“Trust issues, attachment trouble, identity problems, feelings of emptiness, isolation, alienation, and despair—cracks in the soul that can’t be mended. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. How anyone with a hole inside them will search on and on, sometimes all their lives, for ways to fill it.” Paula McLain, When the Stars Go Dark
San Francisco Detective Anna Hart knows about tragedy. As a specialist in finding missing persons, she has seen it written on the faces of desperate families for years. But now, she has personally seen how fast tragedy can rip apart a marriage and destroy one’s center of gravity. The scars of a lonely and isolated childhood in the foster care system have left her bereft of the ability to process her grief. The reader feels her pain but is left in the dark about the facts of the recent cause until nearly the end of the book.
Anna does what many folks do when troubled. They return to a childhood sanctuary where the world seemed safe. 
She needs a timeout from her grief and to process what caused the emotional wreckage of her splintered marriage. For Anna, that place is Mendocino, California where her last and most caring foster father introduced her to the Mendocino National Forest. A wilderness where she learned survival skills in a world of natural beauty. A place of escape and solace. A place to think free of the swirl of daily life.
Upon reaching Mendocino, Anna doesn’t find the peace that Dorothy found returning to Kansas and Auntie Em. Your troubles travel with you, old troubles lay waiting for your return, and new ones greet you. She’s learned several of her old high school friends still live in the area. As a matter of fact, one of them, is now the sheriff.
When Anna learns a local teenager, Cameron, is missing, she can’t stop herself from becoming involved in the search. Diving headlong into the new case, memories of the murder of a childhood friend surface. In an age before the internet and wide-spread cell phone coverage, the investigative team learns of other missing girls.
Was Cameron the victim of a serial killer or an isolated case? Anna’s experiences in locating missing children and her methodology of examining what dynamic made each victim a target clashes with the sheriff’s concept of on the ground crime solving.
The tempo of the plot ricochets through Anna’s past and her present day conflicts. It gets messy and hard to follow at times, creating the author’s purpose of identifying how one’s past can influence one’s present and future. Things seen in retrospect can influence the future for the better.
I had a difficult time giving this book a four star rating at first. Something seemed odd about Anna and the author’s choice to spend so much time in Anna’s childhood and her life in foster care. After reading the author’s notes at the back of the book, I had a better understanding of the mental confusion. Thus, I deliberately chose the opening quote in my review from When the Stars Go Dark.
It could have appeared in the author’s 2003 memoir growing up as an abused foster child, Like Family: Growing Up In Other People’s Houses. I would advise readers to better understand how the author inserted her parts of her personal story into the novel to read the author’s note in the back of the book before start When the Stars Go Dark. Better yet, read the very well written memoir, Like Family to better understand life trapped in a foster care environment.
“Trust issues, attachment trouble, identity problems, feelings of emptiness, isolation, alienation, and despair—cracks in the soul that can’t be mended. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. How anyone with a hole inside them will search on and on, sometimes all their lives, for ways to fill it.” Paula McLain, When the Stars Go Dark
“. . .very few people actually stop to consider how difficult it is to truly vanish. The level of detail needed to eliminate even the tiniest trace. Because there’s always something. A small thread, a seed of truth, a mistake. It only takes a tiny pinprick of circumstance to unravel it all.” (Prologue, The Last Flight)
It was a hard book to read. It was a painful eye-opening experience. The houseless seeking refuge all around us hoping to be hidden in plain view. Look for that older RV that has been parked at the back of your Walmart parking lot for days. The campsite in the forest with a clothesline and a popup port-a-potty shelter that has been there for weeks. Everyone hoping to be seen as normal. All dreading that “three hard knocks” on the door from authorities ordering them to move on like a stray dog.
An elderly man, working a seasonal job for Amazon, revealed that he lived in an RV full time, “I can’t afford to retire and there’s a whole program [called Amazon Camper Force] for people like me.” 
These gas-powered prairie wagons crisscross the country working the Christmas rush doing 12-14 hours shifts at Amazon warehouses; hired as seasonal camp hosts at campgrounds dealing with rowdy campers and daily toilet clearing routines; recruited for backbreaking jobs on beet farms or blueberry harvests; working as carnival staff collecting tickets and manning the tilt-a-wheel ride in the blistering heat.
