Finished: Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) Eh, disappointed in this one...not at all what I expected! I expected this to be more of a sweeping love story, and instead it was a patchy exposition on the political and social beliefs in Russia during World War I and then the revolution. I can remember scenes from the movie as a child, but I'm pretty certain I never watched the movie in it's entirety. I remember the snowy landscapes, and the handsome Dr. Zhivago, and the beautiful Lara. I guess I never realized that Yuri Zhivago was a married man who fell in love with another woman, Lara, and basically pined away for her until he died before the age of forty. Yuri is a doctor and deep thinker who has lost his mother at the age of 10 and who had already been deserted by his father. You would think that experience alone would cause him to behave differently with his own wife and child, but he's far too introspective and selfish. He marries his childhood sweetheart Tonia, and does truly love her, and their child, or so it would seem. Yuri is recruited into the army as a doctor during World War I and spends many years there, coming home after being wounded and not really knowing his child at all. He also meets Lara, a beautiful woman who he actually first came across as a child, who is acting as a nurse during the war. Lara joins the war effort in search of what happened to her own beloved husband, Pasha, who is reported to have been killed, but has really run off to reinvent himself as a Russian revolutionary leader. Yuri and Lara don't have an affair during the war, but there is a definite attraction. Anyway, once home, Yuri dedicates himself to Tonia and their son, but times are harsh in Moscow after the war, so they move to a rural village in Russia which is even harsher. One town away...Lara has gone back to her home before the war. Soon, Yuri and Lara DO begin a love affair, despite Yuri's professed love for his wife...and despite the fact that Tonia may be pregnant again with another child. Yuri just can't get over himself and how much he feels Lara is his soul mate in beliefs, etc. One day, he finally breaks it off with Lara and decides he will go home and be faithful to his family. On his way home, he is kidnapped by the revolutionary troops and forced to be their medical doctor for years. His family has no idea where he has disappeared to and he never sees them again. :-( He doesn't even know if his wife has a son or daughter. He finally escapes after 2 or 3 years and rather than making his way back to the village where his family was, because he hears that village was bombed and that his family escaped, he makes his way back to Lara's house. Lara nurses him back to health and lets him know that she actually met Tonia and helped her deliver a baby girl, named after Yuri's beloved mother. Lara tells Yuri that his family has moved back to Moscow. But...does Yuri leave immediately to go back to his family?? No, he continues to recuperate with Lara and carry on as if she's the love of his life. He also begins writing, and as is prominent in this book, goes off on many political tangents. This seems to be a common thread in most of the Russian books I read....they can't just tell the story...they must expound on and on about every political aspect and belief. Anyway, Yuri finally hears from Tonia and she tells him they have been exiled to Paris...so they are alive! She tells him how much she loves him and wonders what she ever did for him to fall in love with someone else. Meanwhile, Yuri insists that Lara take her and Pasha's daughter and flee to safety when it is clear that the revolutionists and anyone connected with them are being hunted down. Yuri then spends the next few years moping, destitute, and and finally living with yet another woman with whom he has two children, before dying of a heart ailment before he turns forty. He laments for his lost family and for his lost love, Lara, all those years. Both Lara and Yuri's half-brother, Evgraf, show up for his funeral. Evgraf is an interesting character who shows up throughout the book whenever Yuri is in dire straights. Evgraf, who is the son of Yuri's father and some princess has the money and power to get Yuri and his family out of various desperate situations. When Evgraf first meets Yuri he seems to worship the ground he walks on and will do anything to help him, but the author never really develops this relationship. I would have much rather seen this develop than continuously read the political diatribes. Oh well! In all, a very disappointing book compared to what I was mistakenly expecting!

