Finished: The Forgetting Time (Guskin) The exploration of souls reincarnating themselves into young children is the crux of this book about a four year old boy, Noah, who is plagued with nightmares of the water, and is always asking his single mom when he can go be with his other mother. The mom, Janie, a successful architect, but at her wits end, finally resorts to consulting a psychiatrist when Noah is kicked out of preschool for talking about things he shouldn't...like how guns smell when they are fired, and how spells are cast in Harry Potter, etc. None of these things have ever been discussed with Noah by his mom or anyone else she knows, and the fear of water and nightmares just keep getting worse and worse. When a psychiatrist wants to medicate her young son for schizophrenia, Janie takes the desperate measure of consulting another psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson...one who has dedicated his entire neuro-science career to traveling the world and meeting young children who would appear to have the souls of other dead people in them. In many of the countries, like India, the people actually accept this idea and the family of the child will get to know the family of the deceased, once they figure out who it is. Most of the children, though, outgrow "being" the other person by the time they are six or seven, and go on with their current life. Dr. Anderson knows that in America he'll have a much tougher time convincing parents, especially the ones of the soul who has inhabited Noah's body that such a thing is possible. And, sadly, Dr. Anderson, who is sixty-six, has been diagnosed with a kind of aphasia which has already started robbing words from him. The brilliant man has trouble coming up with the correct words for things, and he's only going to get worse over the next year until he becomes completely dependent on someone else to live. In the meantime, though, he's determined to help Janie and Noah. Dr. Anderson is able to get out of Noah that his name is Tommy and what area of the country he lived in. He begins searching obituaries for any child named Thomas who may have drowned or died in the years since Harry Potter came out! They find a family whose nine year old son has been missing and presumed dead for seven years. The mother, Denise, has never fully recovered and just goes through the motions of life. The father no longer lives in the house. And, the younger brother, Charlie, now fifteen, is a teenager basically raising himself and lonely for his parents' attention. When Janie and Dr. Anderson take Noah to the house, he immediately recognizes it, and when he sees Denise, he throws his arms around her legs crying, "mama, mama". It's all very emotional for Denise and Charlie, but Noah says too many things and knows too many things for them not to believe. As they sit around, pretty much in shock, talking about how this could be possible, Noah slips out the back and makes his way over to the house of the person who killed him!!! Acckk!! As it turns out, Tommy was on his bike heading to a friend's house seven years before when the fourteen year old brother of another friend stopped him and said, hey, want to come fire my gun? The fourteen year old, who was verbally abused by his father, just wanted someone to show off to. He promised Tommy he could have a turn shooting the rifle. As Tommy was setting up the third can for Pauly on the side of an old well, Pauly decided to switch his perfect aim from the can to the well bucket. He fired the gun and the bullet ricocheted off the metal bucket and hit Tommy in the back, felling him at once. Panicked, thinking he'd killed Tommy, and knowing his own father would probably kill him, Pauly threw Tommy's body into the well. As he was leaving, he heard Tommy yelling for help! He's wasn't dead! Pauly looked around for a rope, but found nothing to help. Figuring that by the time he came back with help that Tommy would be dead, he just left him to drown. :-( So, little four year old Noah goes over, knocks on the door and confronts now twenty-one year old Pauly, really freaking him out by asking him why he shot him and threw him in the well! Pauly runs out of the house and into the fields, and Noah returns back to Tommy's old backyard and climbs up into his and Charlie's old tree house. By now Janie has called the police to find the missing Noah, and instead, they find Pauly who confesses to what he did years before. Charlie gets an idea of where Noah might be and sure enough, finds him in the tree house. They reminisce a bit, and Denise hears them. This makes her open to embracing Noah more readily and Denise is the only person Noah wants when he then has an asthma attack and is rushed to the hospital. Janie is reeling by all the developments, but Noah throws her a crumb when he asks her not to leave the room either. After they stay for the funeral and burial of Tommy's remains, which were found in the well, Dr. Anderson and Janie tell Noah that it's time to go home now, and he consents, but first he wants Denise to give him a bath...the first bath he's had in over a year due to his fear of the water!! She gives him the bath and then sends him on his way. The families promise to stay in touch. They do stay in touch by phone a couple of times, but by the time Noah is six, when Denise comes to visit, he doesn't recognize her at all. Janie just has to tell him that this is an old friend he met a while before. Denise is upset, but realizes it's what's best for Noah and she is finally able to say goodbye to Tommy. She and Charlie are in a much better and open place now than before as well. It was a pretty good page-turning book...especially when Noah went to confront Pauly and we didn't know the truth yet of how Tommy had died. It was all a horrible accident, though, and at the end of the book, Denise goes to the prison to visit Pauly and hear what happened. She asks him to write to her. Interspersed before every couple of chapters were real-life accounts taken from a book written by a doctor who actually did travel the world studying reincarnation in young children. All in all, a pretty good book!