You would think that reducing your life to the interior of your car or a 10 foot tear-drop trailer would make you dark and dismal to be around but that is far from the truth. It is a vibrant and caring sub-culture that finds joy and peace in the simpler life. They gather annually in Quartzsite, Arizona for a convention of sorts. Friendships are renewed, new comers to the life style are given guidance, vendors offer products useful to campers, and nationwide companies offering flowery descriptions of backbreaking work opportunities. Smart phones provide internet access to the “normal” world. Youtube videos and Facebook sites offer guidance on simplifying your life and some creative entrepreneurs have thriving online businesses working from the front seat of their vehicles.
The man opens his eyes and finds himself strapped to a strange hospital bed. His naked body has electrodes plastered head to toe and tubes infiltrating every orifice. His “nurse” is a pair of robotic arms; the voice, feminine, with an emotionless drone. With sleep heavy eyes he scans the room and sees mummified remains in the other two beds. It seems he’s been “asleep” a long time. He doesn’t know how long because he doesn’t remember anything including his name.
Suddenly a neuron fires in his head, and he has a blip of memory. He is in a coffee shop in San Francisco. He’s reading an email from the Pulkovo Observatory in Russia soliciting theories to explain why a line of infrared emissions are leaving the sun, dimming it, and heading toward Venus in a widening arc.
Revealing any more will spoil the story. I will give a heads up. This is a science fiction novel. It has a lot of technical jargon and space science stuff. Understanding and comprehending that material not my strong suit. I stuck to the pathos, ingenuity, jerry rigging, loneliness, entertainment, witty sequences, and humor that our reluctant and inexperienced astronaut provided. Space geeks seem to have a harder time accepting the plot. I did not feel I lost anything by skimming through the equations and astro-geek speak. To me, the heart of the story had a richer more personal message – loyalty and friendship – that left me cheering at the unexpected ending. I really enjoyed the book. (The Martian remains my favorite though.)
One evening she finds the unconscious Justice gasping for breath, in a moment of sympathy, she disregards her orders to immediately report changes in his health to her minders and then let nature takes it course without medical intervention. She calls for an ambulance before she reports that Justice Winn is near death. With the Justice still alive but hospitalized in a permanent coma, Nurse Lewis turned over the apple cart that will lead to mayhem in the underworld of politics and international relations.
Political Powerhouse, Stacey Abrams, is known for her political activism and dedication to universal suffrage. She is a lawyer specializing in tax law and has published numerous articles on that subject area. In her spare time she is a New York Times bestselling author of fiction. Her latest work, her first political thriller will be published in May, 2021. I am honored to receive an advanced reading copy from Doubleday and Netgalley.
I received an ARC of The Ride of Her Life, by award winning author, Elizabeth Letts and met Annie Wilkins. This is the true story of a plain and simple 63-year-old woman in poor health who was told she had less than 4 years to live. Annie Wilkins was the last of her family and unable to work the farm. A kind doctor found her a place to stay at the County Home; a quiet place to wait out her fate. That option didn’t sit well with the hard working, strong willed, and independent Annie.
Ignoring nay-sayers, a poor choice of seasons to start, dead-broke, poor health, inadequate clothing, few food supplies, and without a plan or a map, Annie set on November 5, 1954 from Minot, Maine to fulfill her father’s dream to see California. Her mode of transportation was a retired trotting horse. She reasoned it was better to sit in a saddle and see the world than die of boredom in a rocking chair.
The ride wasn’t always sunshine and roses. She soon learned that automobiles now ruled the roads, saddle tramps were history, and the United States had wicked weather and elevation challenges. Annie also was relieved to find strangers who were kind and generous outnumbered those who were stinkers and hateful people. She suffered injuries and near frostbite but nothing slowed her down for long.
The Cheyenne hope to find a way to co-exist with the white men by merging cultures and offer to marry white women. The US government set up a clandestine project, Brides for Indians (BFI) with the intent that the women would “civilize” and teach English to the heathens. Volunteers brides from insane asylums and prisons, women whose crimes generally defined by men, were sent westward. White Women is written as the journal of May Dodd.
