Best Books I Read in 2020:

This year I read 59 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.     Oddkins by Dean Koontz (1988) Grand Central Publishing
Disguised as a children’s tale about a magic toy maker's death and the quest of his magic toys to find the new toy maker who is across the town.  Their adversaries include some newly awakened toys made by the previous, evil, toy maker.  At the same time, the heir of the toy maker who thought his uncle was ridiculous and wants to sell the toy shop is pursued by a man who was just released from prison who wants to buy the shop to make more evil toys.  The turning point comes when the nephew sees the magic toys on their journey being pursued by the evil toys.

2.     Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds (2017) Atheneum
Written in verse, this tour-de-force follows a boy whose brother was just shot and killed.  As he takes the elevator down from his apartment, after having retrieved his brother’s gun, he is met at each floor by ghosts of others in his family who have also died by gunshot; his uncle, a girl he knew at a playground, his father, even the young man who killed his father, and his brother.  They all ask him why he thinks he needs a gun.  And it ends with that question still open.
This book won honors from Newbery, Coretta Scott King, Prinz, and won the Walter Dean Myers Award and The Edgar for Best Young Adult Fiction.

3.     A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (2011) Candlewick Press
Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker.

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been having nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as originating the story.

4.     A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas (2016) Berkley
An interesting variation on the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Charlotte Holmes has an extraordinary mind.  She has no interest in becoming married to a man.  So after her father reneges on his promise to pay for the education that she might become independent, she intentionally loses her maidenhead to a married man.  That way he cannot be forced to marry her and her worth as a prospective bride is dashed in the eyes of any other man.  Then she ‘runs away from home’ determined to establish herself.  Unfortunately things do not go as planned.  A childhood friend, who is now a Lord, tries to watch out for her, but that only brings anger.  She ‘happens’ upon an ex-actress who is a widow, whose name turns out to be Mrs. Watson.  It is she who concocts the scheme of fronting a ‘sick’ Sherlock Holmes, whose sister, Charlotte, takes messages to him.  This book highlights three murders which happen to be inter-related.  In the end, a mysterious man seems to be behind it all.  His name is Moriarity.
Well written, mixing a pure mystery with the gothic romance flavor of the late 19^th century.

5.     Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire (2014) Candlewick Press
A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.
While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.
The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.
Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

6.     The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008) Dial Press
Judith Ashton, a journalist and successful author of a series of comedic, light-hearted books on World War II written under a pseudonym, wants to write about something different and under her own name.  She receives a letter from Guernsey from a farmer who has acquired a book she once owned.  He tells how it led to the society on the island.  She is intrigued and writes back asking questions about the name of the society.  He writes back, telling her the story of how, on the spot, when confronted by German soldiers, a resident spun up the story, creating the society on the spot.  Back in London, Judith is pursued by a rich American publisher.  Her publisher and life-long friend, is both jealous and worried that the American will steal her away from his publishing company.
The book is written as a series of letters and tells the history of the German occupation of Guernsey without apology or lack of exposure of the tribulations of both sides.

7.     Absolute Power by David Baldacci (1996) Warner Books
This was Baldacci’s first novel.  It centers around corruption of the worst kind at the highest office in the land.  A rich old man, who was responsible for putting the president in office, goes on vacation to Jamaica.  At the last minute, his wife decides to stay behind.  Her real reason is to bed the president, who is all too willing to cooperate.
A thief, who knows a maid at the rich man’s house, enters, quiets the alarm system and proceeds to the master bedroom where behind a mirror, is a room sized safe filled with money, jewels and collections.  But before he can leave, the president and the rich man’s wife enter the bedroom.  The thief is trapped in the safe and discovers that the mirror is a one-way window and watches the scene develop.
Both the woman and the president are drunk.  When he slaps the woman too hard, she hits back, this enrages the president and he begins to beat the woman.  She grabs a letter opener and slices his arm.  He yells and his secret service men burst into the room in time to see her on top with the letter opener poised to plunge into the man.  The secret service men kill the woman.
The president’s chief of staff enters the scene, gets the secret service men and the president out of the room.  She finds the letter opener and bags it and puts it in the top of her purse.  When the secret service men come back, she has them sanitize the room, removing all evidence that the president had been there.  While doing that, they knock over the purse, and the letter opener falls behind a table to the floor.
When they leave, the thief leaves the safe, grabs the bagged letter opener for future insurance and climbs out the window.  The chief of staff realizes she left her purse behind and the secret service men go back for it.  Only once they’re in the room, they see the open window and the rope the thief used to climb down.
They give chase but fail to catch the thief before he gets away.
The local homicide detective called-in when the local patrol sees the open window, notices impossible aspects of the case.  No fingerprints anywhere, not even of the victim or her husband.  The floor has been vacuumed, the woman checked for having had sex, and a blood spatter pattern that shows something or someone was near when she was shot – and two bullet holes in her head from different directions, one still inside her head and the other already dug out of the wall.

8.     Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo, Illustrated by K.G. Campbell (2013) Candlewick Press
Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.
Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.
No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

9.     The Huntress by Kate Quinn (2019) William Morrow
A gripping thriller about the hunt for a woman, who as a Nazi killer hunted children.  The tale is told in two timelines; one about a Russian girl who wanted to fly airplanes and the other, after World War II where she and her ‘husband’ look for the Nazi killer.  The story exposes the bravery of Russian women who flew planes and bombed the enemy Germans to defend and then to drive back the invaders.  And the dangerous escape of one such woman after the government chose to imprison her over something her father said in a drunken brawl.  She then rescues an escaped British soldier, only for him to get killed by the huntress, who tried to kill them both.  But the Russian woman escaped and survived.  Later, the soldier’s brother, a journalist, finds her in a field hospital and to save her, he marries her in the field and has her sent to England.  A few years later, after the war is over, he has been chasing down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice and she appears to help him find the Huntress (who has gone to America)

10. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson (2019) Sourcebooks Landmark
The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek must scrap for everything—everything except books, that is.  Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.
Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else.  Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.  If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she's going to have to confront prejudice as old as Appalachia and suspicion as deep as the holler.
Inspired by the true blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse library service of the 1930s, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman's belief that books can carry us anywhere—even back home.

11. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The life of Cora, a runaway slave living in Georgia– who rails against the man who has become her ‘owner’ in the 1840s.  Her mother ran away and left her behind as a child (near the end of the book we learn that she was on her way back to get her child but was bitten by a cotton-mouth and died in the swamp).  This is a bitter memory for Cora, who took over her mother’s little plot of ground as a garden.  When a new slave, a big man, took over her cabin and ruined her garden to build a house for his dog, Cora busted-up the doghouse and hurt the dog and its owner.  This got her branded as crazy by the other slaves.  But a new man secretly plots with her to run away.  When they leave, they find their way to the underground railroad.  On the way slave hunters try to capture them.  Cora kills one, fighting for her life.  On the railroad, they get a choice to stop in South Carolina or go on.  This is a different kind of life where negros are educated and given health care.  Only it turns out to be insidious.  Because the doctors are studying eugenics and want to operate on the women, so they won’t have children.  One day, slave hunters come to town looking for Cora and her man.  Cora escapes back to the underground railway station.  Her man never arrives.  She catches the next train, run by a boy who was told the stations were closed.  He drops her off at the end of the line, it is blocked by a cave-in after that.  The station master does not expect her and things have gotten bad in his town.  He takes her home and hides her in the attic.  No one in the town is allowed to have slaves.  But this is not a town of tolerance.  On the way to the town, she saw a seemingly endless row of trees with former slaves hanging from the branches.  She lives in the attic for months.  Each week she watches as a runaway slave is brought to the town square, denounced, and sometimes the white family that harbored the slave is also put on a platform, ridiculed and then all hanged.  Cora has no escape.  One night the town constabulary knocks on the door and drags Cora, the station master and his wife out.  But Cora is not hanged.  The slave hunters came to town looking for her.  They have a commission in Tennessee to return a slave.  On the way, the hunter gets tired of hearing that slave sing, off-key, and kills him.  They switch direction toward Georgia to return Cora and are hijacked.  Cora is freed and runs with two new black men who tell her they are not slaves.  They take her to a farm in Indiana where the owner is black and quite a few runaway slaves.  Life on the farm is good.  Cora discovers the owner has a library and spends a good amount of her time there when she isn’t helping on the farm.  But life is not idyllic.  There are people on the farm who resent the runaways from sharing in what they have built.  One man contacts the slave hunters, thinking they will come and remove the runaways peacefully.  It results in a massacre.  Cora is captured, but the slave hunter wants to see where the underground station is so he can report it and have it destroyed.  But on the way down the ladder, he insists on holding on to Cora.  She falls, pulling him with her.  She lands on top and he dies.  She uses a handcart and pumps her way to another station.  Where she comes out seems to be in the middle of nowhere.  A small wagon train passes here and the last wagon is driven by an old black man who offers her a

 

The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo 

Alex was running from trouble and ghosts.  She ended up at a crime scene, having lived with the wrong type of people, into drugs, and all of them dead.  But she was cleared by the police.  While recovering in the hospital, she was approached by a Dean from Yale who understood she saw ‘Grays’ and wanted to offer her a free ride to college if she would assist their Lethe program to oversee rituals the ancient houses were secretly performing, forecasting the stock market, running for public office, writing bestsellers, and other things not quite so ethical.  She’s not exactly a novice at seeing the dead, but she can’t seem to locate a dead girl and several groups, including the cops and her Dean try to warn her off looking into the death.  But she can’t help herself and solving this riddle takes her to the Nile on the other side of the Veil to bonding with a dead man, to showing a magical cure in front of the cop assigned to Lethe, to proving a seemingly harmless immortal is more than she seems.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

The life of Cora, a runaway slave living in Georgia– who rails against the man who has become her ‘owner’ in the 1840s.  Her mother ran away and left her behind as a child (near the end of the book we learn that she was on her way back to get her child but was bitten by a cotton-mouth and died in the swamp).  This is a bitter memory for Cora, who took over her mother’s little plot of ground as a garden.  When a new slave, a big man, took over her cabin and ruined her garden to build a house for his dog, Cora busted-up the doghouse and hurt the dog and its owner.  This got her branded as crazy by the other slaves.  But a new man secretly plots with her to run away.  When they leave, they find their way to the underground railroad.  On the way slave hunters try to capture them.  Cora kills one, fighting for her life.  On the railroad, they get a choice to stop in South Carolina or go on.  This is a different kind of life where negros are educated and given health care.  Only it turns out to be insidious.  Because the doctors are studying eugenics and want to operate on the women, so they won’t have children.  One day, slave hunters come to town looking for Cora and her man.  Cora escapes back to the underground railway station.  Her man never arrives.  She catches the next train, run by a boy who was told the stations were closed.  He drops her off at the end of the line, it is blocked by a cave-in after that.  The station master does not expect her and things have gotten bad in his town.  He takes her home and hides her in the attic.  No one in the town is allowed to have slaves.  But this is not a town of tolerance.  On the way to the town, she saw a seemingly endless row of trees with former slaves hanging from the branches.  She lives in the attic for months.  Each week she watches as a runaway slave is brought to the town square, denounced, and sometimes the white family that harbored the slave is also put on a platform, ridiculed and then all hanged.  Cora has no escape.  One night the town constabulary knocks on the door and drags Cora, the station master and his wife out.  But Cora is not hanged.  The slave hunters came to town looking for her.  They have a commission in Tennessee to return a slave.  On the way, the hunter gets tired of hearing that slave sing, off-key, and kills him.  They switch direction toward Georgia to return Cora and are hijacked.  Cora is freed and runs with two new black men who tell her they are not slaves.  They take her to a farm in Indiana where the owner is black and quite a few runaway slaves.  Life on the farm is good.  Cora discovers the owner has a library and spends a good amount of her time there when she isn’t helping on the farm.  But life is not idyllic.  There are people on the farm who resent the runaways from sharing in what they have built.  One man contacts the slave hunters, thinking they will come and remove the runaways peacefully.  It results in a massacre.  Cora is captured, but the slave hunter wants to see where the underground station is so he can report it and have it destroyed.  But on the way down the ladder, he insists on holding on to Cora.  She falls, pulling him with her.  She lands on top and he dies.  She uses a handcart and pumps her way to another station.  Where she comes out seems to be in the middle of nowhere.  A small wagon train passes here and the last wagon is driven by an old black man who offers her a ride to the west.

