Finished: The Secret Speech (Smith) The second book in the Child 44 trilogy with Leo Demidov, the former Russian intelligence officer, and his wife, Raisa, at the center of the action once again. In this story, three years have passed since Leo solved the serial killer mystery in Child 44. At the end of that book he and Raisa, unable to have children of their own, adopted the two daughters,  Zoya and Elena, of a man and wife who had been killed by a more sadistic Russian intelligence officer. Unfortunately for Leo, he had been present and under the command of that officer, and Zoya had witnessed the execution of her parents at the age of 11. She agreed to live with Raisa and Leo for Elena's sake, since it was better than the orphanage, but she harbored a deep hatred for Leo and officers like him in general. Three years later, when The Secret Speech opens, Zoya is 14 and still full of hatred, and Elena is 7. Khrushchev is now the leader of Russia instead of Stalin, and he puts out a document, a transcript of a speech he gives, deriding Stalin, and admitting Stalin's crimes and his barbaric techniques, including those of the Russian intelligence officers that tortured, maimed, killed and imprisoned so many Russian citizens. When this speech is made public, old intelligence officers begin being murdered by a clandestine resistance group. The group is led by a woman, Fraera, who has a huge bone to pick with Leo. Many years before, when Leo was first starting out in the ranks, he was assigned undercover to expose a priest, Lazar, who was still supporting the church, even though Stalin had made it a law that there would be no church. Leo, undercover as Maxim, became Lazar's pupil and nearly like a son to him and his wife. When he got the proof he needed that Lazar was breaking the law, Leo had him exposed and arrested, and sent to a gulag in the far north country. The wife, never forgiving Leo, ends up being Fraera, the lady who is leading the mercenary group! She kidnaps Zoya and Leo must pretend to be a prisoner being sent to the gulag to rescue Lazar and help him escape from prison before she will give Zoya back alive. Of course, Zoya actually likes and approves of Fraera's group and their tactics. They are attacking the very people who killed her parents! She becomes one of them, and even though Leo is successful in bringing Lazar back, an entire political story unfolds in which Leo and Raisa must then travel into Hungary to try and rescue the unwilling Zoya from the clutches of Fraera, who is busy helping ignite a revolution in Hungary. Meanwhile, Zoya falls in love with Malysh, the young teenage right-hand-man of Fraera, and together they actually plan to leave Fraera's group when she becomes too erratic. Feeling betrayed, Fraera locks Malysh and Zoya in with the captured Leo and Raisa as the Russian troops approach the hiding place of her and her followers to squash the revolution. The book is far more detailed and exciting than this brief synopsis! Leo, Raisa, Zoya and Malysh must make their way to safety, and Malysh is killed while pretty much saving the lives of the rest of them. :-( It's the second sad death, as Leo's good friend and associate Timur had been killed in the escapade to release Lazar from the gulag. At the end of the book, Zoya is reluctantly back with Leo, Raisa and Elena, but no so filled with hatred anymore. She saw the lengths that Leo and Raisa would go to to save her...and she saw the insanity of what Fraera was doing too. Anyway....I really enjoyed this book and will most definitely read the third installment.

Finished: Main Street (Lewis) A book about a young woman in the early 1900's who longs to be accepted as an educated, evolved woman when she marries a small town Minnesota doctor and goes back to live with him in the set-in-its-ways, gossip-thriving town. Things only go downhill for Carol Kennicott as she realizes that no one in the town wants to make any changes for the better....no one wants to hear her ideas on improvement, much less on literature or art or music...no one appreciates her flair for fashion. Everyone expects her to be a good little doctor's wife to Will Kennicott, a good-old boy who likes to hunt and hang out with the guys too. I'll give it to Will, though, he perseveres throughout the story, even though he does some things I'm not thrilled with...but he does love Carol and tries his hardest towards the end to evolve. Carol, for her part, spends far too much time in her own head and worrying about what people think of her...and with good reason...the town is a cesspool of gossip and busybodies. When she finally takes their little son, Hugh, and goes to Washington D.C. to find her way in the working world, she does find the fulfilment she wanted...but she also finds that there are just as many cliques in the workplace as there are in good ol' Gopher Prairie. She spends over a year there, and when Will comes to visit, they reconnect and she realizes that Gopher Prairie might not be so bad. She eventually goes back, pregnant with their second child and settles down to small town life again, this time more confident in herself, but still not in love with the stagnation of a small town.

I've had this book on my reading periphery, and thought it might be more a picture of quaint life in a small town...and less of an emotional, stressful journey of this one woman. It was pretty well written, and kept me interested, but certainly wasn't a terribly compelling book that I just couldn't put down. I'm glad I finally read a Sinclair Lewis book though! He wasn't on the list of Top 100 authors I went through three years ago. :-)