The book is not for the squeamish. I found myself turning away for relief at the times. Always I returned as I felt I owed it to the memory of all women who have been pressed under the power of a patriarchal society.
“Don’t you ever wish your problems would take care of themselves?”
Familiar Things is a fictionalized story of the day to day life of a young teen living in squalor. It depicts life and its hardships on Flower Island, the fictional site of Seoul’s massive landfill. Steps away from the profoundly foul landfill, a shantytown has been created from discarded items and populated by the poorest of the Seoul’s poor.
Let’s clear the air; pun intended. You will feel like taking a shower every time you set down the book. But this isn’t a story about the garbage. Flower Island is just geography. It’s about a child nicknamed Bugeye and the people that populate his life on Flower Island. It is a sad story but engaging. In a country comprised of haves and have nots. This is a story of have nots and the way they make a life for themselves. The living conditions are abysmal but the only time they are made to feel less than human occur when they need to head to the mainland.
Big for thirteen-years-old, Bugeye easily passes as fifteen and is expected to become a picker alongside his mother. But he is also a kid, and he finds no one objects if he doesn’t go to work once in a while. So when Baldspot decides to share his secret life, Bugeye follows him into a spellbinding story about Flower Island. The magical realism blends with reality as smoothly as a chocolate/vanilla soft serve ice cream cone.
Julie gets the harebrained idea to go backpacking, alone and inexperienced, in the Acadia National Park and soon learns she’s bit off more than she can chew. She becomes lost and after a futile search by rescue teams is declared dead a year later. Her memorial service brings the three remaining members of the clique together. Elise can’t bring herself to believe Julie is dead. Julie has always pulled a disappearing act only to reappear when she feels like it. Molly and Mae mourn Julie’s death while Elise holds out hope she will see Julie again.
Two years to the day she disappeared, Julie is found sitting on her front porch. She is wearing the clothes she disappeared in and claiming to have no memory of the events of the past two years. Mae, the wealthiest of the group, arranges a get-away to a remote and bizarrely designed hotel to welcome Julie back into the fold and reunite the clique.
The next morning, the old Julie with the bouncy curls and fashion model skin arrives for breakfast. And still no one asks what is going on with her. And she offers no explanation. The days pass. The atmosphere in the hotel is changing. The staff acts spooked. There are sounds in the walls. The thermostat in Elise’s room seems possessed always resetting itself to freezing. Some days Julie appears bedraggled. Oher days she seems infused with instant health. Still no one mentions it.
Fifteen years ago, Louise Penny published Still Life, the first book in a new cozy murder mystery series. Still Life introduced readers to a mystical Québec village called Three Pines and to a cast of quirky characters. Each book can be read independently and enjoyed but to fully understand the main characters, I encourage reading the series in order.
Early the next morning the phone rings at Olivier’s home. A passerby has spotted a body on the floor in the Bistro!
The resort’s groundskeeper, clearing overgrown horse paths, leads to the discovery of the Hermit’s cabin and the bloody scene of the crime. What they find inside the cabin is even more baffling than the murder and again raises questions about Olivier’s honesty and character. Could this beloved resident of Three Pines have a dark side?
Gamache struggles to separate his deep feelings for Olivier with his uncanny ability to recognize when someone is not telling the truth or withholding information. He so very much wants to exonerate Olivier but every new clue in someway implicates him.
Something might be stalking you, and crawl right up behind
We meet Alex struggling with why she made the concession to put her boyfriend’s needs above her own and move to the big city. Brad’s high-flying big city career has made him a demanding narcissist. Alex pines for a return to her life working in nature. Her achievements in conservation in the city haven’t met all her needs. While Alex is dealing with her failing relationship, she attends a conservation award ceremony and is nearly killed by a rabid anti-conservationist shooter. Rattled to her core, she jumps at the chance to leave the city to takeover a wolverine study in the Rocky Mountains wilderness of Montana.
Most of the residents of the fictional town of Bitterroot, like other cloistered towns, disdain outlanders. The recent creation of the Land Trust for Wildlife Conservation has everyone’s dander up. The land, the site of an abandoned large-scale ski resort, had been openly used by the locals to graze livestock and hunt game. The land is now off-limits. The ban is observed by some and abused by others.
