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344. Then She Was Gone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Jewel

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

359 pages, published April 17, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel whose 15 year old daughter Ellie disappears.  Ten years later, Laurel is a divorced woman in her early 50’s who starts dating a charming stranger named Floyd whose 9 year old daughter Poppy is a precocious, pretty and reminiscent of Ellie.  Things then take a dark and unexpected turn.

Quotes 

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

 

“I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

 

“Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”

 

“People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”

 

“She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.” 

My Take

Then She Was Gone was a quick, captivating read.  Author Lisa Jewell does a particularly good job with the main character Laurel and her struggles to keep living after her 15 year old daughter disappears.  There are also several twists that kept me turning the pages of this book.

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343. In the Woods

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

464 pages, published May 27, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the Woods opens with the disappearance of Peter and Jamie, two twelve year old children, from the woods nearby their small town of Knocknaree in Ireland where they often played with their best friend Adam.  Adam is discovered the next day in the same woods with his tennis shoes soaked in blood and no memory of what happened.  Fast forward 20 years later and Adam (who now goes by Rob) is a police detective in a nearby town.  When another 12 year old is found murdered near in the same woods where Peter and Jamie disappeared, Adam and his partner/best friend Cassie are assigned to the case.  The investigation stirs up lots of old memories for Adam and his life begins to unravel.

Quotes 

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”

 

“I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.”

 

“The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.”

 

“Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.”

 

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”

 

“She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”

 

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”

 

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.”

 

“People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.” 

My Take

After reading and loving The Witch Elm earlier this year, I definitely wanted to read more by the incredibly talented Tana French.  In the Woods is the first of her six book Dublin Murder Squad series and did not disappoint.  French compensates for a slowly building (at times meandering) plot, by creating detailed and nuanced characters in a richly drawn atmosphere.  This is a mystery and you want to know what happened, but you are also happy to spend time in the compelling world created by French.  I look forward to reading more from this impressive writer.

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342. In a Dark, Dark Wood

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Ruth Ware

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

308 pages, published April 19, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Nora, the protagonist In a Dark, Dark Wood, hasn’t seen her former best friend Clare for ten years since they left University.  When she receives an invitation to Clare’s Hen Party (British for Bachelorette Party) set in a remote part of the English countryside, Nora equivocates but ultimately decides to attend, a decision she will come to deeply regret.

Quotes 

“Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out. It was not an endearing habit, but it was one I could not condemn. I understood it too well. I, too, am happier watching than being watched.”

 

“People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.”

 

“I always thought that being self-sufficient was a strength, but now I realize it’s a kind of weakness, too.”

 

“there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt.”

 

“There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.”

 

“There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.”

 

“You’d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You’d think they’d know that we’re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work—zombie reincarnations of their former selves, stitched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising.”

 

“There’s a kind of focusing effect that happens when you’re very ill. I saw it with my granddad, when he was slipping away. You stop caring about the big stuff. Your world shrinks down to very small concerns: the way your dressing gown cord presses uncomfortably against your ribs, the pain in your spine, the feel of a hand in yours. It’s that narrowing that enables you to cope, I suppose. The wider world stops mattering. And as you grow more and more ill, your world shrinks further, until the only thing that matters is just to keep on breathing.” 

My Take

In a Dark, Dark Wood is a serviceable thriller with a few twists and turns to keep things interesting.  I’ve read better of this genre, but still enjoyed my time with this book.

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341. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Hank Green

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult

352 pages, published September 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing starts out with the appearance of the Carls, giant alien sculptures that resemble ten-foot-tall Transformers wearing suits of samurai armor, throughout the world.  23 year old April May and her friend Andy make a video with the Carl located in New York City and post it on YouTube. The video goes viral and April and Andy find themselves at the center of an intense international media spotlight which has enormous consequences for their lives.

Quotes 

“I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”

 

“I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before. It’s pretty amazing, really.”

 

“You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”

 

“Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”

 

“It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.”

 

“I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.”

 

“What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?”

 

“As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.” 

My Take

While Green makes a few interesting observations about fame, celebrity and social media and the larger media, I found myself mostly bored by this novel.  Skip.

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340. Miracle Creek

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Drue Emerson

Author:   Angie Kim

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Miracle Creek is a literary courtroom drama about a Korean immigrant family and a young, single mother accused of murdering her eight-year-old autistic son.  It takes place in a small Virginia town and explores the intertwining lives of people who are very different from each other.  All is not what it seems as the courtroom tension builds.

Quotes 

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together — one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad–every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness–resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

 

“to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive.” 

My Take

In Miracle Creek, author Angie Kim combines compelling character studies with a taut courtroom drama.  You also come away from the book with a deeper understanding of the highs and lows of living with an autistic child.  A page turner of the best kind.

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339. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Maxwell King

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Psychology

416 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Good Neighbor is a biography of an American original, Fred Rogers (1928–2003), known and beloved by millions of children as Mr. Rogers.   In addition to creating his iconic children’s show, Fred was intensely devoted to children and their needs for understanding, compassion, equality, and kindness. Using original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, author Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work.

Quotes 

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

 

“Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.”

 

“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”

 

“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”

 

“The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

 

“Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

 

“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.”

 

“It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”

 

“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.”

 

“In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.” Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

 

“For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.”

