Page Sixty-Five

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

I was disappointed by this novel. I had high hopes and while it was fairly entertaining overall I would not recommend it.

Page Sixty-Four

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A mystery. Very readable. Would recommend.

Page Sixty-Three

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver "The Summer Day"

"It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always let like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. . . . It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me" (207).

Highly recommended.

Page Sixty-Two

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

A troubled girl finds work in a flower shop and thinks back to the events that lead to her present-day life. Victoria uses her gift for flowers and arrangements to battle her inner demons and help others. A good read.

Page Sixty-One

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Narrated by Enzo, a dog, this book is sad and heartwarming. A light read.

Page Sixty

Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

Excellent.

"Here is the country not in its Sunday best, but in its old clothes, unpaved, unfenced, full of character, ungroomed, unvisited, barely penetrable" (180).

"It seemed to me that going deeper into my mother's past would help me understand all the life that was blocked up inside me, that is blocked up inside each of us" (269).

"I'm reminded of what Michael said about memory: the facts don't matter; everything you learn blurs and merges and contributes to a way of seeing the world" (275).

Page Fifty-Nine

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

This book brings the lives of four individuals together during the conflict in Sarajevo: the cellist, who vows to play every day at 4 o'clock for 22 days for the 22 victims of a bombing while standing in line for bread; Arrow, a sniper who must protect the cellist, Dragan, who is trying to simply cross an intersection, and Kenan, a man who travels to collect water for his family on the other side of town. An excellent novel.

Page Fifty-Eight

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

A young girl with Asperger's struggles to understand empathy and find "Closure" after her older brother is a victim of a school shooting. A great young adult book.

Page Fifty-Seven

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Magical.

Page Fifty-Six

The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

Alex attends Themis Academy, a boarding school where the staff believes everyone to be perfect and does not engage in dealing with disputes among students. After Alex is date raped, she enlists the help of a group at the school called The Mockingbirds, named after the book To Kill a Mockingbird. With their help she attempts to seek justice for what happened to her.

This is a good young adult book that deals with a serious issue in a realistic way, as the author herself was date raped in college.

Page Fifty-Five

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neil

Baby is a twelve year-old girl living in Montreal with her father, Jules. Jules is a heroin addict, and when go from bad to worse for him, Baby is tossed into foster care and then eventually into the arms of Alphonse, a pimp. Gritty, dark, disturbing, this book was a difficult read but a page turner nonetheless.

Page Fifty-Four

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Where to start with this book? I would love to be able to cheat here and simply write what is on the back, but that does not even come close to what unfolds in this 766-page book. I picked this book up on a recommendation, and also the reviews seemed to paint quite a summer blockbuster: grossly engaging, can't put it down, one of the year's best books (and the list goes on). I was wary because the book was science-fiction, post-apocolyptic . . . everything I usually dislike and avoid. Though I thought if I could get through The Road, I could get through this. Many times I was about to toss the book aside and not finish. It is complex in its vast number of characters, scenes, dream sequences, and overall plot. In a most basic synopsis, a plan is hatched by a scientist traveling in South America and carried out by the military at a government facility in Colorado to create a drug that will prolong life. The plan requires twelve individuals; Brad Wolgast, FBI, and his partner are the two men responsible for acquiring them. All twelve are death-row convicts, so their lives - apparently - can be easily spared. The final piece of the puzzle is a young 6-year old girl, Amy, who was abandoned by her mother - a necessary fact, as the ideal group for this experiment are individuals who would not be missed from their everyday lives. Wolgast brings Amy to the facility against his better judgment, having found a fatherly affection for the young girl. Soon after their arrival at the facility, all hell breaks loose and The Twelve - by this time having turned into green-illuminated vampire-like figures (glowsticks/sticks/smokes/dracs), begin their blood-sucking rampage that will last for the next ninety-odd years . . . or more (that is when this first book ends). It is ultimately up to Amy to save the world from these freakish figures.