Emily St. John Mandel captivated me in her dystopian novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014, about the destruction of civilization by a flu pandemic. Spooky prescient now laid against our real world crisis with Covid-19.
I will admit I have struggled for some time to review this latest book. Counterculture, ghostly appearances, and Ponzi schemes are far outside my comfort zone to discuss with any validity. Yet in the end, I must say I enjoyed the book but find it hard to tell you why exactly….. Collectively, a multitude of characters spend time pondering questions. How did I find myself in this situation and not see it coming?
Bennie discovers a book filled with crumbling newspaper articles written by emancipated slaves and published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate. Each article a desperate plea for help in locating family members ripped apart by the auction block. This discovery becomes the catalyst to encourage Bennie’s students to learn of their own legacy and take pride in the part they play in passing that legacy on to the next generation.
That’s it! All you are going to get from me. I’ll leave you with a clue to the book’s title. Hannie, Juneau Jane and Lavinia travel on a long dangerous and complicated journey. They seek refuge one night in an old building. They find the walls wallpapered with newspapers articles from the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper. Hannie is shocked to learn the articles were written by former slaves looking for lost kin.
[Hear the plaintive song “Lorena” on 
Her Last Flight captures the spitfire spirit of the early aviatrixes like Amelia Earhart, Ruth Nichols and Louise Thadon. Although there are strong inferences to Amelia Earhart, this is not a fictional accounting of her life. References to lead character, Irene Foster’s interest in surfing is likely modeled after surfers like Isabel Lethan.
Reading the dusty journal, Everett is startled to find a clue about Sam Mallory’s most famous aviation student, Irene Foster, who also disappeared in flight. Foster and Mallory, in 1928, were the most famous aviators with a history of flying together on long distance rallies. By 1937, Irene Foster was flying solo. On a flight circumnavigating the globe, she failed to arrive at a planned stop to meet up with her husband, George Morrow. Extensive searches concluded she was lost at sea. Yet, Sam’s last journal entry from 1937 was a scrawled message – GM to rescue at last thank God She will live. Could Irene Foster have left her husband and traveled to Spain to be with Sam? Was she with Sam when his plane crashed? Is she alive?
Hanalei, Hawai’i October 1947
Ana, the daughter of the chief scribe to Herod expresses her longings to be remembered throughout time in this pseudo-diary account of her life. She wants the world to know what life was like for a woman in the time of Herod and Pontius Pilate – and what life would look like if you buck the system.
When Ana is fourteen-years-old, she begins her menses, and is quickly betrothed by her father to an old beetle-eyed and cruel landowner. Ana’s introduction to her betrothed is a public spectacle in the heart of the marketplace intended to highlight the high status of both families. Her reaction upon meeting her intended was to faint dead-away. She is rescued from her fall by a young bearded man who visage brings on “odd smelting” in her thighs.
For Ana, moving to Jesus’s family compound filled with siblings and their spouses is a shock. She has to partake in harsh physical tasks that she assumes to the best of her ability. In time, their marriage is strained as Jesus begins to realize that he has a mission from God that he must fulfill and begins to spend massive amounts of time away from Ana. The day arrives that Jesus tells Ana that he must go on alone to discover what he must do to fulfill his predestined future.
Ana never gives up on Jesus. Her life, after he leaves her, is one tragic day after another. With the help of other enlightened people, she is provided the means to document her story returning to her own passion as a scribe. Through Ana we follow the final days of Jesus concluding with his death. We feel her agony as she witnesses his final steps burdened with the weight of the cross. We cry with her as she stands at the foot of the cross.
She wonders if soon there will be no one left at all.
Outside Mitchell Inn, high up a remote mountain road in the N.Y. Catskills, the blizzard is intensifying. Snow pelts the windows like bullets and the wind howls angrily. Inside, the fireplace crackles and snaps throwing welcoming heat around the lobby. The weekend is about to begin and the mystery awaits.
