Orphan #8

Author: Kim van Alkemade
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015
Pages: 416
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: In this stunning new historical novel inspired by true events, Kim van Alkemade tells the fascinating story of a woman who must choose between revenge and mercy when she encounters the doctor who subjected her to dangerous medical experiments in a New York City Jewish orphanage years before.

In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City’s Lower Eastside. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.

Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.

Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.

Review: I thought this was a good book until I started considering all the research that must have gone into it, and some of the creative events that happened. I flipped to the back of the book and that's when I read that the plot and characters were inspired events and circumstances that had actually happened to members of the author's family, long ago and far away. She had photographs and details about her family written in an extra chapter. It was fascinating.

This is thought-provoking and controversial at almost every turn.

I could have done without the "leave nothing to the imagination" lesbian sex details (and that's the reason this "only" gets a "recommend" rating), but I'm not one for reading about the details of sex regardless. Just not my thing. The theme of homosexuality itself didn't bother me, but the details did. So there you have it.

Black-Eyed Susans

Author: Julia Heaberlin
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Random House Publishing, 2015
Pages: 368
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: I am the star of screaming headlines and campfire ghost stories. I am one of the four Black-Eyed Susans. The lucky one.

As a sixteen-year-old, Tessa Cartwright was found in a Texas field, barely alive amid a scattering of bones, with only fragments of memory as to how she got there. Ever since, the press has pursued her as the lone surviving “Black-Eyed Susan,” the nickname given to the murder victims because of the yellow carpet of wildflowers that flourished above their shared grave. Tessa’s testimony about those tragic hours put a man on death row.

Now, almost two decades later, Tessa is an artist and single mother. In the desolate cold of February, she is shocked to discover a freshly planted patch of black-eyed susans—a summertime bloom—just outside her bedroom window. Terrified at the implications—that she sent the wrong man to prison and the real killer remains at large—Tessa turns to the lawyers working to exonerate the man awaiting execution. But the flowers alone are not proof enough, and the forensic investigation of the still-unidentified bones is progressing too slowly. An innocent life hangs in the balance. The legal team appeals to Tessa to undergo hypnosis to retrieve lost memories—and to share the drawings she produced as part of an experimental therapy shortly after her rescue.

What they don’t know is that Tessa and the scared, fragile girl she was have built a fortress of secrets. As the clock ticks toward the execution, Tessa fears for her sanity, but even more for the safety of her teenaged daughter. Is a serial killer still roaming free, taunting Tessa with a trail of clues? She has no choice but to confront old ghosts and lingering nightmares to finally discover what really happened that night.

Shocking, intense, and utterly original, Black-Eyed Susans is a dazzling psychological thriller, seamlessly weaving past and present in a searing tale of a young woman whose harrowing memories remain in a field of flowers—as a killer makes a chilling return to his garden.

Review: Although I will never look at black-eyed susans the same, probably for the rest of my life, this was a fantastic read. This was heavily researched as far as CSI and forensics go, and the story itself was engrossing. I flew through the final pages.

Ida Tarbell

Author: Emily Arnold McCully
Genre: Biography
Publisher: Clarion Books, 2014
Pages: 288
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success. Rejecting the term "muckraker" to describe her profession, she went on to achieve remarkable prominence for a woman of her generation as a writer and shaper of public opinion. This biography offers an engrossing portrait of a trailblazer in a man's world who left her mark on the American consciousness.

Review: More textbook than novel, this is written to young adults, which probably made it more palpable. Growing up in the "oil region," not far from Titusville, PA, Ida Tarbell was a household name. I knew of her, but not much about her. I can't imagine this will appeal to many readers for pleasure reading, but I got through it. I hadn't realized Tarbell was so influential or so well-known.