Gracie's Secret

Author: Jill Childs
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2019
Pages: 320
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Time stops for Jen when her beloved daughter, Gracie, is involved in a terrible car crash. After the little girl is pronounced dead at the scene, it's a miracle when paramedics manage to resuscitate her.

The relief Jen feels at Gracie's recovery is matched only by her fury at the drive of the car - her ex's new girlfriend, Ella. Jen has never trusted Ella, and now her worst fears have been confirmed.

But then Gracie begins to tell strange stories about what she heard in the car that day, and what she saw in those moments near death. It's clear that there's something shocking hidden in Ella's past. . .but exposing it could tear all their lives apart.

Review: In a rare moment when I was actually able to browse the library shelves, rather than searching books online and requesting, I found Gracie's Secret. 

I went into this thinking it was fiction, but then bam, it turned thriller. I was hooked from the beginning, and it held my attention til the end. I'm annoyed that I picked up on subtleties early on, but that's almost par for the course. Whether it's intuition or because I read so much, I don't know. Regardless, I do know I must read more by this author.

The Grown-Up

Author: Gillian Flynn
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Crown/Archetype, 2015
Pages: 64
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keep observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to giver her lovely life a drama injection.

However, when the psychic visits the errie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan's terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore. Miles, Susan's teenage stepson, doesn't help matters with his disturbing manner and grisly imagination. The three are soon locked in a chilling battle to discover where the evil truly lurks and what, if anything, can be done to escape it.

Review: This is an R-rated book for sexual content, but the story itself was great. The ending slayed me though. Really? That was it? Such is the life of a short story. Enjoyed it.

Influenza

Author: Jeremy Brown
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Atria Books, 2018
Pages: 272
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: On the 100th anniversary of the devastation pandemic of 1918, Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the origins of the Great Flu that killed millions, to vexing questions such as: are we prepared for the next epidemic, should you get a flu shot, and how close are we to finding a cure?

While influenza is now often thought of as a common and mild disease, it still kills over 30,000 people in the US each year. Dr. Jeremy Brown, currently Director of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health, expounds on the flu's deadly past to solve the mysteries that could protect us from the next outbreak. In Influenza, he talks with leading epidemiologists, policy makers, and the researcher who first sequenced the genetic building blocks of the original 1918 virus to offer both a comprehensive history and a roadmap for understanding what's to come.

Dr. Brown digs into the discovery and resurrection of the flu virus in the frozen victims of the 1918 epidemic, as well as the bizarre remedies that once treated the disease, such as whiskey and blood-letting. Influenza also breaks down the current dialogue surrounding the disease, explaining the controversy over vaccinations, antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, and the federal government's role in preparing for pandemic outbreaks. Through 100 years of advancement in medical research and technology have passed since the 1918 disaster, Dr. Brown warns that many of the most vital questions about the flu virus continue to confound even the leading experts.

Review: This book interested me on two fronts. First, as a mom. Flu vaccines are a hot topic every year in the various mom groups in which I participate. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate. After nearly 13 years in this role :-), I just go with my gut every year and vaccinate, but I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not.

Secondly, my grandmother was born in March 1918, and I enjoy reading books that are set or discuss issues of the world during her formative years. She was oldest girl, but not the oldest child in her family so I like to imagine what the world would have looked like then. What did my great-grandmother think having a 6 month old when the flu first broke out. At any rate, they were fortunate enough to not lose immediate family members in that pandemic.

This was interesting listening, and I feel like I learned "something."

The Silent Sister

Author: Diane Chamberlain
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2015
Pages: 368
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Riley MacPherson has spent her entire life believing that her older sister Lisa committed suicide as a teenager. It was a belief that helped shape her own childhood and that of her brother. It shaped her view of her family and their dynamics. It influenced her entire life. 

Now, more than twenty years later, her father has passed away and she's in New Bern, North Carolina, cleaning out his house when she finds evidence that what she has always believed is not the truth. Lisa is alive. Alive and living under a new identity. But why, exactly, was she on the run all those years ago? What secrets are being kept now, and what will happen if those secrets are revealed? 

As Riley works to uncover the truth, her discoveries will put into question everything she thought she knew about her family. Riley must decide what the past means for her present, and what she will do with her newfound reality. 

Review: Diane Chamberlain is one of my favorite authors. No one tells a story like she does. However, this had a couple flaws, although I still highly recommend this novel.