Edgar Hill is a self-centered egotist overweight slob uninterested in exercise and more interested in a cold brew. He prefers time away from his family and the drudgery of home life with squawking children and the admonitions of his exhausted wife. He loves his family; just doesn’t see the point in investing his time with them. He doesn’t seem to find the point of anything, actually.
The high fives were short lived as a rapid-onset virus began spreading through the country. The U.S. powers-that-be turned to the scientists that created the NANs for help. Their nano-tech scientists, having reported that the NANs had not been fully vetted for use, had been kept in the dark about the deployment. Suddenly it was a deadly race to determine if the NANs could be stopped before it turned into a pandemic. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Maurice Swift has always wanted to be a writer. And not just any writer. The best of the best. Someone that history will remember as a literary great and whose books will never go out of print. But he has one problem. He can put together the words on paper but he is incapable of generating the original idea; he lacks imagination.
The second part of the book, to me, was the most interesting. Maurice Swift, accompanying his latest victim, American author, Dash Hardy, unexpectedly met the renowned Gore Vidal at his home in Italian villa, The Swallow’s Nest. This serendipitous encounter exposed Swift’s wiles as he tried to vandalism Vidal’s life and ingratiate himself into his social community; if successful there would be no need to squander his unproductive time with Dash. The world-wise Vidal recognized Maurice’s tactics. The acerbic literary elder sparred with Swift and privately let him know that wasn’t blind to the young man’s game; he couldn’t out-master the master.
If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband? Do you want to instill God and Civilization and Righteousness in the westernmost part of our country?
Being an adventuresome old woman, not necessarily of high moral character, I decided to spent the day traveling with forty-three woman in a train of prairie schooners heading from St. Joe, Missouri to California. The book amused me but I won’t say it made me feel like I connected with the characters. As a woman born at a time when my father had to sign for my first credit card, I could relate to many of the misogynistic scenes; there were times I could see where the use of a good war club might serve as an attitude adjuster.
When he was around seven-years-old, the United States was attacked and retaliated against Afghanistan for harboring Osama Bin Laden. At the time of the invasion, his Uncle Lala, was a high ranking Taliban secret officer. The Passarlay family’s earlier association with the mujahideen during the recent war with Russian brought the Americans to Gulwalhi’s home suspecting stored weapons. Tragically, the American raid left his father and grandfather dead.
The boys were sad to leave but somewhat excited about the journey. The promised two week journey began with deception. The boys were immediately separated. Gulwahli found himself among streams of constantly changing refugees, mostly older adult men, some who shielded and protected him as best they could under the circumstances.
The actual journey took the heartbroken and terrified Gulwalhi a harrowing year through nine different countries. He suffered torture and imprisonment three times in adult prisons – Iraq, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and with the wiles of the innocent and dumb luck, escaped three times. He, incredibly, survived each leg of the journey, barely, suffering physically from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, heat exhaustion, and a myriad of unimaginable conditions laced with beatings, mental cruelty, and constant threat of danger. The refugees seen only a paycheck and viewed as chattel – subhuman.
The world has changed- and not for the better. More and more people struggle to stay alive, chancing death every day to live in safety. He wants to the world to open their hearts and minds to see that most, certainly not all, refugees are looking for a hand-up not a handout. He realizes the pressures placed on countries where refugees are flocking to for help are struggling to handle the influx. He just wants the refugees to seen human and treated humanely while in transition.
The old rocking chair faced east looking down the Qu’ Appelle valley in Saskatchewan, Canada. God knows where its journey began, but when the Cree Indian woman found it abandoned in the plains grass, she knew it was special and dragged it back to her tipi. Her young daughter, Red Sky in the Morning, was the only one that heard the chair’s past in the creaking wood.
Back in 2016, while researching book titles that might be of interest for a local book club, I stumbled across – Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons From a Small-Town Obituary Writer. Intrigued, I bought a copy of the tiny book and placed it on my TBR shelf. The reading club, limited to 8 titles a year, didn’t select the book. Time marched on and I forgot about it.
As suggested by the subtitle, obituaries and/or “life stories” play an important part of each of the 18 brief essays. It was easy reading that was tinged with humor, compassion and uplifting stories about newly departed neighbors and friends in the author’s hometown of tiny Haines, Alaska. Finding the Good is just that – interviewing those that knew the departed and finding the good in their life story yet not ignoring their less glamorous moments. The point of each story was crafting an obituary that showed their humanness and reflected the fact that their lives mattered to others.