Finished: Where They Found Her (McCreight) A pretty good, but very predictable, page-turner about a newborn baby found dead in a college town. There are several possibilities for the new mother, but who would have actually killed the baby? Molly, the mother of a five year old, wife of a newly hired professor at the university, and the new reporter assigned to the case, has her own demons, having lost a full term baby two years before, but she gradually puts all the facts together to come up with the truth. The new mother ends up being the teenage daughter of the very likable police chief of the town...and...the baby was born with the cord around her neck and died almost instantly. The teenager, Hannah, and a friend of hers panicked and buried the baby rather than Hannah facing the wrath of her parents for getting pregnant. The father of the child Molly suspects to be the charming Dean of Students at the university who she has discovered has been having unsavory relationships with students for years....until....Molly discovers little handwritten notes to Hannah from the father and they are in her husband's handwriting!! That's right....Molly's husband ends up being a cheating smarm. Anyway....a pretty good whodunnit for treadmill and airplane reading. :-)

Finished: Bel Canto (Patchett) A beautifully written book about a group of South American revolutionaries who break in on a party of upper class citizens from around the world who have gathered to hear the world famous opera singer, Roxanne Coss. Their goal...to kidnap the president of their unnamed country and take him hostage until the government is overthrown and their relatives freed from unjust imprisonment. The first problem? As carefully planned as the operation is, with three generals and over twenty armed young gunmen cutting off the power to the vice president's home, where the event is held, and bursting through the air ducts...the president is not in attendance! A very poor ruler, even though the event is in honor of Mr. Katsumi Hosokawa, the renowned president of the Japanese company, Nansie, who they hope to convince to build a factory in their poverty stricken county, the president of the country decides at the last minute to miss the soiree to stay home and watch his soap opera! Sadly, Mr. Hosokawa has no intention of ever building a factory there. He travels to the country only because he loves, lives and breathes opera, when he's not working, and his favorite opera singer, Ms. Coss is there to sing just for him. The book is about the powerful affect that music has on the soul as much as it is about the unfortunate circumstances that the captives are suddenly thrust into, and the perhaps more unfortunate circumstances that the revolutionaries come from. Fortunately Mr. Hosokawa has his brilliant young interpreter with him, Gen, who can speak English, Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, German and Russian...and he will need those skills since bigwigs from all of those countries are in attendance! When the revolutionaries realize the president is not there, they dig in their heels and decide to let the women, children and servants go and hold all the men hostage...with one catch...the opera singer stays. She is the only woman not released. A benevolent Red Cross worker, Messner, is the only person allowed in and out of the mansion. He soon comes to realize that the leaders don't plan to kill anyone and just want their demands met. Neither the revolutionaries or the government, though, are willing to give in so the hostage situation continues for over four months! Eventually, the rules in the house are relaxed and Roxanne Coss begins singing every day. One Japanese businessman, Mr. Kato, discloses that he's a beautiful piano player, and he accompanies her every day. (The original accompanist dies very early on from lack of insulin. He had not even told Ms. Coss he was diabetic in order to spare her any inconvenience.) As the weeks go by, the hostages begin to see most of the young gunmen, many of them young teens, as sympathetic people. One of the boys, Cesar, has a beautiful voice and can sing. Roxanna Coss begins giving him lessons. One of the boys, Ishmael, becomes very good at chess. Two of the boys turn out to be girls...one of whom, Carmen, Gen falls in love with, and she with him. All these businessmen who would in their normal daily lives not be stopping to smell the roses, begin to appreciate the every day things in life...cooking, sunlight, reading, and most of all the beautiful singing. Of the three generals, two are very tough and rigid, but General Benjamin, who actually has a family of his own back home, just wants to see his brother released from prison. He has a daily game of chess with Mr. Hosokawa. And, speaking of Mr. Hosokawa...despite the fact that he has a dedicated wife and daughters back home, he falls deeply in love with Roxanne Coss and she with him! His marriage to his wife was arranged and loveless but devoted until now. Mr. Hosokawa also comes to love Carmen as a daughter and Gen as a son. On Messner's last visit, it is clear that he knows something is about to happen and he begs General Benjamin to surrender, but it falls on deaf ears. Within a few days, military soldiers storm the house and shoot down every revolutionary in sight...Cesar as he is having a music lesson, Ishmael as he is gardening in the yard, and Carmen, as she runs towards the piano room when she hears the first shots. Tragically, Mr. Hosokawa is right behind her and seeing what is happening before she does, he throws his body in front of hers and they both die by the same bullet. All the other hostages make it out alive amidst the scattered young bodies of their captors and the three older generals. It's so sad, mostly to think of the young lives lost to a cause they weren't even that knowledgeable of. In any event...the end of the book is rather strange as Gen and Roxanne Coss end up getting married!! Maybe it was their way of living forever with the two people they'd fallen in love with and lost? The book is very beautifully written and truly makes you feel for each person, well almost each person, as they come alive on the pages.

