Finished: History of Wolves (Fridlund) A very intense and sad book about a 15 year old girl, Madeline, who has been raised with zero social skills on a now defunct commune on a lake in Minnesota by her parents. When she meets a woman and her four year old son, Paul, who have moved in across the lake, and is asked to help out with babysitting, she has no idea about how intricate and fragile their family dynamic is. Madeline narrates the tale and goes into detail about some of her high school experiences, where she is known as the "freak" or the "commune" kid. She also delves into what she remembers of her past when the other commune members were there and she had her one best friend that was her age. By the end of the book, I think she has figured out that her parents may not even be her real parents, but just the members of the commune that volunteered to keep her. Anyway, having grown up in the woods and on the lake, Madeline is completely at home out in the wild and is fascinated by wolves. Paul's mother, Patra, trusts Madeline more and more to take Paul about and show him how to do outdoor things. Madeline notices that Paul seems sickly much of the time, but doesn't know enough to question things. She can see that Patra adores her son and dotes on him. Madeline is just beginning to feel a part of some kind of normal family, hanging out in a warm house with plenty of food, when Patra informs her that her scientist husband will be coming home for the weekend so she won't need her for a few days. A week or so later, Madeline finds Paul's lost white cat out in the woods and takes it back to their house. She meets the husband, Leo, and is surprised to see Paul looking even more sickly. Patra has become more of a nervous wreck with her husband there, and Madeline can sense that something is off, but mostly she feels jealous of Leo have Patra's attention. We finally learn that Leo is a Christian Scientist and that Paul is very sick. Before moving to the lake, Patra had defied Leo and taken Paul to the doctor who diagnosed him with diabetes. After that, though, Leo somehow convinced Patra that Paul didn't need any medical intervention, so Paul is quickly slipping into diabetic ketoacidosis, i.e., he's going to die due to lack of insulin. Madeline ends up staying with them for the two days that Paul slips into a coma, right up until his parents take him away in a car and he dies a few hours later. We then find out that Madeline is recalling this time because she's about to testify at a hearing where the parents have been charged in Paul's death. Madeline wonders if she could have done more or helped in any way, but she's really just too socially immature herself to see that she should have asked another grownup for some kind of help. In the end, the parents get off with some kind of probation because they couldn't be persecuted for their religious beliefs. And, Madeline goes on to support herself, have a room mate and have a relationship with a young man. However, she's called home to the lake after her father dies and it becomes clear that her mother needs her there in her old age. The writing itself is very compelling and beautifully done. It's just such a sad, sad story. I spent much of the story thinking maybe the mother was poisoning her little boy, so I was surprised when it was the father who was basically forcing his religion on his much younger wife and son. ok, so now I'm going to look for something more light-hearted to read!