Embedded in one story is the following quote that seems to sum up the book’s message.
Jojo Moyes, known for her numerous heartwarming romance novels, several made into movies (Me Before You) has written her first historical fiction featuring the Pack Horse Library project. Fans of her romance fiction will not be disappointed.
An old Mainer friend once told me that Moxie was the greatest beverage in the world (and actually gave me a bottle to try.) I rank it right up there with cough syrup and kerosene. “Acquired taste,” he said. But I digress.
THE SECRETS WE KEPT: a novel
Their love/hate story is based on fact. Loving an already married man and living in a repressed country was costly to Olga in so many ways. She was used by the Kremlin to weaken Pasternak’s resolve to finish his decades long work on Doctor Zhivago. The Soviet strategy was to learn the subject of the novel by leaning on Olga Ivinskaya. After weeks of harsh interrogation and failing to learn the substance of the novel from Olga, sentenced her to five years of hard labor at a Siberian gulag. 
Pasternak found that leading a duplicitous life, Olga’s years of incarceration, and the torture and deaths of friends and fellow colleagues of Pasternak, exacerbated his heart problems. He retreated with his wife, Zinaida, to the comfort of his remote dacha to finish his book. Upon Olga’s release from the Gulag, he bought her a small home nearby. (The Doctor Zhivago movie depicting these days at the snowy fictional dacha, Varinkino.)
Meanwhile, over in America, former members of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) regrouped and became the Central Intelligence Agency. Women who had served their country during the war in OSS clandestine activities, with some exceptions, found themselves reassigned to a typing pool. Fact. The characters in the typing pool are fiction. They were depicted as a giddy bunch consumed with marriage, the latest fashions and lunch dates. Cloistered within their ranks were women who were typists by day and secret “carriers” of sensitive material by night.
The blue Oldsmobile station wagon rumbled up the pea gravel driveway parking in front of an aging architectural matron, known locally, as “The Dutch House”. The wealthy previous owners, now long dead, remain omnipresent leering down in life-size portraits over the delft blue mantel; their Dutch heritage visible in every room – everything left just as it was the day they died – hairbrushes to bath towels.
Mandl decided a stunning young wife accompanying him to lavish political dinners would be an advantage. He possessively pursued her. Her parents, sensing the danger of displeasing this distasteful older suitor, advised her to marry him – ending her career as an actress. If rumors were true about the dangers for Jews in Europe, he might prove her family’s savior. Or so they thought.
As Nazi troops gathered on Austria’s border, Hedy knew it was time to play her greatest performance. Using her contacts in the entertainment industry, she disguised herself and escaped her husband and the Nazis by emigrating to the United States – taking with her Nazi secrets. Unsure what to do with this knowledge.
In October, 1937, Hedy Kiesler Mandl stepped off a train in Hollywood as Hedy Lamarr. Once more, relying on her well-honed skills as an actress, she enchants Louis B. Mayer from MGM Studios. She quickly becomes an internationally loved movie star. And once again, she finds herself controlled by men.
A chance meeting with the avant-garde composer and pianist, George Antheil, led to Hedy making a friend who could look beyond the pretty face. Hedy, having spent hours in her husband’s personal library had amassed specific knowledge of torpedoes technology. Still struggling with what to do with her knowledge of the weaknesses in Nazi weaponry, she enlists Antheil’s help in creating technology that would improve the American Navy’s accuracy in torpedo accuracy.
The setting and circumstances of Konzentrationslager (KL) Auschwitzcan play a harsh backdrop. The cruelty hard to read.
Where to begin. Perhaps with the truth. Some people are going to love the sneaky slow twisty evil of this psychological novel set in England.