Finished: Zoo (Patterson) The ads for the TV show prompted me to read this book, a definite page-turner about animals suddenly getting smarter and planning group attacks on humans. Only one man, scientist Jackson Oz, believes that the world is headed for an animal meltdown of global proportions, but no one will listen to him. He travels to Africa to see if he can get the abnormal lion behavior on camera to bring back and show the United States. He can't believe the orchestrated attack that the male lions perpetrate....killing his guide and nearly killing Jackson. On his way back to base camp, he spots French biologist, Chloe, clinging to a rock, surrounded by vicious crocodiles. He manages to save her life and get them back to the U.S. where still, even after seeing the footage, no one will take him seriously. When he returns to his own apartment in New York, his pet chimpanzee, Attila, has gone crazy in the same way and killed the person taking care of him. Attila escapes out the window and we flash forward five years. Oz and Chloe have married and have a three year old son, Eli. The world is in chaos from animals running rampant and attacking...dogs, cats, rats, lions, leopards, dolphins, bats, chimpanzees, etc. Finally, the government is ready to listen to Oz and Oz finally, after five years figures it out....the animals aren't attacking because of a virus like rabies (which they thought for several years). They are attacking because of the unusual pheromones they smell in the air. And the pheromones are caused by a breakdown in the ecosystem caused by too much cell phone radiation and too much oil byproduct in the air. Oz finally convinces the president and all the world leaders that humans need to totally shut down their cell phones, turn off their cars, shut off all electricity, basically, no planes, no trains, etc., until they can figure out how to create a long term solution. The world complies, and two days later, the animals are miraculously going back to their normal patterns after viciously killing so many people. On the third day, the government starts to get lax and starts granting special permits for phone, car and plane usage. Other governments do the same thing, and within a day, the animals are back to killing people. The top government officials of the U.S., plus the scientists, including Oz and his family are whisked off to Iceland to live, apparently the rest of their lives? That's where the book ends. Hmmm. Oh, and at one point when Oz was in Washington D.C. trying to convince the president of the urgency of the matter, Chloe was hold up back in the new "military zone" of the upper east side of New York in a fancy townhouse. It gets all scary because Attila and two other chimps have broken the glass and are about to enter the room where she and little Eli are, and they are ready to kill some human meat. Attila can smell the nervous female odor...but then he smells something else, a whiff of a boy who smells like someone he used to know...someone who rescued him from his laboratory cage and used to cradle him and feed him. He smells Oz in Eli. He forces his other chimp friends to leave and go to another building, saving Chloe and Eli. Anyway...the book was really good until the ending where all the people just forgot after only three days how serious things were. Maybe the author doesn't have too much faith in the people? Who knows, maybe that's what everyone would do. I plan to watch the TV series when it comes on and see how it is! :-)