Finished: The Nest (Sweeney) An easy-reading page-turner about four adult siblings who all spend their inheritance before they actually have it, and the problems and personal growth they go through as a result. The Plumb siblings are Leo, 46, Jack, 44, Bea, 43 and Melody, 39. When youngest daughter, Melody, was sixteen, their father decided to create a nest egg for the kids' future. He didn't intend for it to be an inheritance of any huge substance. He wanted the kids to get their educations, earn their own way, and then each have a bit of money for later in life if they needed it. Therefore, he set the terms to be that the money would not be available to them until Melody had her 40th birthday! Unfortunately, their father unexpectedly died not long after creating the trust fund. The kids were distraught. Their father had been the most loving of their parents, as their mother was a cold, selfish, alcoholic who was never very loving. The trust fund was left in the hands of the mother to only use if an emergency came about, but otherwise to divide it by the four children at the designated time. The market just happens to be good to their father's investment, and by the time Melody is about to turn 40, it is worth over 2 million dollars. Each of the siblings has overspent in their lives and constantly counts on the impending "nest" to pull them out of their financial woes. Melody and her husband have twin 16 year old daughters and a huge mortgage on their New York house. Melody is counting on the money to be able to pay off some of her mortgage and send her girls to whatever private college they'd like to go to. Bea is a writer who had a successful run of stories many years ago, and acquired a publisher, Stephanie....but along the way she developed writer's block and is living paycheck to paycheck. Jack is an antique dealer with a shop which has slowed down in business. He's married to Walker. Together they own a summer home, but Walker basically supports Jack. Jack, who was afraid to invite his family to his marriage to his longtime boyfriend, has mortgaged the beloved summer house without telling Walker. He counts on using the money to right that wrong. Leo, the most successful of the siblings, had an extremely successful online gossip magazine, but sold out on his partner for millions because he was tired of it, and because he wanted to marry the socialite he'd become enamored of. None of the siblings has remained particularly close at all, each pretty much going about their own lives and worrying mostly about themselves. As the book opens, Leo and his wife are at a cousin's wedding. Leo, high on cocaine, gets bored and seduces a nineteen year old server at the wedding. He convinces her to go with him in his Porsche. He's the charming one, after all. She does go with him, and in the process of performing a sexual act on him, they are in a horrific car crash. Both survive, but the girl loses a foot in the accident. Finding out the girl and her family are illegally in the country, Leo's mother and her new husband pay them off to keep quiet. She pays them off with the nest egg money!! Leo's mother argues that it is an emergency. Of course, she's not even doing it out of concern for Leo....she's doing it to keep the story quiet so her new husband's reputation isn't tainted. The other siblings are furious! How could she use their nest egg money to bail Leo out?? Surely he will have to repay them. Jack demands, Melody whines, and Bea worries. Leo finally meets with them and tells them to give him a little time to work something out. He's lost every penny he has to his wife in the divorce settlement after the accident. Leo secretly knows that he has 2 million dollars squirreled away in a Grand Cayman bank account that his ex-wife's lawyers know nothing about. He COULD pay his siblings back, but decides, instead, to run off and leave the country, leaving them stranded. This is not before he gets Stephanie (Bea's old publisher, and Leo's old flame) pregnant. Stephanie never tells him she's pregnant, especially since he up and leaves without even a note. She ends up being a great single mother and actually getting to know Leo's siblings when all is said and done. With Leo running off and no nest egg in sight, we see how each of the siblings deals with their various financial troubles. Jack makes a decision to deal in an illegal transaction with a stolen antique. When Walker finds this out, he leaves Jack after 20 years together. Jack is devastated at first. Walker sells the summer cottage and actually helps Jack out of his troubles, but then divorces him. At the end of the story, Jack has actually learned to live on his own and has vowed to be there for his brother and Stephanie's little daughter. In an epilogue we see that it's Uncle Jack who walks her down the aisle many years later! Melody finally must admit to her husband and twin girls that she's not the perfect mother! She agrees to sell her beloved house, and when the twins let her know that they'd be just fine going to state schools, their family works things out and turns out okay. Bea finds her writer's block unblocked and begins a new story and actually finds a new love. So, in the end, they didn't really need the "nest" after all, and ended up taking care of things on their own like their father wanted. And, as a result of having to communicate so much about the "nest", they actually get involved in each other's lives and grow closer! Leo, he ends up living a lonely life, still exaggerating his own self-importance and wondering why Stephanie has never come looking for him, lol. All in all, a pretty good book and a fast read. :-)

Finished: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. ...her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out. Great, great book! Rather than a page-turner, this was a book to be savored about a young Nigerian couple, Ifemelu and Obinze, who are in love but grow apart when Ifemelu travels to live in the United States, and Obinze, unable to obtain a similar visa, is left behind. Their love for each other is always there, even though both go on to have other very meaningful relationships, Obinze even marrying and having a daughter. Most of the story belongs to Ifemelu as she lands in America to extensive culture shock and must learn new ways, new foods, new ideas. The biggest shock to Ifemelu....racism! In her country EVERYONE is black. There is no class division by race which she finds in America. American African Americans don't consider Africans or Jamaicans or any other black person who migrates to America one of their own, either. They don't think people from foreign countries can possibly understand what their forefathers went through. Ifemelu talks to Obinze about everything when she first goes to America and their love remains strong even with the distance. However, when Ifemelu has to do something almost as unsavory as having sex with a man for money to make ends meet, she develops a terrible sense of self-worth and self-loathing and falls into a depression. She refuses to accept any more letters, phone calls or emails from Obinze until finally, years pass and he has been cut out of her life without explanation to him. It's terribly sad. :-( Ifemelu begins a very successful blog about "Black America" that discusses all kinds of topics faced by black Americans. She acquires thousands of followers, along with enough sponsors to make herself both money to live on and money to send home to her parents. Still, too much time has passed and Obinze becomes part of her past as she has deep relationships with two other men, Curt and then Blaine. One day, it finally hits Ifemelu that she has not been happy in America and she decides to quit her blog and move back to Nigeria! Once there, it takes her time to adjust back to the non-American ways she'd become accustomed to. Meanwhile, Obinze had faced nightmares of his own. In addition to Ifemelu cutting him off and breaking his heart, he went to London on a temporary visa and then tried to stay their illegally working under someone else's name. Deported back to Nigeria when caught, somehow (it's not specifically stated in the book), Obinze does manage to put his university degree to use in Nigeria and begins buying rental properties. After a few years go by, he's a very rich man, married to a wife who he finds beautiful, but who he doesn't love the way he does Ifemelu. He's got a two-year old daughter he adores, though...the light of his life. When Ifemelu briefly emails him that she's coming back to Nigeria after the silence of those four or five years, his heart doesn't know what to do. Ifemelu doesn't contact Obinze right away when she comes back, but gives herself time to adjust. One day she runs into Obinze and the sparks are still there! They begin seeing each other, and though Obinze feels guilty about his wife, he can't help how he feels for Ifemelu. When Obinze asks his wife for a divorce, she refuses and tells him he will not only be breaking up their family, but he will ruin his little daughter Buchi's life. As a result, Obinze and Ifemelu go their separate ways for about seven months until one day Obinze shows up on Ifemelu's doorstep declaring he has left his wife...he could no longer live without Ifemelu. She invites him. The End. This is a very simplistic summary of a beautifully written book. Ifemelu's experiences in America are detailed and heartrending. Their experiences together are full of love, then separation, mutual support, then loss of each other....all written to make the reader feel and think. I like it when a book makes me think beyond just the typical story of boy meets girl in America or England or wherever....when an entire different culture and way of life is thrown in to enrich the experience!