Finished: Years of Grace (Barnes) Pulitzer Prize winner from 1931 about the life of Jane Ward, a Chicago girl, and her loves, losses and family, from 1891 to 1928. I'm not really sure this was a Pulitzer worthy book...a little bit too surface, not much depth, but maybe that's just a sign of the writing in that time period? Each section is labeled by what man had the biggest influence in her life...first Andre, her first love at 14, then Stephen, her husband of thirty years, and then Jimmy, her best friend's husband who she falls in love with, but sends away so as to do the proper thing and stay with her husband and children. The last section is labeled for her children, and is about her relationship with them mostly as young adults as she laments that their generation does things so much differently and watches them make decisions she wouldn't have made. When Jane and Andre fall in love as young teens, they declare they want to get married before he must move back to France. Their parents say no, and Jane's parents make Andre promise not to contact her until she's 21, four years later. Jane goes to Bryn Mawr and then back home to debut with her other girlfriends. She never forgets Andre, and as her 21st birthday approaches, she wonders if she'll hear from him and if they will feel the same for each other. Meanwhile, one of her best friend's cousins, Stephen Carver, has fallen madly in love with Jane as they've seen quite a bit of each other. He keeps proposing to her, but she tells him while she's very fond of him, she doesn't love him. When she finally gets a letter from Andre, she's thrilled, but he says that he's been given the opportunity of a lifetime to work for the next year in seclusion mentoring to a great sculptor in France. (Andre is an artist.) Jane feels betrayed and writes Andre a dismissive letter, saying they've both moved on and she's marrying Stephen. Then, pressured because the Spanish American War is about to take Stephen to Cuba, Jane does declare her love for him and marry him. Flash forward fifteen years and Jane is 36, still married to Stephen the dependable banker, with three children. She's bored and unhappy, but loyal to her family. She goes to visit her best friend from childhood, Agnes, in New York, and meets Agnes' restless, carefree husband, Jimmy. Jimmy moves to Chicago for a job and Jane's whole family sees alot of Jimmy and really likes him. Of course, Jane falls in love with Jimmy and Jimmy with Jane, but they don't take it further than a few kisses. Jimmy does beg Jane to leave her husband and children and go off to Europe with him. She is shocked that he'd think she would do such a thing, and ends things abruptly. She feels guilty for the rest of her life that she betrayed her husband and her best friend, but she still holds the love for Jimmy in her heart. Jimmy, distraught when Jane says no, signs up to fight in World War I, and is killed fairly quickly. Agnes never knows that Jimmy fell for Jane. Later, when Jane is watching her own grown children go through loves and losses, she's incredulous when her oldest daughter, Cicily, who is married with three children, falls for HER best friend's husband, who is married to Jane's husband's sister, and has children of his own. Their solution, rather than doing the right thing and breaking up two families, is to each divorce their spouses and marry each other. The whole book is very readable, but not very deep, and rather soap-operish. I kept thinking maybe I was reading a 1930's version of a Jackie Collins novel maybe? Anyway, another one down. Not sure I'll read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, but I'll keep plugging along. :-)

Finished: The Man in the High Castle (Dick) A pretty good page-turner about the world in 1962 as it would be if the Axis powers had won World War II instead of the Allies! The book follows several characters as they survive in either the German controlled east part of the former United States...or the Japan controlled Pacific states. Only in the Rocky Mountain states is there some semblance of the United States, but even that is controlled by the Reich. The book is set in San Francisco, where the Japanese are the elite, and the white people the menial workers. Hitler has since died of syphilis and German chancellor Bormann rules the Reich. The Germans have plugged up and drained the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into farmland, and have also managed to see to the genocide of almost all the Africans in Africa. One character is a German spy posing as a Swedish businessman who meets with the Japanese higher-ups in San Francisco to let them know that a certain faction of the Germans in power is planning to drop a bomb on the Japanese islands and wipe out their co-existing, cold-warring "allies". While the meeting between the German spy and the Japanese is taking place, Bormann dies, setting off an immediate political turmoil while Nazis Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich jockey to become the next leader. In a book within a book, an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, has written a novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is the fictional story of what the world would be like if the Allies had won the war and America and Great Britain thrived! This book is forbidden in the German controlled east, but many copies are floating around in the Pacific states. Many Americans read the book secretly and wish that history could have turned out that way. There are, of course, alot more details and in depth character stories, but I'm not going to do a total recap on this one. The book is really intriguing and scary at the same time. Imagine if it had really happened??

Finished: Lie Down In Darkness (Styron). One of the most depressing books I've read, but what should I have expected from the author who wrote Sophie's Choice? The book tells the story about the Loftis family, a 1940's fairly well-to-do, but very dysfunctional southern family. It opens with the father, Milton Loftis traveling to pick up the body of his 23 year old daughter, Peyton, who has committed suicide. Milton, a promising young lawyer and hopeful judge when married to Helen years before, has basically ruined his family by becoming an alcoholic. Milton and Peyton have always been exceptionally close, especially since first daughter, Maudie, was born with mental and physical disabilities, and Helen has devoted most of her time and emotion to Maudie. Milton has spoiled the beautiful Peyton terribly. Helen, resents the relationship between Milton and Peyton, and is pretty cold to Peyton all her life. Basically, it's just a sad story of two very selfish parents completely wrecking a young life. Peyton could have been a great human being, but she pretty much didn't stand a chance with her mother ignoring her in favor of Maudie, blaming her for anything that went wrong with Maudie, and her father doting on her, and at times even slathering all over her. We see flashbacks of their "family" life, and spend time in the present, seeing how each parent is dealing with Peyton's death. One of the last chapters is done from Peyton's stream of conscience viewpoint on the day that she desperately tries to reconnect with her own husband, Harry, who has left her because of her own drinking, sleeping around and otherwise outrageous behavior, and when failing to reconnect...commits suicide. Such a sad, tragic story. Sigh.