Finished: Scoop (Waugh) Eh, probably my least favorite of the Waugh books I've read, and I had such hopes since it is one of his most highly regarded books! I think it was just not my cup of tea because it was chock full of political satire, and I'm just not good with political satire. Quiet, unassuming, bachelor William Boot, who lives in the country with his brothers and a bunch of older family members writes a small nature column for London's paper, The Beast. John Boot, a distant cousin who he's never met, is a relatively successful novelist with one very rich friend who happens to be the wife of a man with considerable influence in the government. When John Boot asks his friend, Mrs. Algernon Stitch, to help him figure out how to get out of a relationship he's entangled in, she suggests that he gets sent on a foreign writing assignment by The Beast, a paper owned by Lord Copper, her dear friend. The wealthy, but discombobulated Copper takes to the idea and calls up his newspaper editor, Mr. Salter, and demands that he send Boot to the politically unstable country of Ishmaelia in Africa. Salter looks for the only Boot he knows and can't believe that Lord Copper wants to send the mild-mannered nature columnist, William Boot, to an African country that is about to erupt in war...but send him he does. William Boot goes on quite an adventure and is taken advantage of by all the other reporters sent to the area, as he doesn't even know how to interpret or send a proper cable message to his newspaper. Just by being his innocent self, Boot manages to avoid being sent on a wild goose chase that all the other reporters follow, and he is the only reporter in the capital city when the coup takes place and the Russians take over Ishmaelia! He gets the story sent home and becomes an unlikely journalistic hero for The Beast, and all of London...since The Beast has the only reporter that gets the story. Meanwhile, John Boot goes to see his friend Mrs. Stitch and she can't believe that Lord Copper never sent her friend on the assignment. Once William gets home, he just wants to go back to his quiet life, but Lord Copper wants to have him knighted! In another mix up, it is actually John Boot who gets the invitation from HRM to be knighted instead of William, lol. And...lucky for him, he does finally get sent on The Beast's next foreign assignment to Antarctica. William happily resumes his former nature column and continues on with his unassuming life. This book just bordered on too much nonsense for me rather than just being a good, deep story. I'm so glad I read it, since I'd heard so much about it, but it really can't compare to two of my favorite books by Waugh, Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust.

Finished: The Maltese Falcon (Hammett) My first old-fashioned detective book...other than the Sherlock Holmes stories I've read. :-) This book was always coming up on a list of books that I should read. It was a good detective story, introducing me to private eye, Sam Spade. I had to really push Humphrey Bogart out of my head and just try to picture Sam Spade on my own as I read. There wasn't really too much surprising to the story. A woman in need, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, comes to Sam and his partner, Miles Archer for help finding out where a former criminal named Thursby (who she at first says has run off with her little sister) is staying in San Francisco. Of course, Brigid is lying as to why she wants to find Thursby....and after both Miles and Thursby end up dead, the police are on Sam Spade's case about what could have happened...even insinuating that maybe he killed his own partner since Sam was having a fling with Miles' wife, Iva. Sam deals with a few unsavory characters, the obese former boss of Brigid, Mr. Gutman, the effeminate partner in crime, Mr. Cairo and the skeezy trigger man, Wilmer Cook. They are all, along with Brigid, looking for the Maltese Falcon...an ancient statue of a Falcon that was encrusted in jewels and made for the King of Spain hundreds of years before. Stolen and misplaced many times over throughout the years, Gutman finally had his beady eyes on it in the possession of a rich Russian. When he sends Brigid to steal it from the Russian, Brigid decides to keep it for herself and enlist the help of Thursby. Brigid entrusts the statue to a ship Captain that is sailing for America, Captain Jacobi. It's a ship that will arrive in the states later than she and Thursby. Of course, after meeting Sam Spade, Brigid falls into bed with him rather than divulging the real truth of her story. She fancies that she loves Sam and that he loves her...but that doesn't stop her from wanting to complete her mission of making money off the statue. When the statue arrives, Brigid realizes that Gutman and Cairo are going to most likely kill her for the statue, so she begs Captain Jacobi to take it straight to Sam Spade. He does so, but at the cost of his own innocent life as Wilmer Cook shoots him as he's on his way. Captain Jacobi makes it to Sam Spade with the "package" and Sam leaves his affable and indispensable secretary, Effie, there to call the police after Jacobi dies of his wounds while Sam goes and deposits the statue in a train station locker. Finally, as all the interested parties meet, Sam insists that he won't deal with Gutman for the statue until he gives up Wilmer in the shooting of Thursby and Jacobi. Sam wants to hand the police the shooter, mostly to get them off of his back, but also for reasons of pride...to prove that he can "get his man". Gutman agrees and then takes out $10,000 to pay Sam in exchange for the statue. Sam has Effie fetch the statue and bring it over. Nearly salivating over the packaging, Gutman rips it all apart and scrapes off the outer layer of paint, only to discover that the statue is a fake! They all determine that the Russian was on to them and switched the statue before ever letting it out of his sight. The criminals decide to head back to Europe (with the $10,000), regroup and come up with a new plan. Brigid stays behind with Sam and is shocked when he tells her he's figured out that she's the one who killed his partner, Miles. She tries to deny it, but he lays out the story. He knows that she came there that day requesting one of them to follow Thursby, assuming that the ex-criminal would get nervous and kill his tail. She would then tell the police that Thursby did it, sending him to prison. That way she would be rid of splitting the money she'd get for the statue with him. When Thursby refused to be spooked by Miles that night, Brigid lured Miles into the alley herself and killed him with Thursby's gun, then still planning to pin it on Thursby. Of course, Thursby turned up dead by the hand of Wilmer before Brigid could go to the police. Brigid is shocked that Sam is going to turn her in, but turn her in he does. Case wrapped. :-) I can't say that I'm big on the detective genre, but the story was fast-paced and kept me reading. I'm going to read one other one I have...The Big Sleep. It's supposed to be "the best" detective novel out there. I guess we'll see. Then I think I'm done with detective novels. :-)