 

“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”

 

“There are, essentially, two compelling reasons why I believe the reading public should care about Fred and his work: First, he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. No one better understood how essential it is for proper social, emotional, cognitive, and language development to take place in the first few years of life. And no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education. Second, he provided, and continues to provide, exemplary moral leadership. Fred Rogers advanced humanistic values because of his belief in Christianity, but his spirituality was completely eclectic; he found merit in all faiths and philosophies. His signature value was human kindness; he lived it and he preached it, to children, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of us everywhere who could take the time to listen.”

 

“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.” 

My Take

The mark of a good biography or memoir is after you finish reading it, you feel like you have a deep understanding of the person who is a subject.  This is definitely the case of The Good Neighbor.   Author Maxwell King does a superlative job of conveying not just the biographical facts of Fred Rogers’ life (which are interesting in and of themselves, e.g. he hated Dartmouth and transferred away from there as soon he could), but essence of the man himself.  You leave the book understanding what made Mr. Rogers tick and with a lot of respect and admiration for the life he lived.

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338. A Virtuous Woman

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kaye Gibbons

Genre:  Fiction

167 pages, published November 5, 1997

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

When Jack Stokes met Ruby Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty.  Ruby was the daughter of a Carolina gentry family and was a newly widowed after disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter.  Jack was a skinny tenant farmer with nothing to his name but his pride.  This unlikely pair created a special bond with each other and a remarkable marriage.

Quotes 

“It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren’t good or bad,

they’re just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.”

 

“Oh, it’s no crime to want and need somebody to love and to be loved by and to go and do what you need to do to have that, but its certainly a pity when you want it so badly you’ll let it be anybody.”

 

“You have to be so careful. You can’t ever just throw words out. They have to land somewhere.”

 

“And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don’t you believe it to be so?” 

My Take

I read this book a while ago and I must say that it really didn’t stick with me.  It’s not bad, just not great.  Gibbons is a skilled writer, but I just didn’t care that much about the relationship between Ruby and Jack.

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337. Still Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

469 pages, published October 23, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Still Me is the third installment in the story of Louisa Clark.  Having recovered from the devasting loss of Will Traynor (chronicled in Me Before You) and still in thrall to her new romance with paramedic Sam Fielding (chronicled in After You), Louisa accepts a job to serve as a companion to Agnes, the much younger, new wife of uber wealthy New Yorker Leonard Gopnik.  Louisa tries to have it all, an adventure in New York while holding onto her transatlantic relationship with Sam whom she left behind in Britain.  When she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who reminds her of first love Will Traynor, Louisa must make decisions that will impact the rest of her life.

Quotes 

“I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.”

 

“Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

 

“All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

 

“You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other.”

 

“If someone likes you, they will stay with you; if they don’t like you enough to stay with you, they aren’t worth being with anyway.”

 

“you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.”

 

“You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes.” 

My Take

I’m big fan of Jojo Moyes, especially her books featuring the down to earth, very likeable, irreverent Louisa Clark.  While not quite as good as the first two in the series (Me Before You and After You), I still really enjoyed this fun, escapist read.  Perfect for the beach.

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336. On Calvary’s Hill: 40 Readings for the Easter Season

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Karen Reader

Author:   Max Lucado

Genre:  Non Fiction, Theology, Christian

144 pages, published October 24, 1999

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

On Calvary’s Hill is a 40 day Devotional leading up to Easter chronicling the passion of Christ and exploring his final days.

Quotes 

“Why is the cross the symbol of our faith? To find the answer, look no further than the cross itself. Its design couldn’t be simpler. One beam horizontal—the other vertical. One reaches out—like God’s love. The other reaches up—as does God’s holiness. One represents the width of his love; the other reflects the height of his holiness. The cross is the intersection. The cross is where God forgave his children without lowering his standards.”

 

“The next time you think that no one understands or cares, reread the fourteenth chapter of Mark and pay a visit to Gethsemane. And the next time you wonder if God really perceives the pain that prevails on this dusty planet, listen to him pleading among the twisted trees. The next time you are called to suffer, pay attention. It may be the closest you’ll ever get to God. Watch closely. It could very well be that the hand that extends itself to lead you out of the fog is a pierced one. No Wonder They Call Him the Savior.” 

My Take

I found On Calvary’s Hill to be an inspiring read, especially during the Easter season.  It really made me think about the sacrifice of Jesus and what that means to my life.

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335. The Immortalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Chloe Benjamin

Genre:  Fiction

346 pages, published January 9, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Immortalists opens in 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side.  The four adolescent Gold children seek out a mystical woman to hear their fortunes.  When she tells each of them the date when they will die, her prophecy irrevocably defines and alters their lives.   Youngest child Simon, who has the soonest death date in his 20’s and who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, escapes to San Francisco.  Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy.  Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11.  Bookish Varya becomes a noted longevity researcher.

Quotes 

“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”

 

“Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence–fall in love, have children, buy a house–in the face of all evidence there’s no such thing?”

 

“When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.”

 

“In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right, and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”

 

“But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations.”

 

“Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”

 

“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.” 

My Take

While I found the main premise of The Immortalists to be fascinating, i.e. how would you act if you knew the date of your death, I felt like the book could have done a bit more with it.  Still, it was well written and with compelling enough characters to keep me interested throughout.

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