Love Anthony

Author: Lisa Genova
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Gallery Books, 2012
Pages: 309
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: In an insightful, deeply human story reminiscent of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Daniel Isn't Talking, and The Reason I Jump, New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientiest Lisa Genova offers a unique perspective in fiction - the extraordinary voice of Anthony, a nonverbal boy with autism. Anthony reveals a neurologically plausible peek inside the of autism, why he hates pronouns, why he loves swinging and the number three, how he experiences routine, joy, and love. And it is the voice of this voiceless boy that guides two women in this powerfully unforgettable story to discover the universal story truths that connect us all. 

Review: Lisa Genova just doesn't disappoint. This wasn't my favorite of her books that I've read this far, but it was still excellent reading. 

Other Lisa Genova Novels
Inside the O'Briens
More or Less Maddy
Still Alice

Inside the O'Briens

Author: Lisa Genova
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Gallery Books, 2015
Pages: 352
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: From the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice Lisa Genova comes a powerful and transcendent new novel about a family struggling with the impact of Huntington’s disease.

Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s disease.

Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?

As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.

Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (The San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core.

Review: I drank the Genova Kool-Aid. I don't think this author can write a bad book. I felt a little ripped off by this ending, but on the other hand, it's actually brilliant. Good luck putting this one down before you turn the last page.

Other Lisa Genova Novels
Love Anthony
More or Less Maddy
Still Alice

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.

Pioneer Girl

Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Editor: Pamela Smith Hill

Genre: Historical Biography

Publisher: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2014

Pages: 400

Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: Follow the real Laura Ingalls and her family as they make their way west—and discover that truth is as remarkable as fiction.

Hidden away since 1930, Laura Ingalls Wilder's original autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life. Some of her experiences will be familiar; some will be a surprise. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography re-introduces readers to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions of people around the world.

Wilder details the Ingalls family's journey through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory— sixteen years of travels, unforgettable stories, and the everyday people who became immortal through her fiction. Using additional manuscripts, diaries, and letters, editor Pamela Smith Hill adds valuable context and explores Wilder's growth as a writer.

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography also explores the history of the frontier that the Ingalls family traversed and the culture and life of the communities Wilder lived in. The book features over one hundred images, eight fully researched maps, and hundreds of annotations based on census data and records, newspapers of the period, and other primary documents.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in 1929-1930 when she was in her early sixties. Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, Wilder utilized her original manuscript to write a successful children's series. She died in Mansfield, Missouri, at ninety years of age on February 10, 1957.

Review: I'm just a little bit Little House and Laura Ingalls Wilder obsessed. My only criticism about Pioneer Girl is that it ended. It was a fascinating read and I loved the pictures. Some of what is included was a review, but there was quite a bit of new information that I found completely fascinating.

I found the best way to read this was to read the original manuscript to a logical stopping point and then go back and read the notes pertaining to what I just read. This means that I read each page twice. It's amazing to me that I finished it in just over 10 days. There's a lot of text, and I stopped a few times to reference previous notes, pages, or pictures.

I'm hoping we can visit one or two of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites in the Midwest on our trip next summer. A few things must fall into place first, but it would be a dream come true.

The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

Author: Rinker Buck
Genre: History
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2015
Pages: 464
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West—scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history—it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.

Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.

Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.

But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.

At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga,The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.

Review: This was a fascinating read because it piques the readers interest on so many different levels. On the surface, this is a tale of the author's trip and adventures along the Oregon Trail today, but he also pulls in accounts and experiences of the original pioneers on the trail. It is also part social commentary on the state of these united states, and our challenges as a "connected," fast-paced society. There is a bit of memoir feel to it as well as Buck sorts through his feelings about his father and the dynamics of his family.

At times the details of their adventure became a little tedious, but with a story so "American" it's easy to see why this is a hot book right now.