Finished: Ethan Frome (Wharton) Well, that was short and sweet tragic! This has long been on my list to read, and I was surprised that it was such a page-turner for me. I really got drawn into the story and wanted to know what happened. I didn't realize that my book had Ethan Frome AND other stories, so I was thinking I was only about halfway done when the book ended. I guess there was really no other place for it to go though! If I had to summarize this book in one sentence it would be...Women can be such manipulative witches and stupid men are just ripe for their picking. As we begin, Ethan Frome is a 52 year old poor New England farmer who has lived for 24 years disfigured and in pain due to an accident he caused because he saw no way out of a tragic situation. As a 28 year old man, he is trapped in a loveless, hurried, now 7 year old marriage with an older woman, Zeena, who has become more and more of a self-anointed invalid. When her younger cousin, Mattie, comes to help with the housework, Mattie and the quiet Ethan bond over the year and without knowing how the other feels, fall in love with each other. Things come to a head when Zeena makes an overnight trip to a new doctor and Mattie and Ethan have a "normal" quiet dinner and evening together and see how life could be for them. They don't even kiss or confess their feelings, but know they are in love. I suppose that Zeena had some inkling all along because when she comes back she tells Ethan that the doctor says she's worse than she feared, and she has hired a new full-time nursemaid and that Mattie will have to go back to some other relative the very next day. As Ethan drives Mattie to the train station in the horse cart, they go by the big snowy hill they've always promised they would sled down together. On a whim, as the sun is setting and the trees are obscured by the dusk, they take a dangerous but thrilling sled ride down the big hill. They embrace each other at the end and declare they can't live without each other. Mattie convinces Ethan to take her down the hill again and this time run them both purposely into a tree to end their misery. At least they'll go out together. Ethan does so, and finally having kissed Mattie, they fling themselves down towards their destiny. They do, in fact, hit a tree, but both of them survive. Ethan is disfigured on one side for life...and Mattie is paralyzed from the neck down. The author leads you to believe that Mattie won't survive this ordeal, and at the end we find out that Zeena took them both back in at the farm and suddenly wasn't ill any more. That's where the manipulative witch part comes in...I guess she never was! She has cared for them for 20 years where they still live today, an unhappy trio, Mattie and Ethan mere shadows of their former selves. Depressing huh?