THREE PINES, Quebec
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force located in Montreal, taps the infamous Chief Inspector to investigate the death or identity the death as a hunting accident. He heads out of Montreal, crossing the Champlain Bridge, heading into the Eastern Townships. The scenery changes from congested urban environment transitioning to pastoral greenery and suburban villages. Suddenly, off to the side, is a pockmarked metal sign pointing down a rough-and-tumble dirt road. The road dead ends revealing a charming magical scene – a “Thomas Kinkade” village that exudes peace and calm. A most unlikely setting for a violent murder. A place one resident told Gamache she doesn’t remember a crime of any kind during the twenty-five years she has lived there.
The Passengers by John Marrs, set in the “not-too-distant” future, is fiction. The nomenclature has changed – there are no longer drivers, they have become passengers. Fasten your seat-belts. This thriller will have you spinning pages.
Dear Reader, If you have time, please read Still Waters, before diving into this second marvelous novel, The Bridge Between! Pull up a beach chair, a cold drink, feel the breeze, smell the pluff mud and listen to the rolling waves. It isn’t necessary that you do so, but the family you will fall in love with in Still Waters continues in this newest work. Having read both books, I feel I know the characters so well that I am surprised they are not neighbors of mine.
Thirty years later, having obtained an MFA from NYU, he has crafted his debut novel weaving the reference to JFK, Jr. and suicide into the story. The novel’s setting is familiar to him as well; home life in the low-income public housing projects of Chelsea in New York City. A generational workplace as doormen at a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building. The sad history of a few ancestors, parking themselves in pubs, attempting to drown life’s sorrows and inequities.
From all these loose threads, he crafted, the one, the only, Cornelius Sky.
One of the conflicts doctors face in wartime is that they are often asked to do something that is against their healing instincts, because curing a soldier and returning him to the front may mean sending him to his death. This complicates our oath to ‘do no harm.’ I wanted to examine a doctor faced by such choices. 
Winter Soldier is a riveting story of a medical student and a mysterious nun, Margarete, thrown together in a makeshift hospital in an abandoned church in the Austro-Hungarian region of World War I. With a pew for a surgical table and forays to the woods for sustenance, they compassionately offer care to the limbless and horrifically disfigured soldiers in their care. In time, it became a love story. In time, it became a fight for individual choice vs. a doctor’s need to pursue medical care beyond the scope of his duties.
Twenty-two year old, Lucius Krzelewski, was born to a wealthy Polish aristocratic family living in Vienna. His father, an ardent patriot, spent his days reliving the glory days of the fierce soldiers known as the Polish Winged Hussars. He did his best efforts to instill that military fervor in his youngest son, but Lucius showed no aptitude or interest in becoming a soldier.
“Oh,” she said coming to a stop; startled.
The setting. Golden Cove. A fictional town tucked in the bush on the West Coast of South Island, NZ. “[A] primal and untamed landscape [with] trees born of ancient seeds and the ferns huge and green”; each fighting for dominance before reaching the jagged cliffs over looking the Tasman Sea and gorgeous beaches. A wild place where tragedy happened in the past when three visiting hikers disappeared into the bush without a trace over the summer. Present day, life has calmed and the disappearances of those three girls only a sad memory dragged out now and then.
The town is shaken to its roots. Is she injured? Or . . . reviving old memories of the missing girls. Has something evil invaded their isolated world again? From within the community or outside?
Mr. Arcilla died. . . Handsome and scruffy and achingly tall. . .He was just out of college. . . to teach twelve-year-old boarding school girls the fundamentals of Spanish and French. . . Spanish then French. . . He never made it to French. . . 
He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.
Christopher begins to hear voices and messages that he can’t decipher. One day he drawn into the densely forested and foreboding Mission Street Woods. Despite a town wide manhunt, no sign of Christopher is found. Mysteriously, six days later, Christopher reappears and it is immediately obvious that something happened in those woods to change him. And the reader begins to note that the atmosphere in town is growing creepy and scary.
The story is hard-charging at this point and nearly impossible to put down. Supernatural creatures, seen only by Christopher, float through town screaming and battling one another. The deer in the forest seem possessed and appear in the weirdest moments; almost like stalkers. Christopher is aware that he can read minds and that his touch has a chilling affect on anyone he lays a hand upon.
I have now lived geographically in the heart of the Bible Belt for thirty-three years. I was permanently transplanted here quite by accident from northern New York State. The very first question I was asked by the very first person I met was, “Are you saved?” It was news to me that I was in danger and my immediate reply was – From What?
