered throughout. If you don't mind that stuff, you will love this book! But for me, the political statements didn't feel completely connected with the storyline. I felt like they were almost a subplot or sidebar, but not actually enhancing anything. Usually, I read over the political stuff without even realizing it is there, but this felt very pointed and jarring for me.

Overall, a good story with deep characters who are struggling to understand themselves and one another.

After disappearing suddenly from her mother's life six years ago, Ariel returns after hearing a report that a fire was set at her mother Mona's Animal Sanctuary. Over the years Ariel has felt guilt over how she left her mother and her first love Gabriel. She has started a new life with her fiancee Dex, who has no clue about her life prior to when they met.

"The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals" by Becky Mandelbaum brings us a story between mother and daughter and reconciling to ourselves what we want in life. It does move slowly and it took me longer than most books to read and I had to make myself finish reading it. The animal personalities were well written and were one of the most enjoyable parts of this book. As a warning to anyone conservative - this book is filled with liberal ideologies and very anti-conservative. I personally prefer politics be kept from my fiction reading as I get enough in the media. There is also a lot of anger in this book between characters which made it hard to keep engaged.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon and Shuster for the chance to read this book as an ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
This was Becky Mandelbaum’s debut novel but you would never know it.
It was a beautifully written story that had me laughing and crying.
I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was easy to see why Ariel had left her childhood home, especially considering how much attention Mona gave to the Bright Side Sanctuary rather than to her own family. Mona seemed a bit controlling of her daughter, seeing as she didn’t want Ariel to go away to college, but with a full-ride scholarship, how could she say no?

Moving to a new city and starting a new life isn’t always easy, but sometimes going home is even harder. When Ariel discovers there was a fire at the sanctuary and her mother will have to sell it, she heads back to the Bright Side. Between her estranged mother, her first love, and her fiancé, there is a lot of drama and things don’t quite turn out how she expected.

I do think the story ended a bit abruptly though. I just wish the relationship between Mona and Ariel felt more complete by the end, but I guess it was left open-ended because they were just beginning to rekindle what had been broken for so many years. Still, I definitely recommend this book and think others would really enjoy it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3348093524

I received this book as an advanced reader copy from NetGalley. It sounded like a great story with an animal sanctuary and mother daughter relationship. It fell flat for me, I liked the way the animals were cared for in terms of trying to get them adopted but the mother seemed like a hoarder of both animals and stuff. For me, reading about animals in less than ideal situations is not light reading.

Ariel has been away from home for six years, and hasn't spoken to her mother since the day she left. In her case, "home" is also home to dozens of animals: dogs, cats, horses, pigs, llamas, whatever shows up on their doorstep. The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals has been Ariel's mother's passion project since early in her marriage to Ariel's father, but Mona's passion has also caused some unexpected distance in her human relationships, namely with Ariel's father and Ariel herself. When Ariel decided she wanted to go to the other side of the state for college (where she got a full ride scholarship), Mona refuses to give her blessing, hoping Ariel would stay closer to home instead. The rift seems almost irreparable, until Ariel sees the news that the Sanctuary has been vandalized, including arson to the barn, killing a couple of horses. She decides it's time to mend fences and heads for home.

Meanwhile, Ariel's fiance Dex has no idea she grew up on an animal sanctuary, and when he asks Ariel if he can go home with her to meet her mother, she denies his request. What Ariel doesn't want Dex to know, is that she used to be in love with Mona's only employee, Gideon, and she doesn't know what it will be like to see him again. She also never told him she grew up at an animal sanctuary, a fact she's always carried a measure of shame about.

To me, the premise feels very much like classic '00s rom-com Sweet Home Alabama: Girl hides past from current lover, has to go home to settle things before moving forward (a premise I fundamentally cannot understand, because I'd never be able to keep my history hidden like that from a potential spouse. But this is not about me, is it?). However, Bright Side outshines that typical trope by using multiple perspectives in the narrative (y'all know I love a multiple perspective). Not only are we seeing both Ariel and Mona's side, but our third perspective comes from Dex, which was unexpected to me. He could easily be written off as a dopey, one-dimensional character (and in some ways, he still fills that role), but the fact that we see where he's coming from and get to see inside his head and past, adds so much to the complexity and nuance of this story.

Other things I loved include:

- all the animals, DUH. I love how each animal is so tenderly cared for, named, and loved throughout. They each have a personality, too.
- the 2016 setting, just after the election. The first scene of the book has Mona stealing a giant Trump sign from her distant neighbor's yard. It's crazy to me how many contemporary books have come out in the last four years that don't reference our current political system. It's so pervasive and BONKERS in our daily lives, how could it not effect every single story? I mean, I get it. That's not what every story is about. But it's not what this story is about either. And it's refreshing to have it included, somehow validating all my feelings about it.
- the surprisingly non-stereotypical side characters. I particularly loved Joy and Big John, both of whom could so have easily fallen prey to the villain role, but instead had such goodness in them.
- the beautiful writing: Mandelbaum, a native Kansan, describes the land in particular with gorgeous language.

I was taken by this character-driven story, and found myself thinking about them throughout the day. I think this book will find lots of readers happy to devour it. I will post my review on my blog (shecantstopreading.wordpress.com) and my Bookstagram account (instagram.com/shecantstopreadingblog) a week before the publication date and will update this review with links at that time.

This was a miss for me. I agree with the politics of the narrator, and I love animals and have always wanted to live on a farm, so the cover and premise alone drew me in. But once I began reading this, it just felt forced. I appreciate the chance to read an advanced readers copy and review it.

I received this book from Net Galley for free in exchange for a fair review. This was more of a coming of age story, written from different viewpoints of a mother, daughter and fiancée. It painted a very true picture of an animal rescue along with the lack of money, smells of cat and dog urine and animal hair all over your clothes that go along with a one woman rescue. I probably wouldn’t have read it once I realized it was a coming of age story (generational gap for me) but underlying was the theme of mothers and daughters. Well written and will appeal to everyone who likes this genre.