I guessed Lisa's truth pretty early on in the novel, by page 80. I don't know if it's because it's obvious or if I'm just that familiar with Chamberlain's writing style now. Secondly, Riley's brother was an unessential character. He caused more problems in the telling of the story than he had helped. The whole time I was reading, all I could wonder was why there was even a brother in this story. That character was one of Chamberlain's rare "misses." 

Despite these minor detractions, I really did love this novel. As I always say, I like some of Diane Chamberlain's novels better than others, but I've never been disappointed. That holds true.

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Author: Linda Holmes
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2019
Pages: 304
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth "Evvie" Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband's death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn't correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy's childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the "yips:" he can't throw straight anymore, and even worse, he can't figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean's future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie's house, the two make a deal: Dean won't ask about Evvie's late husband, and Evvie won't ask about Dean's baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken - and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts - the friendships they've damaged, the secrets they've kept - but in life, as in baseball, there's always a chance - up until the last out.

Review: I was hooked from page 1. This novel spoke to me. While I saw pieces of myself in Evvie, all of the characters were authentic. Their actions, reactions, and situations were true-to-life. 

There were moments in this novel that I read and re-read before moving on to the next paragraph or chapter, little nuggets that spoke to me. For example, at one point Dean's parents are asking him if Evvie had pushed him for her benefit, or for his. Had he been sending out signals that she picked up on and in an attempt to be supportive, encouraged him? How often do we do this ourselves. You'll have to read this book for full context, but it was the details that made this book so great.

Hangover.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher, 2013 (originally published 1937)
Pages: 219 pages, 8 discs
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person - no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Review: They sure don't write books like they used to. I would love to sit in an English class and listen to someone really dissect this novel. It was fascinating, maddening, and compelling all in one. Loved it.

I listened to the audio book, which won an Audie Award, not surprisingly since the narrators performed the characters into being.

Could be my favorite read, or listen, of 2019.  

What Happens in Paradise

Author: Elin Hilderbrand
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2019
Pages: 352
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: A year ago, Irene Steele had the shock of her life: her loving husband, father to their grown sons and successful businessman, was killed in a plane crash. But that wasn't Irene's only shattering news: he'd also been leading a double life on the island of St. John, where another woman loved him, too.

Now Irene and her sons are back on St. John, determined to learn the truth about the mysterious life - and death - of a man they thought they knew. Along the way, they're about to learn some surprising truths about their own lives, and their futures.

Review: I waited a long time for this second novel in the Winter in Paradise series, but I was not disappointed. This was just a fun read.

While Hilderbrand's name choices are ridiculous to the point of distraction in this series, the story keeps me turning pages. I also liked that she tied a family from another series into the family in this one. 

The way Book 2 left off leads me to think the third, and final book, will be the best of the bunch.

You'll want to read this series in order.

Other Elin Hilderbrand Novels:
The Five-Star Weekend
Summer of '69
The Blue Bistro
Golden Girl
The Hotel Nantucket
The Island
The Castaways

The Winter Street Series
Winter Street
Winter Stroll
Winter Storms
Winter Solstice

The Winter in Paradise Trilogy
Winter in Paradise
What Happens in Paradise
Troubles in Paradise

Waiting for Eden

Author: Elliot Ackerman
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019
Pages: 171
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Eden lies in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa of his room. We see them through the eyes of his best friend, a fellow marine who didn't make it back home - and who must relive secrets held between all three of them as he waits for Eden to finally, mercifully die and join him in whatever comes after.

A breathtakingly spare and shattering novel that explores the unseen aftereffects - and unacknowledged casualities - of war, Waiting for Eden is a piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty, friendship, betrayal, and love.

Review: I don't remember where I first learned of this book, but it was a National Book Award finalist. From experience, those are pretty good options. This kept my attention from the first page. Interesting premise for a book, albeit a short one at only 171 pages. Thought-provoking.

Save Your Breath

Author: Melinda Leigh
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Amazon Publishing, 2019
Pages: 320
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: When true-crime writer Olivia Cruz disappears with no signs of foul play, her new boyfriend, Lincoln Sharp suspects the worse. He knows she didn't leave willingly and turns to attorney Morgan Dane and PI Lance Kruger to find her before it's too late.

As they dig through Olivia's life, they are shocked to discover a connection between her current book research on two cold murder cases and the suicide of one of Morgan's prospective clients.

As Morgan and Lance investigate, the number of suspects grows, but time is running out to find Olivia alive. When danger comes knocking at their door, Morgan and Lance realize that they may be the killer's next targets.