The book eventually became a definate page-turner for me over halfway. At times it was touching and many others definately chilling and creepy. I didn't love it though, especially not from start to finish. I found some of it confusing and the switching between scenes and characters sometimes frustrating, as was sometimes feeling like Cronin should just shut it with all the detail and side stories and move on. It was, however, a good summer read once I got into it. I can definately see this becoming a movie. Am undecided as to whether or not I will read the next book: The Twelve.

Page Fifty-Three

Room by Emma Donoghue

Jack is five. He lives with Ma in Room. Also there is Rug, Wardrobe, TV . . . Room is all Jack knows. He has not been Outside. Ma was a teenager when she was abducted by 'Old Nick' and locked inside what becomes revealed as an old garden shed. Through Jack's perspective the reader feels Ma's fierce love for her son and her need to protect him from both Old Nick and from the knowledge that there is a world outside their small Room with real people, toys, and wonderful things. However, Room cannot contain Ma and Jack forever, and the time comes when Ma knows she and Jack must leave at any cost.

I didn't think I would like this book at first, but halfway through I could not put it down. The real challenge for Jack is life outside Room. The innocence of Jack is heartbreaking amid what the reader knows his and Ma's reality really is, and amid the fast-paced and puzzling Outside.

Page Fifty-Two

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Ernest Hemingway had four wives and likely countless mistresses. This novel tells of Ernest's first wife, Hadley, a woman eight years his senior, the woman whom, at the end of his life, Hemmingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but her.

This novel confirmed what I had already known or gleaned from other texts about Hemmingway. As Hadley remarks, "He loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved, and even adored" (241). The reason why Hadley and Hemmingway's relationship likely worked six or seven years is because of Hadley's ability to provide Hemmingway with what he needed at the time: praise, encouragement, unending support. In a way, Hadley herself reminded me of what Hemingway was trying to achieve in his writing: strong and simple and true. This is likely what attracted him to her. Yet, it is her need and desire to be Hemmingway's supportive wife that ultimately turned my interest in Hadley to slight disgust. Near the end of the novel when it is apparant that Hemmingway has fallen for Hadley's friend, Pauline, Hadley permits Pauline to openly become Hemmingway's mistress before the arrangment finally breaks down and Hadley agrees to divorce Hemmingway. 1920s Paris is life at its fastest: hard drinking and partying; constant traveling; zany, volatile literary figures and their partners like Pound, Fitzgerald, Stein. Hadley feels at odds with the modern Parisian who sees traditional family life and monogamy as stifling and dated. Yet Hadley, who often remarks at how she does not fit neatly into this Jazz-age Paris like her husband and friends around her, begins to sacrifice too much of herself for a husband who is selfish and obsessed with becoming one of the greatest writers of his time.

In the end, Hemmingway gives in to the darkness that is everpresent in his life and commits suicide in 1961. If we can trust McLain's representation of Hadley it seems as though she never got over her love for Hemmingway, the man who "change[d] her life" (341), even after remarrying and only seeing Hemmingway twice since their divorce.

Page Fifty-One

The Midwife of Venice by Roberta Rich

The novel opens with a description of sixteenth-century Venice that sets the mood for the entire text: "At midnight, the dogs, cats, and rats rule Venice. The Ponte di Ghetto Nuovo, the bridge that leads to the ghetto, trembles under the weight of sacks of rotting vegetables, rancid fat, and vermin. [. . .] It was on such a night that the men came for Hannah." What these men come for is Hannah's help in delivering a baby for a wealthy Christian family. The problem is that Hannah is Jewish, and it is not only illegal for Jews to administer medical treatment to Christians, but Hannah's method she uses as a midwife may cause the Inquisition to deem her a witch. The text follows Hannah's encounter with the Conte and his wife, a sickly and frail woman who has had much difficulty producing an heir for her husband, and intersects her story with the story of her husband, Isaac, who has been captured as a slave on the island of Malta and is in need of ransom to buy his freedom and passage back to Venice.