Finished: Find Her (Gardner) The latest book by one of my favorite suspense authors! This time she revisited Detective D.D. Warner as she tried to break the case of a newly kidnapped young woman who had been kidnapped five years before as well and kept captive for over 400 days. The young woman, Flora, survived the first kidnapping physically, but emotionally she has turned into somewhat of a vigilante trying to make amends for some of the things she was forced to do while kidnapped. Five years before, her kidnapper, Jacob Hess, had been captured by another of Gardner's mainstay characters, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. I'd love another Kimberly Quincy story, by the way. And, Kimberly was introduced in a book after we first go to know her father, FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, who became another recurring character in Gardner's books, along with the detective he aided, Rainie.  Anyway, that was a tangent, but I just love Gardner's books, and all these characters that she keeps bringing back over and over. :-) So, D.D. calls up Kimberly Quincy to get some insight on what happened when she rescued Flora five years before and that helps D.D. figure out what's going on. Flora has been abducted while out in a bar trying to hunt down the person who had kidnapped college student Stacey Summers only three months before. In the process, Flora is taken again herself, but it can't be by Jacob Hess because Flora actually blew his brains out when Kimberly rushed in to save her. So....turns out there was another person who Jacob Hess had been attached to when he was driving Flora around the country in the back of his 18-wheeler, much of the time confined in a pine coffin. Jacob had a daughter whose sociopathic tendencies may have actually outweighed her father's. These five years later, she's out for revenge on Flora for killing her father. So, it all comes to a head with Flora helping to rescue Stacey and Flora and D.D. together bringing down the psycho daughter. At the end, Flora finally realizes that she can try living her life for the future instead of in the past.

Finished: The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) Joan Didion's memoir of the year after her husband, writer John Dunne's, sudden death. For some reason I was thinking this book would be more uplifting, but it was really a study in the depth of grief, many of the experiences so similar to what I experienced after my brother's death. Things like this "One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" I can't tell you how real a moment something like that is. Well, I mean, you understand if you have lost someone close to you. Anyway, in writing what her first year without her husband of forty years was like, Didion also writes "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention." I thought that was very profound as well and wonder if I've been grieving for almost twenty years, but not yet dealing with the grief? Hmm... In Didion's book, the other horrifying event was that her newly married daughter happened to be in the ICU battling pneumonia which had morphed into life-threatening sepsis. I'm sure the stress of that added to her husband's heart attack. How completely shocking and awful for Joan Didion. :-( I'm honestly surprised she was able to write about her experiences, but I'm glad she did. When she writes about bounding into the house, eager to talk to John about something from her day, only to realize that he wasn't there to talk to, I know that exact feeling. I remember so completely intuitively wanting to call my brother after seeing Titanic to compare notes, only to realize, yet again, that he wasn't there to talk to. Anyway....a very deep and moving book, but certainly one that takes me back to all these thoughts rather than propelling me forward!

Finished: The Fixer (Malamud) Pulitzer Prize winning novel about, Yakov Bok, a Jewish man in 1911 Russia who is falsely accused of killing a young Christian boy, and imprisoned in detestable conditions before finally being brought to trial! The book ends as Yakov is finally being carried by carriage to his trial, so book readers never know his fate (though it is assumed that he will be found guilty, even though there is no evidence against him). In fact, The Fixer is based on the infamous real life story, imprisonment, trial and release of Russian Jewish man, Menahem Beilis. In real life, enough people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, apparently cried out for justice when it was obvious that Beilis had been falsely accused of a "blood ritual" killing of a young boy. In the book, very few people cry out, and some who do are actually imprisoned themselves, but there is a lawyer who believes in Yakov Bok, so we are led to believe there might be hope for the right verdict, but most likely not. Throughout his horrific prison trials, the prosecutor tries to get Yakov to confess many times, telling him it will go easier on him. In reality, the prosecutor actually suspects the child's mother of being involved in the murder, but since he's got a Jew in prison and Tsarist Russia was getting uncomfortable with giving Jewish people their rights, the prosecutor intends to make an example of Yakov Bok. Meanwhile, Yakov deeply examines both is life and the bigger world that he has been living in. The book is really a wider statement on how people who are feared are terribly mistreated. I guess it was a good Pulitzer choice, but again, it was one of those very depressing books that makes you question where the goodness in the world is or was.