Peace Talks by Jim Butcher 

The latest in the Dresden files.  Dresden in still considered a part of the White Council of Wizards, while he is also Mab’s Knight of Darkness.  He is living with the Svartelves to protect his daughter.  And Mab has loaned him out to the most powerful white vampire.  His half-brother’s half-sister.  Then his brother goes and does something stupid like trying to kill the king of the Svartelves.   Which makes them suspicious of Desden and his daughter.  All the while, Dresden is supposed to watch out for the security of a special convocation of the magical unseelie accords.  Now the White Council doesn’t trust him.  And that includes his grandfather, the most powerful wizard of all.

The only way to save his brother is through subterfuge.  The only way to save the earth is to fight a Titan.

Night by Elie Wiesel 

You must be brave to read this book.  It will not uplift you, but you will never forget it.

Darkness reigns in the life of Jews during the terror of Nazism.  This is part of the memoir of Wiesel who was rescued from Buchenwald at the end of World War II.  He lost everything, his family, his humanity, his hope.  Yet he survived.  Everything about him, though was changed.  That is what I think he wants the reader to understand; that a people were altered by the inhumanity of others.

"In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende 

The story is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia's 100 Years of Solitude,  This starts with the del Valle family, focusing upon the youngest and the oldest daughters of the family, Clara and Rosa. The youngest daughter, Clara del Valle, has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary of her life. Using her powers, Clara predicts an accidental death in the family. Shortly after this, Clara's sister, Rosa the Beautiful, is killed by poison intended for her father who is running for the Senate. Rosa's fiancé, a poor miner named Esteban Trueba, is devastated and attempts to mend his broken heart by devoting his life to restoring his family hacienda, Las Tres Marías, which has fallen into poverty and disrepair. He sends money to his spinster sister who takes care of his arthritic mother in town. Through a combination of intimidation and reward he quickly earns/forces respect and labor from the fearful peasants and turns Tres Marías into a "model hacienda". He turns the first peasant who spoke to him upon arrival, Pedro Segundo, into his foreman, who quickly becomes the closest thing that Trueba ever has to an actual friend during his life. He rapes many of the peasant women, and his first victim, Pancha García, becomes the mother of his bastard son, Esteban García.

Esteban returns to the city to see his dying mother. After her death, Esteban decides to fulfill her dying wish: for him to marry and have legitimate children. He goes to the Del Valle family to ask for Clara's hand in marriage. Clara accepts Esteban's proposal; she herself has predicted her engagement two months prior, speaking for the first time in nine years. During the period of their engagement, Esteban builds what everyone calls "the big house on the corner," a large mansion in the city where the Trueba family will live for generations. After their wedding, Esteban's sister Férula comes to live with the newlyweds in the big house on the corner. Férula develops a strong dedication to Clara, which fulfills her need to serve others. However, Esteban's wild desire to possess Clara and to monopolize her love causes him to throw Férula out of the house. She curses him, telling him that he will shrink in body and soul, and die like a dog. Although she misses her sister-in-law, Clara is unable to find her sister-in-law by any means and the gap between her and her husband widens as she devotes her time to her daughter and the mystic arts.

Clara gives birth to a daughter named Blanca and later, to twin boys Jaime and Nicolás. The family, which resides in the capital, stays at the hacienda during the summertime. Upon arriving at Tres Marías for the first time, Blanca immediately befriends a young boy named Pedro Tercero, who is the son of her father's foreman. Blanca and Pedro grow up together as best friends despite them being of two different social and economic classes. During their teenage years, Blanca and Pedro Tercero eventually become lovers. After an earthquake that destroys part of the hacienda and leaves Esteban injured, the Truebas move permanently to Las Tres Marías. Clara spends her time teaching, caring for her husband's battered body, and writing in her journals while Blanca is sent to a convent school and the twin boys back to an English boarding school, both of which are located in the city. Blanca fakes an illness so as to be sent back to Las Tres Marías, where she can be with Pedro Tercero, but when she arrives home she finds that Pedro Tercero has been banished from the hacienda by Esteban, on account of his revolutionary communist/socialist ideas. Pedro Tercero meets with Blanca in secret adopting disguises while also spreading his ideas in the form of song to neighboring haciendas.

A visiting French count to the hacienda, Jean de Satigny, reveals Blanca's nightly romps with Pedro Tercero to her father. Esteban furiously goes after his daughter and brutally whips her. When Clara expresses horror at his actions, Esteban slaps her, knocking out her front teeth. Clara decides to never speak to him again, reclaims her maiden name and moves out of Tres Marías and back to the city, taking Blanca with her. Esteban, furious and lonely, blames Pedro Tercero for the whole matter; putting a price on the boy's head with the corrupt local police. At this point, Pedro Segundo deserts Esteban, telling him he does not want to be around when Trueba inevitably catches his son. Enraged by Pedro Segundo's departure, Trueba begins hunting for Pedro Tercero himself, eventually tracking him down to a small shack near his hacienda. He only succeeds in cutting off three of Pedro's fingers, and is filled with regret for his uncontrollable furies.