Finished: Early Warnings (Smiley) The second book in a planned trilogy about The Langdons, an Iowa farming family, and how their lives evolve (in this one) from the 1950's to the 1980's. Quite a thought-provoking book that I think I might have liked more than the first one! This book opens in 1953 with the funeral of Walter Langdon, the patriarch of the first book, Some Luck. His widow, Rosanna, remains as a cohesive presence throughout most of Early Warnings, but this story focuses more on Walter and Rosanna's children, Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry and Claire, and their relationships and children. As it ends, most of those grandchildren of Rosanna and Walter have grown and began having children of their own! Both Rosanna and her activist sister, Eloise, die in the book of relative old age...Rosanna, content with her life and happy with her growing family...and Eloise, regretting the communist activism of her youth and wondering if she totally wasted her life. Anyway, I couldn't possibly recap the whole book, but must give a brief summary so I can come back and read this before reading the third book and remember where we left off. :-)

Frank and his very remote wife, Andy, are still married and stay so throughout the book, even though Frank briefly resumes his affair with Lydia "the love of his life" whore from the first book...and even though Andy has sexual relations with her "out there" therapist while trying to figure herself out. Never one to be maternal to her children, she ends up being a more loving grandmother than mother. And Frank, always the cynical, standoffish, judgemental person, also has trouble relating to his own children who he never feels live up to his own intelligence or expectations. He's much nicer in later years to his children's spouses. Go figure. Anyway, their children are Janet (Janny), and the twins, Michael and Richie. They are all rather doomed from the start with no loving role models, but Janny finds nurturing in her Aunt Lillian's family. The boys just grow up as competitive, sometimes near violent, hellions, which Frank encourages in them at a very early age. Janny does a stint in California and ends up going to the church of the Reverend Jones, nearly buying into the cult, but she pulls herself back just in time to avoid the trip to Guyana! By the end of the book, all the kids have spouses and jobs and seem relatively happy in their own lives...though there will always be that competitive edge between the boys. Janny is married to up and coming computer guy, Jared, with her own daughter, Emily. Michael is married to super rich Loretta with three small children. And, Richie is married to longtime Jewish girlfriend, Ivy, when the book ends. Andy seems to be thriving as a grandmother, and Frank is called in by a longtime, rich associate to go and do another secret "job" for him.

Joe is the good old boy still back on the farm. He's the one who took over for his father and married the girl down the road, Lois. They live on Lois' old farm with her sister, Minnie. Joe is the perfect, low-key, down-to-earth, always reinvesting farmer, and Lois is the perfect baker, homemaker, calm mother. Their children are Jesse and Annie. Not much story about Annie, but Jesse is going to follow in his father's footsteps with the farm. He's now married to Jennifer and they have two sons, Guthrie and Perky. Jesse does become enamored of his adventurous Uncle Frank when he came to visit, and his Uncle took him out hunting and filled him with all his childhood and war stories. This encourages Jesse to actually go to college and see a little bit of the world before settling down back home. Oh, and Frank does completely pay for Joe and Jesse to buy the farm adjacent to theirs that they'd always farmed with their neighbor when that neighbor dies. Franks's not stingy with his money. Oh yes, Frank is rich! So, as we leave Joe and Lois in the 80's the farm crisis is happening and Joe's farm is worth about a third as much as it was. We'll see what transpires in book three!

