The Wife Between Us

Author: Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2018
Pages: 352
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: When you read this book, you will make many assumptions.

You will assume you are reading about a jealous ex-wife.

You will assume she is obsessed with her replacement - a beautiful, younger woman who is about to marry the man they both love.

You will assume you know the anatomy of this tangled love triangle.

Assume nothing.

Twisted and deliciously chilling, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen's The Wife Between Us exposes the secret complexities of an enviable marriage - and the dangerous truths we ignore in the name of love.

Read between the lies.

Review: Maybe because I was in a marriage where gas lighting and emotional abuse were a way of life, I picked right up on that. However, it's the subplots that really keep this moving forward and draw in the reader. This is one of the better psychological thrillers that I've read.

It's been some time since I found a book that I couldn't put down and that I read in a single day.

I credit the editor-turned-author for the attention to detail, and I'm excited that this team is writing another novel. It's due out in January 2019, and titled The Anonymous Girl.

I also can't stop looking at the cover. The artwork/perspective is compelling.

The Light Between Oceans

Author: M. L. Stedman
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Scribner, 2013
Pages: 345
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

Review: I pulled another book off my lengthy To Be Read list. This was a hot book when it was published and it sat on my "shelf" for years.

While I was never sucked into the story or emotionally attached, it was good enough to keep me reading. 

To sum it up, I came, I saw, and I conquered. This just wasn't special. A Do Not Recommend rating seems harsh to me since it's not a bad story with the potential to appeal to many, so I'll go with Recommend.

All the Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Scribner, 2014
Pages: 544
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy who paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. 

Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doeer illuminates the ways, against all odd, people try to be good to one another.

Review: I put off reading this for a long time for several reasons. The first was that the market is flooded with World War II novels, and how does one compete with the amazing stories I've already read; The Nightingale, for example. World War II novels also tend to be emotionally draining, and I have to prepare myself for it.

Secondly, it's long. I don't have an aversion to long novels, but it's a rare author that can keep a story moving and interesting for over 500 pages.

Years after it's release date, All the Light We Cannot See is still on book lists and being recommended on various sites so of course I had to give it a go.

I wasn't sucked in within the first 100 pages, but the chapters, which alternate between Werner and Marie-Laure stories are only 2-3 pages long each so it feels like you're reading at a much faster pace than you are. It also makes it easier to stop and take a break when it gets to be too much.

When I closed the book after reading the last page, all I could do was sit there and think "wow." Someone described it as a slow burn, and there is no better description. It won't have universal appeal, but it's a reader's novel and I loved it. 

The only thing I still can't grasp is what the author gained by the scrambled timeline. For example, it opens in 1944, returns to 1934, then advances to 1940 so on and so forth. It works, but why structure it that way in the first place?