Blanca finds out she is pregnant with Pedro Tercero's child. Esteban, desperate to save the family honor, gets Blanca to marry the French count by telling her that he has killed Pedro Tercero. At first, Blanca gets along with her new husband, but she leaves him when she discovers his participation in sexual fantasies with the servants. Blanca quietly returns to the Trueba household and names her daughter Alba. Clara predicts that Alba will have a very happy future and good luck. Her future lover, Miguel, happens to watch her birth, as he had been living in the Trueba House with his sister, Amanda. They move out shortly after Alba's birth.

Esteban Trueba eventually moves to the Trueba house in the capital as well, although he continues to spend periods of time in Tres Marías. He becomes isolated from every member of his family except for little Alba, whom he is very fond of. Esteban runs as a senator for the Conservative Party but is nervous about whether or not he will win. Clara speaks to him, through signs, informing him that "those who have always won will win again" – this becomes his motto. Clara then begins to speak to Esteban through signs, although she keeps her promise and never actually speaks to him again. A few years later, Clara dies, peacefully, and Esteban is overwhelmed with grief.

Alba is a solitary child who enjoys playing make-believe in the basement of the house and painting the walls of her room.  Blanca has become very poor since leaving Jean de Satigny's house, getting a small income out of selling pottery and giving pottery classes to mentally handicapped children, and is once again dating Pedro Tercero, now a revolutionary singer/songwriter. Alba and Pedro are fond of each other, but do not know they are father and daughter, although Pedro suspects this. Alba is also fond of her uncles. Nicolás is eventually kicked out by his father, moving, supposedly, to North America.

When she is older, Alba attends a local college where she meets Miguel, now a grown man, and becomes his lover.  Miguel is a revolutionary, and out of love for him, Alba involves herself in student protests the conservative government. After the victory of the People's Party (a socialist movement), Alba celebrates with Miguel.

Fearing a Communist dictatorship, Esteban Trueba and his fellow politicians plan a military coup of the socialist government. However, when the military coup is set into action, the military men relish their power and grow out of control. Esteban's son Jaime is killed by power-driven soldiers along with other supporters of the government. After the coup, people are regularly kidnapped and tortured. Esteban helps Blanca and Pedro Tercero flee to Canada, where the couple finally find their happiness.

The military regime attempts to eliminate all traces of opposition and eventually comes for Alba. She is made the prisoner of Colonel Esteban García, the son of Esteban Trueba's and Pancha Garcia's illegitimate son, and hence the grandson of Esteban Trueba. During an earlier visit to the Trueba house, García had molested Alba as a child. In pure hatred of her privileged life and eventual inheritance, García tortures Alba repeatedly, looking for information on Miguel. He rapes her, thus completing the cycle that Esteban Trueba put into motion when he raped Pancha García. When Alba loses her will to live, she is visited by Clara's spirit who tells her not to wish for death, since it can easily come, but to wish to live.

García, fearful of his growing attachment to Alba, discards her. Esteban Trueba manages to free Alba with the help of Miguel and Tránsito Soto, an old friend/prostitute from his days as a young man. After helping Alba write their memoir, Esteban Trueba dies in the arms of Alba, accompanied by Clara's spirit; he is smiling, having avoided Férula's prophecy that he will die like a dog.  Alba is pregnant, though whether the child is Miguel’s, or the product of her rape is unknown.  Alba embraces this ambiguity, however, loving her unborn child as above all, it is her own.  Alba resolves that she will not seek vengeance on those who have injured her, choosing to believe in the hope that one day the human cycle of hate and revenge will be broken.  Alba is revealed to be the narrator of the novel, which she writes while she waits for Miguel and for the birth of her child.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson 

The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek must scrap for everything—everything except books, that is.  Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.

Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else.  Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.  If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she's going to have to confront prejudice as old as Appalachia and suspicion as deep as the holler.

Camino Winds by John Grisham 

We return to Camino Island only to suffer a hurricane.  And a brief affair between one of the island’s less savory writers and a woman who breaks-up with him and walks away during the hurricane.  Bruce Cable, bookstore owner on the island checks on his writers and discovers one has died, under mysterious circumstances.

Just as Bruce Cable’s Bay Books is preparing for the return of bestselling author Mercer Mann, Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course and heads straight for the island. Florida’s governor orders a mandatory evacuation, and most residents board up their houses and flee to the mainland, but Bruce decides to stay and ride out the storm.

The hurricane is devastating.  Homes and condos are leveled, hotels and storefronts ruined, streets flooded, and a dozen people lose their lives. One of the apparent victims is Nelson Kerr, a friend of Bruce’s and an author of thrillers. But the nature of Nelson’s injuries suggests that the storm wasn’t the cause of his death: He has suffered several suspicious blows to the head.

Who would want Nelson dead? The local police are overwhelmed in the aftermath of the storm and ill equipped to handle the case. Bruce begins to wonder if the shady characters in Nelson’s novels might be more real than fictional. And somewhere on Nelson’s computer is the manuscript of his new novel. Could the key to the case be right there—in black and white? As Bruce starts to investigate, what he discovers between the lines is more shocking than any of Nelson’s plot twists—and far more dangerous. 

A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park - Tree-ear is an orphan who lives under a bridge with Crane-man, a disabled soldier.  Crand-man has raised Tree-ear since he was a toddler.  They live near Ch’ulp’o, a village of potters whose celadon finish is highly prized.  Tree-ear is determined to become the apprentice of Min, the oldest and best potter in the village.  Min dismisses him without consideration because only the son of a potter can become a potter.  But he does need help and eventually hires the boy to do laborious work that will allow Min to spend more time on his pottery.