Lillian is still happily married to CIA guy Arthur. They have four children, Tim, Debbie, Dean and Tina. Lillian is a good mom, but she does rather let her kids run a bit wild. Arthur definitely feels the stress of his job which goes from surviving the tricky cold war to helping decide if the US should bomb Iran, and everything in between. He's so stressed, in fact, that he tries to commit suicide at one point when the kids are older and he ends up being treated in a hospital with shock therapy and sent home. He continues to work, but it's not as stressful. In the meantime, Tim is a wild thing, pretty uncontrollable...alot like his Uncle Frank, he's told. He ends up having a secret relationship with Debbie's best friend, the equestrian riding Fiona, and has one "oops" sex experience with her before he heads off to college that leaves you wondering if she could have become pregnant. Tim flunks out of college and signs up for the military where he is promptly shipped to Vietnam. It's not long before Tim is killed, and we have our first tragedy of this book. :-( Lillian and Arthur are in shock, but push forward with their other children. Debbie is devastated, but continues on with her life. She loves horses but was always at the mercy of riding Fiona's horses, and when Fiona goes off to college, that relationship fizzles out. Debbie ends up married with two kids of her own, Carlie and Kevvie. She talks to her mom on the phone every day. There's not much story about Dean or Tina, but they are both alive and well and maybe will be more prominently featured in the third book. The second tragedy for this family is that Lillian discovers a breast lump and though she goes through chemo, radiation, double mastectomy, etc., she finally succumbs to breast cancer in her fifties. Lillian has been the thread that has held all the siblings and children together since her own mother, Rosanna, passed away, so it is heart wrenching when she dies. Of course, Arthur is beside himself, and at the end of the book, he's pretty much a shell of his former self, but he's still got his government connections, and he's in constant touch with his three remaining children and his grandchildren.

Henry is the son who was all smarts and books growing up. He goes on to get his PhD I'm pretty sure? In some type of medieval archaeology or something, and he's teaching college. He spends many years crushing on his own female cousin, Rosa, Eloise's daughter...just to discover at some point that he's actually gay! He has a couple of steady relationships with younger guys throughout the book, but he's never been an extrovert, so those end up falling by the wayside. He's just on the cusp of AIDS, and is glad that he was never promiscuous when it comes to light. He does see a weird sore on his gum one night while brushing his teeth and panics, but then realizes it was a popcorn kernel that he missed! Perhaps he will be more involved in an AIDS story in the third book.

Claire is the baby of the family and was always closer to her father, Walter, than her mother, Rosanna. She was also very close to Henry. She ends up married to a very controlling doctor, Paul, and has two boys, Grayson and Bradley. Paul is so demanding and picky about every single detail of their lives, that Claire feels stifled after a few years. The boys have grown up respecting, or maybe fearing, their father all their lives, so Claire feels like she's not even needed around the house. She has a couple of secret affairs, and finally when the boys are teenagers, she actually stands up to Paul one night about something trivial and he gets so angry that he hits her! Of course, the boys don't see it, so they're still a little confused when she starts divorce proceedings, but Paul won't hear of it. Not until three years later will he divorce her when he actually finds someone younger to put up with him. Claire is living on her own, working and going to college when we leave her in the 80's...oh, and she seems to actually have a better relationship with her college-aged sons.

And then...there is Charlie! Charlie is a character that is introduced but we never know who he's related to. He's born in 1965 and we see him in Kindergarten, with his little name tag...and late elementary school as he becomes a good swimmer and diver...and at 16 when he discovers the book The Once and Future King and reads it all night, and then again as a 20 year old who loves the outdoors who is moving out to Colorado with his girlfriend to work at an outdoors adventure shop. Charlie is adopted. In a bizarre coincidence, Frank actually spies Charlie one day when Frank goes to Aspen on that mysterious business for the rich guy. It's like looking in a mirror 40 years ago, he thinks. He goes and buys a pair of hiking boots from Charlie and can't get over the resemblance. He becomes convinced that Charlie must be his son by his old mistress, Lydia. He gets Charlie's license plate and asks Arthur to do some secret CIA research on him. What Arthur finds is not at all what either Franks OR Arthur expected. Charlie is not Frank's son...he's Tim's son, and Arthur's grandson! Sure enough, Fiona had become pregnant on that one night all those years ago before Tim headed to college and Fiona had given the baby up for adoption! Charlie's adoptive mother, having always been honest with him, tells him when she finds out that Arthur was inquiring about him. At the end of the book Charlie calls Arthur! Charlie is a genuinely nice person and says he always wished he was from a big family. The book ends with Arthur and Tim's siblings wondering what it will be like to meet Charlie.

I'm kind of now looking forward to the third book! I guess it will take all these people with their good qualities and their flaws right into our time period! :-) Great summer read this one was!