Review: Rumor has it that this is the last book in the Morgan Dane series, and I hope that's not true. Once again, Melinda Leigh knocks this genre out of the park. 

While each books can stand on its own, I recommend reading the series in order.

The Morgan Dane series
1 Say You're Sorry
2 Her Last Goodbye
3 Bones Don't Lie
4 What I've Done

5 Secrets Never Die
6 Save Your Breath

American Housewife

Author: Helen Ellis
Genre: Humor / Fiction / Short Stories
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016
Pages: 208
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Meet the women of American Housewife. They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when its cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven.

Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these twelve delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wic
ked answer to the question: "What do housewives do all day?"

Review: This was a departure for me. Not a genre I typically read, but I need books on the short side to get my reading challenge back on track. The cover was the best part of the book, but even I found it entertaining at times. 

Hidden Figures

Author: Margot Lee Shetterly
Genre: Non-fiction / Biography
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, 2016
Pages: 368
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of the NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in the America's space program - and whose contributions have been unheralded until now.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these "colored computers," as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these "computers," personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America's greatest adventure and NASA's groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.

Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women's rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world - and whose lives show how out of one of America's most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.

Review: On my list for quite some time, I saw it on my library's shelf of audio books and snagged it. 

I suspect I would have found the print version rather dry, but as an audio book it was good. Math and space are subjects that typically wouldn't interest me, but history, the civil rights movement, and gender equality are themes that speak to me. 

I liked this book a whole lot more than I had ever expected I would, and I'm so glad I gave it a chance. I hope to watch the movie this weekend. I think it will transition well to the big screen, or my little screen, so to speak.

In some ways it reminded me of another book I liked, The Warmth of Other Suns.

Every Other Weekend

Author: Zulema Renee Summerfield
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2018
Pages: 282
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: The year is 1988, and America is full of broken homes. Every Other Weekend drops us into the sun-scorched suburbs of southern California, amid Bret Michaels mania and Cold War hysteria, with Nenny a wildly precocious, nervous nelly of an eight-year-old, as our guide to the newly rearranged life she finds herself leading after her parents split.

Nenny and her mother and two brothers have just moved in with her new stepfather and his two kids. Her old life is replaced by this new configuration, Nenny's natural anxieties intensify, and both real and imagined dangers entwine: earthquakes and home invasions, ghosts of her stepfather's days in Vietnam, Gorbechev knocking down the door of her third grade class and recruiting them into the Red Army. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her, yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. Indeed, tragedy does come, but it comes at her sideways, in a way she never imagined.

With an irresistible voice, Summerfield has managed to tap the very truth of what it is to have been a child of her generation, bottle it, and serve it up in devastating, hilarious, heartfelt doses. Every Other Weekend beautifully and unsettlingly captures the terrible wisdom that children often possess, as well as the surprising ways in which families fracture and reform.

Review: This book appealed to me because my kids split time between two homes - week to week though - not every other weekend. Ultimately though, this gave me no insight into their lives. I was 11 years old in 1988 so while I went into this expecting to relate to my children, I found it myself relating to it instead.

Nenny's imagined scenarios brought about by her fears were relatable. I don't know how much time I spent thinking the Soviets would come to my classroom, but we've all had our fears morph into stories of their own. Heck, I still do this as an adult.

I can't recommend this novel because it is just so odd, but it might hold some appeal. Hey, at least it's short.

A Place at the Table

Author: Susan Rebecca White
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Touchstone, 2013
Pages: 336
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Alice Stone is famous for the homemade southern cuisine she serves at Cafe Andres, a chick gathering place for New York's cultural illuminati, and in her groundbreaking southern cookbook. But her past, on the other hand, is a mystery to all who know her. Upon Alice's retirement, Bobby Banks, a young gay man ostracized by his family in Georgia, sets out to revive the aging cafe with his own brand of southern cooking while struggling with heartbreak like he's never known. Meanwhile, seeking respite from the breakup of her marriage, wealthy divorcee Amelia Brighton finds solace in the company and food at Cafe Andres, until a family secret comes to light in the pages of Alice's cookbook that threatens to upend her life.

Review: I had such high hopes for this novel, and even loved the first few chapters. By the middle of "Bobby's section" though I was losing interest. It picked up a little for Amelia, but overall this novel lacked substance, and believable motivations for the characters' actions. Even the twist wasn't enough to salvage this novel.