An announcement is made in the village that a royal emissary is coming to select potters for a commission.  Min’s work is the best, but he is slower than other potters.  The emissary, wanting a sample from Min offers to let him bring his offering to the capital.  But Min cannot make such a journey.  Tree-ear offers to make the journey for him.  They pack the sample and Tree-ear sets off on his journey.  Part way along, he is set upon by thieves who think he has food or something they can easily sell for food in his backpack.  When they find it is only a piece of pottery, they cast it off the side of the mountain, breaking it into many pieces.  Tree ear climbs down the mountain but can only retrieve a single shard.  Even so, he perseveres and delivers the shard as a sample to the emissary.  The emissary gives a commission to Min.  When Tree-ear returns, he learns that Crane-man has perished in an accident, and that Min, will adopt Tree-ear as his son and rename him to Huang-pil.

Camino Island by John Grisham

A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for twenty-five million dollars.

Bruce Cable, a known womanizer, owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts.  His girlfriend is an antiques dealer whose store is next door to the bookstore.

Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer’s block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position.  She used to spend summers on Camino Island when her grandmother was alive but has not been back in years.  She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable’s circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets.

To do this, Mercer frequents the bookstore.  She was supposed to visit when her book came out, but thinking no one really wanted to buy the book, she cancelled her tour just before going back to the island.  She strikes up a friendship with Cable, who wants to get her into his bed.  Eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there’s trouble in paradise, FBI involvement, and double-dealing.

 One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

This is the story of three sisters, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, who visit their estranged mother, Cecille in Oakland, California.  But when they arrive with dreams of Disneyland and movie stars, they discover their mother is nothing like they expected.  The end-up spending their summer in a school run by the Black Panthers and learn unexpected lessons.  The book won numerous awards, including the Scott O’Dell award, the Coretta Scott King award, a Newbury Honor and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

The Huntress by Kate Quinn 

A gripping thriller about the hunt for a woman, who as a Nazi killer hunted children.  The tale is told in two timelines; one about a Russian girl who wanted to fly airplanes and the other, after World War II where she and her ‘husband’ look for the Nazi killer.  The story exposes the bravery of Russian women who flew planes and bombed the enemy Germans to defend and then to drive back the invaders.  And the dangerous escape of one such woman after the government chose to imprison her over something her father said in a drunken brawl.  She then rescues an escaped British soldier, only for him to get killed by the huntress, who tried to kill them both.  But the Russian woman escaped and survived.  Later, the soldier’s brother, a journalist, finds her in a field hospital and to save her, he marries her in the field and has her sent to England.  A few years later, after the war is over, he has been chasing down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice and she appears to help him find the Huntress (who has gone to America).

The Buried World by Jeff Wheeler 

The second book in his series about the Grave Kingdom, wherein Bingmei is taken by the evil Emperor Echion and forced to release his dead queen Xisi.  Together they plan to rule the world.  So it is Bingmei’s obligation to escape and travel into the Grave Kingdom to find the one thing that will defeat evil.

 The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

Edward Tulane is a rabbit.  A figurine and a toy.  He is the companion of a very rich little girl.  And he has the dignity his position affords him.  But his position is not as secure as he thinks.  While on a trip with his little girl on the RMS Queen Mary, he falls overboard into the Atlantic.  He rests on the ocean floor for quite a while.  After most of a year, a storm tosses him into a fishing net.  The fisherman takes him home to his wife, who dresses him as a girl rabbit and sings to him everyday.  The Woman’s daughter thinks the situation is ridiculous and tosses him in the garbage, which leads to him being put in a dump.  From there he finds himself the property of a hobo, who tells stories at night to other hobos. Then he lives with a little boy and his tubercular sister until she dies.  In anger at this sister’s death, he damages the rabbit.  He tries to get him fixed-up, but cannot afford the repairs and lets the toymaker keep him for sale.  A woman comes in the store to look around and spies the rabbit.  She is the little girl, grown up now with her own daughter, who originally owned the toy.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie 

A collection of two dozen interlinked short stories starring his usual cast of characters on the reservation. It was the basis for his movie, Smoke Signals.

Each story can stand on its own, but together they draw a canvas of stories that could only be found on the reservation. Victor Joseph, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Junior Polatkin and others live through these stories and go on to stories in other books. Sherman Alixie has a pattern of ordinariness that frequently delivers a hard punch to the gut.

"Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them."

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancy

First Wave: “Lights Out” During the first wave, the Others release an EMP wave that takes out all electronic technology and kills half a million people by shorting out all moving vehicles, including planes in mid-flight. 

Second wave: “Surf's Up” The Others, realizing that roughly 40 percent of Earth's population lives within 60 miles of the coastline, drop enormous rods "twice as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as heavy" onto the Earth's fault lines, causing massive tsunamis that wipe out three billion people. 

Third wave: “Pestilence” The Others launch a scheme to infect as many remaining survivors as possible with a deadly virus. Using the Earth's birds as carriers (via falling excrement), the plague claims 97 per cent of remaining survivors. The virus, which resembles an advanced form of Ebola, causes victims to slowly bleed to death until eventually "you've become a viral bomb. And when you explode, you blast everyone around you with the virus". 

Fourth wave: “Silencers” After the 3rd wave, the remaining human population tries desperately to survive off whatever resources remain by looting, all the while clinging to the hope that "the people in charge", wherever they may be, are working toward a solution. Eventually, this belief seems legitimate when an impressive battalion of soldiers (with functioning vehicles) arrives at the makeshift camp where Cassie, Sam, and her father are staying. The soldiers and commander, however, only appear interested in the children and promptly load them onto waiting buses before ordering all the adults into the camp barracks.  Once the humans are surrounded, Commander Vosch orders a massacre and kills everyone at the camp.  Cassie, however, narrowly escapes and witnesses her father's death by Vosch's hand. At this moment, the 4th wave becomes clear: not all "humans" are actually humans.

Cassie goes on a mission to rescue her little brother.  She finds herself trapped and wounded by a sniper.  But eventually, he walks away.  A couple of days later, she discovers another survivor, delirious, she faints and wakes up in his farmhouse.  Her little brother and her fellow survivor are trained in weapons and then sent on a raid to root out the Others.  Only it turns out that their Sergeant is really an Other and the exercise is a trap to remove the best defenders of humanity left alive.

Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo 

Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.

Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.

No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

Get Real by Donald Westlake

John Dortmunder and his friends are hired, against their better judgement, to do a reality show about a gang of crooks who meet at their favorite bar in the back room.  Only they really want to rob the building where the filming is taking place in a mock-up of their favorite bar.  The real target is on the floor below the filming.  But it appears that it is used infrequently by visitors from out of the country.  When the gang breaks-in to find out where the real money is hidden, they discover that the real crooks are the people that own the company filming the show.  The gang doesn’t take all of the money, but the company isn’t going to go to the cops, because then they’d have to admit that they’re skimming the budgets of the shows they’re making and sending the money overseas.  All they can do is cancel the show.

 The Darwin Affair by Tim Mason

A library book club recommendation.  We have a police detective in London who has unwittingly been labeled as being the model for Dicken’s Inspector Bucket in his serial novel, Bleak House.  It’s made him popular with a lot of people, even the Queen.  He is given the responsibility to make sure she is safe on her way across London.  But a witless man waves a gun and screams anarchist slogans.  He gets away but is slain only a block from the scene.  A butcher’s apprentice sees a man fleeing the scene, but doesn’t think much about it.  The next day he is abducted.  The detective tracks people with no real success and is eventually let go for insubordination.  He accepts a job at a pub that is next to a funeral home.  One that is switching bodies from the coffins to sell as cadavers to the medical school across the way.  But then our detective recognizes one of the bodies.  And the race is on.  He is reassigned into the police and set to accompany the Queen and Prince Albert on their visit to Germany.  And the original assassin, along with his new ‘apprentice’, the butcher boy, follow to try to kill the Prince.

 The One and only Ivan by K.A. Applegate

Ivan is a gorilla who lives in a tourist trap mall off I95.  He has friends, Stella, an elephant, Bob a dog, and Julia, the janitor’s daughter, who brings him materials to do art.  Maurice, who owns the mall and the animals in it, raised Ivan after hunters killed his family.  But Stella is sick and Maurice doesn’t take care of her as he should.  A baby elephant, Ruby, captured as Ivan was, comes to the mall.  She’s scared.  Stella gives her some comfort and pointers, but Stella dies and just before she does, she asks Ivan to take care of the baby.  Ivan has to think for a long while, but he starts painting pieces of paper and makes enough to cover the billboard.  Julia talks her father into putting the pieces together on the billboard and suddenly the mall is the center of attraction again.  Maurice is happy at first to be making so much money.  But eventually the zoo learns of the animals and comes to inspect their cages.  In the end, Ivan and Ruby get to move to an open-air zoo.

Topaz by Leon Uris 

An original thriller about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The name of the French President is a thinly veiled characterization of De Gaulle, but he was not the President in charge during the time of the story.  It boasts a medium sized cast of a Soviet defector and his wife and daughter, a French secret-service agent, his wife and daughter and his lover in Cuba, high-ranking Cuban officials and American agents interviewing the defector and using the French secret serviceman to get confirmation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.  The story delves deeply into the pressures on family life in these roles.

The book was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin 

Mengele is alive and well in South America and he’s been busy.  There is a plan afoot to create the fourth Reich.  But someone found him and recorded a secret dinner meeting wherein he has assigned 94 names of older men he needs killed in order for his plan to go forward.  These men must be around 65, have a much younger wife, and a teenage son.  The must be killed in a specific order and on or near specific dates.  Just as the recorder has managed to get a famous Nazi hunter, Yakov Liberman, on the phone, but before he can relay the details, Mengele and his men burst into the hotel room and kill the young man.  Yakov can’t get it off his mind and asks a reporter friend to let him know about men fitting the description dying, either in suspicious accidents or outright murder.  The clippings start coming in with far more volume that Liberman expected.  He poses a hypothetical question while giving a lecture at a university.  This leads him to talking to a geneticist.  The conclusion involves a pattern that matches the growth of the most evil man in history.  It seems that Mengele, using some of Hitler’s hair, has created 94 clones and had them delivered to families that were turned down because of the difference in the age of the father and the mother.  When Hitler was a teenager, his father was killed.  Mengele has 94 chances to create a new Hitler from the boys from Brazil.

The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley

In which two orphaned sisters, of the family Grimm, after being shunted from one foster family to another are finally claimed by a woman who says she is their grandmother.  The problem, as far as the older sister is concerned, is that their father told them their grandmother is dead.  The grandmother’s driver is a gaunt old man and her car seems even older.  In the town, which also looks very old, the girls get a lot of odd looks.  The mayor is Mr. Charming, there are other people with names of characters from fairy tales.  In their grandmother’s house, there is a room they can’t go into.  The older sister is waiting for the chance for her and her sister to escape yet another crazy foster home.  But then a giant steps on a farmhouse and the story really gets wild from there.  All the while, the older sister refuses to believe in fairy tales, until the giant steals their care with their grandmother and her driver right in front of them.  The grandmother’s keys come flying out and onto the ground.  They have no choice but to go back to their grandmother’s house and see what is in the forbidden room.  And it’s the magic mirror, hiding all kinds of magical artifacts in a warehouse behind the mirror.  Jack, from the beanstalk tale is the only one in town who knows how to kill a giant, and he’s in jail.  The girls have to rescue their grandmother and figure out who is causing all the trouble.