Rich's storytelling is quite vivid in its description and suspenseful in the many hardships Hannah and Isaac face in their separate journeys to reconnect with one another. I would not say this book is amazing, but it was a satisfying read.

Page Fifty

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I started this book last summer, thought it humdrum, and tossed it aside. Luckily, I picked it up again this summer and read it straight through. With lines like "I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life," how can you not enjoy this book and marvel at Fitzgerald's use of language. In fact, just as that quote reveals, the book - to me - is a commentary on the oppositions that Nick Carraway's 1920s self-absorbed American society reveals: within/without; enchanted/repelled; East/West. It is interesting to note how the characters illicit no pity for the reader, yet even with that detachment the book carries the reader into a society that is as shallow as its characters. A true testament to Fitzgerald's writing style as - had it not been for this - I would have reshelved the book a second time.

"He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

Page Forty-Nine

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

It is 1950s Britain and 11-year old Flavia de Luce is an aspiring chemist who lives at decaying Buckshaw, an English mansion, with her father and two sisters whom she reviles. When she witnesses a dead jack snipe with its beak through a stamp on her doorstep and then a man in her cucumber patch who whispers "Vale" as he takes his dying breath, a precocious Flavia embarks on a mission with her trusted bicycle Gladys to uncover exactly what has happened and how her father may be involved.

Enjoyed this book primarily because of its quick-witted, intelligent protagonist.

Page Forty-Eight

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

This book can speak to most people today: the protagonist, Sarah Nickerson, has three children, a husband, a demanding 80-hour a week job, and tries to be everywhere and everyone all at once, 24-hours a day. Her intuition at the beginning of the book speaks to her through dream sequences and gives her many clues to make her realize she is burning the candle at both ends. Failing to heed the cautious voice in her head, Sarah - in another effort to multitask - ends up in a car accident while on her phone. She ends up with "Left Neglect" - a rare condition where she does not see or comprehend her left side, or anything that is left: the left side of a page, people standing to her left, the left side of a photo or picture, et cetera. Sarah is left to reevaluate her life and her role in it.

I had a feeling I wouldn't like this book when I realized the protagonist's three children were named after Peanuts characters. Right then and there (and this was only a chapter or so in) the book lost its lustre for me. I really, really wanted to like it after loving Still Alice, but this book failed to connect to me, which is odd as I have previously stated it would be easy for most readers to connect to. While I can appreciate Sarah's fast-paced life and the consequences it brings, I could not connect with or truly understand Left Neglect. It was too foreign for me to grasp. I also found this book didn't really go anywhere. While in Still Alice the disease got progressively worse, Sarah learns to better handle her Neglect, but it was an uninteresting and even slightly uninspiring journey for me.

Page Forty-Six and Forty-Seven

Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Finishing off The Hunger Games trilogy was an easy task, as the books are super fast reads and Collins does that masterful trick of giving the reader a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter, thus prompting one to keep reading. Catching Fire was not a favourite of mine - seemed to have too much of the same concept as the first, but without being as well executed. The first book was definately the favourite, but Mockingjay was engaging enough with some surprising twists and ended in a way that left me fairly satisfied. Overall, can definately see why young adults love these books. Very recommended for reluctant readers!

Page Forty-Five

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

It is 1984 in Dahanu, India and Kavita Merchant gives birth to a girl, Usha. Kavita will do anything to save her second daughter from a culture who favours sons, so she and her sister leave the child at Shanti Orphanage in Bombay. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Somer and her Indian-born husband Krishnan realize that Somer will never be able to bear a child of her own. Somer allows herself to be convinced to adopt a child in India, and eventually the two adopt Kavita's child, now almost one years old and mistakenly named Asha. The author takes the reader through the next 25 years, alternating between the voices of Somer, Krishnan, Asha, Kavita, and Jasu. The adoption affects each person differently and distinctly, and the author explores topics such as motherhood, marriage, family, and identity.

This was a good read, but for some reason I found the book dragged on at times.