This is just a little snippet of writing that I liked at the beginning of the book when Ifemelu was breaking up with Blaine to move back to Nigeria. They'd been totally happy together, so it catches him completely off guard. He wants to know why and these are her thoughts:

But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

Finished: Memory Man (Baldacci) Great way to start off the new year with a page-turning, psychological thriller. :-) Amos Decker is a man who remembers everything...everything. Due to a horrific football hit on his first game as a professional football player, Amos' brain is forever changed. From the time he is 22, he remembers every detail about everything he reads, experiences, sees, hears, etc. It's called hyperthymesia. And, he's also got synesthesia. Synesthesia is:

a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.

In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.

When we meet the 42 year old Amos, he's a man in despair. Sixteen months before, his beloved wife and nine year old daughter had been brutally murdered and left for him to find. Since his wife had been one of the few people to understand him after his brain change, Amos has hit rock bottom. He has quit the police force, where he was a great detective for many years. He's barely making ends meet, taking on odd private investigating jobs and living out of a cheap hotel. One day that all changes when his former partner, Mary Lancaster, waltzes in and tells him that a man has just confessed to the unsolved murders of his family! Before Amos can even make it in to question the man, another tragedy hits the town....a horrific shooting of several students at the town high school, where Amos had also attended and been a football star many years before. Amos finagles his way into interviewing the confessor and deduces that he's not the person who killed his family...but he most likely knows the person who did. As the rest of the police force struggles to find the high school killer, Amos' old boss asks him to come back and consult with the police department to help figure out the killings. In doing so, Amos and his partner come to the shocking realization that the same person who killed his family committed the high school shootings....what's more....the person has left coded messages for Amos telling him that he's the reason behind everything for a slight that Amos allegedly afflicted upon the killer sometime in the past. However, Amos rewinds his mind like a VCR, as he describes it, and replays everything that has happened to him in his life over from the time he recuperated after the life-altering football hit. He can't remember dissing anyone at all, much less bad enough to have them exact such horrible revenge. In the meantime, a young reporter, Alexandra Jamison, doesn't help Amos' plight at all when she writes a very compromising story about him in the paper implying that he actually knows the man who confessed to the murders and perhaps Amos hired the man to kill his family? Jamison makes up for the article by actually becoming an ally of Amos', helping him, his partner, and the FBI man solve the mystery. Of course, this is done mostly by Amos' uncanny mind! In the end, the mystery is solved and the killer brought to justice. I wasn't that thrilled with the reasoning of the killer, but the killer ended up being someone who had been brutally assaulted as a teenager by a trusted member of the police force, and then abandoned by his parents. Receiving therapy at the same brain center as Amos twenty years before, the "slight" against Amos was that Amos stood up in their group therapy session and said he wanted to do good with his life by becoming a police officer. For that, Amos' family is slaughtered!! See? A little bit weak. But, still a good book! And, in the end, the FBI man offers both Amos and Jamison jobs to come and work for him at the FBI. I smell a sequel in the making! :-)