One Good Deed by David Baldacci 8/10)

A new character for Baldacci, a man Aloysius Archer, a WWII vet who found himself on the wrong side of helping a young lady escape her family.  She said she was 21 but she lied.  As a result, her father had Archer put in prison for kidnapping a minor.  He’s out, on parole, and sent to a city he’s never heard of before.  There, he immediately runs into a man who hires him to collect on a debt or repossess the collateral.  He then meets his parole officer, get a list of what he’s not allowed to do (including going to bars, where he was hired).  It becomes obvious fairly soon in the story that there are two rich and opposed men in the town, one is the man who hired Archer and the other is the man Archer is supposed to collect the debt from.  Archer’s boss is keeping the daughter of the other man.  That man refuses to pay the debt.  For some reason the wife of Archer’s boss knows about the affair and does nothing about it.  Then Archer’s boss is killed.  Then the other man is killed.  There are multiple players with axes to grind in both directions.  The story revolves around Archer’s parole not being violated while he tries to figure out who the real killer is to clear his own name.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

The film version of this followed the beginning of the book very closely.  But the book devolves into constant angst on the part of the title character. The story itself follows closely in both mediums.  A man falls overboard, fighting for his life.  He’s picked-up by fishermen, who take him to shore on a small isle, where he is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor.  But he is an amnesiac.  He had something embedded under his skin.  He remembers something about a bank.  Once he goes there, he becomes a target.  He abducts a woman as a shield to get away, but then when he leaves her, someone tries to rape and kill her.  He returns and saves her only to faint.  When he awakes, she is taking care of him.  In the meantime, his arch enemy, whom he does not remember, attacks the secret headquarters where Bourne got his instructions to trap or kill, and leaves Bourne’s fingerprints.

Redwall by Brian Jacques

A Saga about the attack of a madman on an Abbey in England.  The characters are represented by animanls.  Mice run an Abbey that helps the community and takes-in the sick to help them get well.  A Rat, Cluny the Scourge, travels with his horde of rats, weasels and ferrets in search of plunder.  But when he sees the Abbey, he decides he wants it for his castle.  The Abbey had a hero in its past, Martin of Redwall.  Now they had another, Matthias.  The scenes shift from Cluny to Matthias and the mouse goes on adventures to find Martin’s sword so he can return to Redwall and defeat Cluny.

The book is rather long and even though written for British children, it might not have been quite as popular in the U.S. because of colloquialisms and the violence in the scenes.  Cluny has a poison barb on his tale, there is a military Rabbit, the sparrows, who seem to hate everything, shrews who constantly fight, a barn cat, a snowy owl and a viper.  Matthias has to either defeat or turn all of them.

Absolute Power by David Baldacci

This was Baldacci’s first novel.  It centers around corruption of the worst kind at the highest office in the land.  A rich old man, who was responsible for putting the president in office, goes on vacation to Jamaica.  At the last minute, his wife decides to stay behind.  Her real reason is to bed the president, who is all too willing to cooperate.

A thief, who knows a maid at the rich man’s house, enters, quiets the alarm system and proceeds to the master bedroom where behind a mirror, is a room sized safe filled with money, jewels and collections.  But before he can leave, the president and the rich man’s wife enter the bedroom.  The thief is trapped in the safe and discovers that the mirror is a one-way window and watches the scene develop.

Both the woman and the president are drunk.  When he slaps the woman too hard, she hits back, this enrages the president and he begins to beat the woman.  She grabs a letter opener and slices his arm.  He yells and his secret service men burst into the room in time to see her on top with the letter opener poised to plunge into the man.  The secret service men kill the woman.

The president’s chief of staff enters the scene, gets the secret service men and the president out of the room.  She finds the letter opener and bags it and puts it in the top of her purse.  When the secret service men come back, she has them sanitize the room, removing all evidence that the president had been there.  While doing that, they knock over the purse, and the letter opener falls behind a table to the floor.

When they leave, the thief leaves the safe, grabs the bagged letter opener for future insurance and climbs out the window.  The chief of staff realizes she left her purse behind and the secret service men go back for it.  Only once they’re in the room, they see the open window and the rope the thief used to climb down.

They give chase but fail to catch the thief before he gets away.

The local homicide detective called-in when the local patrol sees the open window, notices impossible aspects of the case.  No fingerprints anywhere, not even of the victim or her husband.  The floor has been vacuumed, the woman checked for having had sex, and a blood spatter pattern that shows something or someone was near when she was shot – and two bullet holes in her head from different directions, one still inside her head and the other already dug out of the wall.

A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas

The second volume in the Lady Sherlock Series wherein our heroine, Charlotte Holmes, who masquerades as her ‘sick brother’, Sherlock, solves cases both important and mundane with her superior wit, observation, and deduction.  In this case, Lady Ingram, the wife of a man that Charlotte secretly loves, comes to consult with the detective about her own lost love.  A man whom she was unable to marry because he was unsuitable to her parents.  Once a year, they pass each other by at a specific place in the park.  But this year, he did not appear.

Ingram’s brother, also a Lord, proposes to Charlotte and gifts her with a set of mysteries to solve.  She solves all but one upon reading them.  The extra one takes days of working ciphers.  She runs into a detective from Scotland Yard who has a corpse to examine and find the murderer.  The corpse’s coat has a braille message in the back of it.

These cases entwine in unexpected ways that lead to extreme changes in people’s lives.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Judith Ashton, a journalist and successful author of a series of comedic, light-hearted books on World War II written under a pseudonym, wants to write about something different and under her own name.  She receives a letter from Guernsey from a farmer who has acquired a book she once owned.  He tells how it led to the society on the island.  She is intrigued and writes back asking questions about the name of the society.  He writes back, telling her the story of how, on the spot, when confronted by German soldiers, a resident spun up the story, creating the society on the spot.  Back in London, Judith is pursued by a rich American publisher.  Her publisher and life-long friend, is both jealous and worried that the American will steal her away from his publishing company.

The book is written as a series of letters and tells the history of the German occupation of Guernsey without apology or lack of exposure of the tribulations of both sides.

It is definitely one of the best books I've read this year

Past Tense by Lee Child

Reacher is on his way across the country from Maine.  He happens to see a sign for the town that his father grew-up in.  So he decides to investigate.  While there, he stops a young punk from raping a waitress that works for the boy’s father.  He’s the local spoiled rich-kid.  Reacher intervenes and the kid ends-up with a broken arm and jaw.  The local cops include a former Army MP and out of courtesy, she asks Reacher to leave.  But he isn’t finished looking for his roots. 