My book club selected Boy Erased for last month’s discussion. As I read the book and smashed into the inner struggles of Garrard Conley’s life, I felt like I was dropped from 35,000 feet into Dante’s inferno.
Publisher’s Synopsis
Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay.
I would have given the book a one star rating but for the intriguing descriptions of the floral plants featured in the nursery where Jane worked. I found myself turning to my collection of botanical books parked on the side table of more interest than Jane’s psychological and emotional issues. The plant intrigue earned a second star for the book.
Hoping for a new start, she escapes to a small seaside town. It turns out that her issues come with her; the only change is geography. The loss of her daughter consumes her thoughts. She gets along well with everyone in town on a surface level but internally she is a lonely mess.
When Jane meets Alma, Edward’s significant other, she worries that Alma would find out about her relationship with Edward. Surprisingly, Alma already knows and doesn’t give a flip. The couple smothers Jane with over-the-top affection and frequent invitations to their home. Their seduction routine leads to daredevil deeds that require Jane to endanger her life and to commit large scale vandalism.
My honest opinion? The book is disjointed and ricochets around in Jane’s mind. The various plot lines don’t seem to build suspense and feels like life in a wind tunnel. I think it could have been a good book with more judicious editing and deeper character development. As it is now, the characters are flat, the plot and conclusion obvious, and the story feels like a blindfolded foot race through a corn maze.
The hundreds of girls moved en-masse for protection and stood weeping at the foot of the [tamarind] tree . . . Do you know why you are here? . . . It is in your best interests to choose our religion . . . Even if you refuse to accept our religion, you must wear the hijab.
The marauders endeavor to eliminate any Western influences and to force native peoples to their extreme Islamic views. The most notable of the violent Islamic terror groups is known as Boko Haram; whose name loosely means “Western education is a sin.”
Nearly two years to the day from their capture and in the heart of the divisive United States 2016 election season, Boko Haram revived attention to their insidious kidnapping by releasing 21 girls. Once again, and for a brief time only, the world renewed its interest in the fate of these innocents.
There is always a certain level of risk involved in negotiations with wild places and wild elements. Even those places that seem tame, or familiar. . . The key is finding a balance – trying to determine whether the risk is worth the reward. Caroline Van Hemert
Covid-19 Matters
As I try to form my thoughts here, I am reminded of Ian Strachan’s children’s book –The Boy in the Bubble. I can’t be the only person on the globe that’s chafing at the bit to get their hair cut and a hug from my best friends. Ya, I know. I could do those things. But you see, I am of the opinion that a longer life with my family outweighs looking good for the funeral director.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I live isolated on Alec Mountain. The only people I see regularly are the mail carrier and the garbage pickup crew. About every 2-3 weeks, I mask up and head to the grocery store.
In the mornings, when the weather permits, I build a tiny fire, plop my tush in my wooden glider, sip my morning coffee, and watch the sun rise. The birds are outrageously loud this year. It makes me feel better to be outside. I look around and realize that the natural world is going on just fine in spite of the pandemic.
I have my concerns and worries just like everyone else. There are family members serving their communities in the health care field to worry about. My son lives in Germany and recently had a serious crash on his bicycle requiring surgery and I can’t go to see him. My sister is in an Atlanta area nursing home where many residents and staff have Covid and a fair number of residents have died. I am her trustee and have been handling complicated financial transactions on her behalf standing in front of drive-up bank windows; the last time in the rain.
So where am I going with all this? I have come to the conclusion that my brain has been stunned and I just can’t stop my mental wanderings long enough to write reviews for my blog. I still read. I have read some very fascinating new fiction – pickup a copy of The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. Stay tuned, I will be back in the near future.
My wildlife camera captures guests on those trails. Some delightful and others requiring some intervention. Imagine my surprise to recently capture images of an entire herd of cows that had broken loose from their pasture and some how climbed the mountain to enjoy my trails.
Please stay safe. Things will get better.I am sure of that for a fact.
Back with you soon.
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Tagged as Book Reviews, Covid19 comments, Itzey.blog, Mountain Life, Social Isolation