At the same time, a young couple from Canada have car trouble and find an out of the way motel in the woods about 20 miles north of where Reacher is staying.  What they’ve stumbled upon is a version of the Most Dangerous Game where a group of rich older men have been willing to pay a lot of money to hunt people.  The motel is run by three young me who have been planning this for a long time. 

Reacher discovers that a Tin Mill, run during the war effort was managed by his grandfather.  At the time, all the little groups of buildings had a local area name, but the post office was in the nearest city.  Reacher finds that the neighboring farm has encroached on the Mill area and fenced it in as their own, untaxed land.  This leads to complications since there aren’t enough men to challenge Reacher.  More people get injured.  The Mob, at the restaurant owner’s request come in from Boston looking for Reacher.  This causes problems for the local police who still want Reacher to leave. 

So finally, Reacher goes north and finds the same motel.  Only they don’t want another person there, so they make poor excuses for why they can’t rent him a room when it’s obvious that there are quite a few people there.  Reacher doubles back and interrupts the ‘game’.

The Rise of Magicks by Nora Roberts (6/9)

The final volume in the Of Blood and Bone series – in which our heroine, Fallon, raises her armies and attacks Evil.  She begins by taking outposts of the Purity Warriors.  Then she attacks a government base in Atlanta that is targeted to destroy magicals.  Then Washington DC where a self-proclaimed president presides over horrible experiments on magicals, searching for a vaccine to inoculate a super-army.  Then she attacks New York, and restores broadcasting.  Finally, she and her mate and his sister, blood of the Danniah confront and trap Evil, ridding the world of it for another thousand years.

There are a lot of biblical parallels in the story.  But it was a fun read.

The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas

The second volume in the Elemental series – the boys at Eton take a holiday at one boy’s uncle’s estate on the Scottish coast.  One boy, Wintervale, was not able to attend as his mother was not well.  But suddenly, Fairfax and Titus see the boy in a skiff trying desperately to escape from an Atlantis frigate.  When all seems lost, the boy, looks back at the frigate and it is caught in a maelstrom, sucked under by the whirlpool.  He seems completely out of it when he reaches shore and when the prince administers a remedy, he goes into a seizure.  From then on, he has a terrible time walking and has to be helped everywhere.  But worse, Titus now thinks his vision of Iolanthe being the one who will help him succeed in his quest to overthrow Atlantis was wrong and it’s Wintervale instead.

The book is written in two timelines.  In the other timeline, Iolanthe and Titus are in the Sahara desert and don’t remember anything.  However, they’re attacked by agents of Atlantis and fight their way across the desert until allies rescue them.  The book does tie both together at the end.  Which apparently the real showdown that will be explained in book three.

The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas - (5/23)

The same author as A Study in Scarlet Women.  This is a fantasy set in an Earth where Atlantis and The Domain are populated by mages of differing abilities.  Our main characters are Iolanthe Seabourne, a young woman who suddenly is able to call down lightning, a great feat for an elemental mage,  and Prince Titus, Master of The Domain.  Opposed to the pair is Atlantis, ruled by the Bane.  In order to hide Iolanthe, Titus disguises her as a boy and she spends the next year at Eton with a magical spell that makes everyone think ‘he’ is Fairfax, a great cricket player.  Titus also lays a spell to keep any image of Fairfax from being recognized.  Through training in the Crucible, a magic book with tests, Titus trains Fairfax to get better with the one element she has no control over; air.  And he falls in love with her, but struggles to keep his eye on the goal; the overthrow of Atlantis.

Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire

A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.

While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.

The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.

Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

Hades by Candice Fox

Fox’s first novel is dark and probing.  Hades is a man who fixes things for criminals.  But when he’s brought a car with two battered and wounded children inside, he cannot dispose of them.  Instead he takes them in and raises them.  But Eden and Ethan can’t forget what happened to them and who the men were who killed their parents.  When they grow-up, they’re brilliant, they become cops, then detectives in the police department, and they’re sociopaths when it comes to their enemies.  And they’ve been using their resources to hunt down and kill the men who killed their parents.  There’s only one left.  Enter our narrator, the new partner to Eden.  The last one died in action.  Our narrator has his own problems, with alcohol and with women.  He becomes suspicious of the brother and sister detectives, but he’s busy dealing with a surviving victim of a serial killer.  The ending is both inevitable and a surprise.

Get Real - Donald Westlake

A Dortmunder novel – John and his occasional cohorts are asked to talk to a reality show producer about filming them while they do a real job.  No one in the gang wants to go to jail, but the producer offers them a cash bonus and per diem.  It sounds sketchy, but they agree to rehearsals while looking in the building for something worth stealing.  It has Westlake’s usual flare for comedic scenes of misunderstandings and an ending that make the book worth reading.

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

An interesting variation on the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Charlotte Holmes has an extraordinary mind.  She has no interest in becoming married to a man.  So after her father reneges on his promise to pay for the education that she might become independent, she intentionally loses her maidenhead to a married man.  That way he cannot be forced to marry her and her worth as a prospective bride is dashed in the eyes of any other man.  Then she ‘runs away from home’ determined to establish herself.  Unfortunately things do not go as planned.  A childhood friend, who is now a Lord, tries to watch out for her, but that only brings anger.  She ‘happens’ upon an ex-actress who is a widow, whose name turns out to be Mrs. Watson.  It is she who concocts the scheme of fronting a ‘sick’ Sherlock Holmes, whose sister, Charlotte, takes messages to him.  This book highlights three murders which happen to be inter-related.  In the end, a mysterious man seems to be behind it all.  His name is Moriarity.

Well written

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd

Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker. 

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been havinv nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as co-author.