Finished: Warlight (Ondaatje) A pretty good book about two British siblings left on their own with questionable "guardians" as their parents go off to a mysterious job assignment in the year following the end of World War II. Fourteen year old Nathaniel and sixteen year old Rachel are told by their parents that their father is accepting a new job in Singapore and they will be gone for a year before they have the children join them. They expect them to stay at their private schools and live with a mysterious family friend named Walter, who the kids secretly call The Moth. The father leaves first and the mother spends the next few weeks meticulously packing her trunk, involving the kids in all the decisions, and spending as much quality time as she can with them. They are, of course, devastated when she leaves, but they get used to their life with The Moth. The Moth has many friends, just as mysterious, who come in and out of the house and this extended group of friends essentially becomes a family for Nathaniel and Rachel. After a few months, Rachel stumbles upon her mother's neatly packed trunk, hidden in the basement! Did she not really leave? Was she even alive? The kids have all kinds of questions for The Moth, but he can only tell them that their mother is safe. Rachel comes to resent and even hate her mother as she grows into a young woman much in need of her mom. She becomes close to The Moth though, as a father figure. Nathaniel goes to work at one of the hotels that The Moth has an interest in and meets a girl, Agnes, that he begins a relationship with. He also becomes very close to Darter one of the strange friends of The Moth's, who is at the house night and day. Darter convinces The Moth to let Nathaniel run barges with him in the middle of the night transporting illegal racing dogs into London. Nathaniel and Agnes end up living quite the life, sneaking into empty houses for sale to spend alone time, and then traveling up and down the river with Darter late at night. After more than a year, and after the kids realize that their parents are probably not really coming back, Nathaniel notices a strange man following him. The man appears again, and then the third time, tries to kidnap both Nathaniel and Rachel. The Moth and Darter, along with another strange man that Nathaniel recognizes, defend and protect the kids...The Moth paying with his life. :-( When Nathaniel wakes up from the chloroform that the kidnapper used, there is his mother! She appears to be very acquainted with all the protective men, whose job it has been all along to keep the kids safe. We find out then that their mother has been working as an agent in the British intelligence since war time, and is still working for them, tying up loose ends, searching out enemy groups that may try to reassemble, etc. When she sees that her children are in danger from these groups, she cold turkey gives it all up and moves back to the tiny home village where she grew up with Nathaniel. Rachel wants nothing to do with her and never sees her again. Nathaniel finds out a bit more about his mother as they share time together, but they are never as carefree and close again as they were before she left. She enlists her next door neighbor, a farmer, to take Nathaniel under his wing....essentially, she's arranged another protector for him. She never knows when someone from her past may come to exact revenge. By the way, at this point in the story, the dad is just never heard from again and the mother is apparently fine with that because he was a loose canon and not a nice man. Anyway, during this time, we learn all about the sixteen year old boy, Marsh Felon, who first met the mother when she was eight, and how as they stayed in touch over the years, he became the person who recruited her fresh out of college, married and with a baby, to work for the British intelligence. We see how much they grow to mean to each other, and how intertwined they stay their whole lives. When eighteen year old Nathaniel goes off to college in America, he is notified that first semester that his mother has been killed. A relation of one of her former enemies has finally sought her out and killed her. Many people come to her funeral, but it isn't until many years later, after much research, himself working in British intelligence records, that Nathaniel realizes that Marsh Felon was the tall man who came to his mother's funeral and tried to console him. Nathaniel also seeks out some of the people from his past. He can't find Agnes, because he never knew her real name. He does find Darter though, but Darter isn't happy to see him. He is married with a child now and is anxious for Nathaniel to make his visit a quick one. As Nathaniel uses Darter's restroom, he sees a cross stitch on the wall that is an obscure quote that Agnes once said to him. He realizes as he leaves that when he was taken away by his mother, he was never even given a chance to say goodbye to Agnes or Darter, and that with all their empty house shenanigans, Agnes must have been pregnant with his child. Darter, then, even though much older, must have married Agnes to give her and the child a home. The books ends as Nathaniel makes this realization. Warlight is a pretty good book, well written, with good character development and lovely details and descriptions. It just wasn't quite what I expected it was going to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. :-)

Finished: Us Against You (Backman) This sequel to the much loved book Beartown was another brilliant look into the lives of the Beartown people, picking up right after the events of the first book, and continuing on like a page-turning freight train around and through each character's hopes, dreams, hardships, failures, realities, etc. Beartown left me needing a sequel, and now Us Against You leaves me hoping the author will write another one! This is the beginning of the Amazon description, and I think it's better than anything I could write, so here goes: "A small community tucked deep in the forest, Beatown is home to tough, hardworking people who don't expect life to be easy or fair. No matter how difficult times get, they've always been able to take pride in their local ice hockey team. So it's a cruel blow when they hear that Beartown ice hockey might soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for the rival team in the neighboring town of Hed, take in that fact. As the tension mounts between the two adversaries, a newcomer arrives who gives Beartown hockey a surprising new coach and a chance at a comeback." So, Peter Andersson is still there, and still the general manager of the hockey team in Beartown, but only because this newcomer to town, a manipulative politician named Richard Theo, has supplied an unknown investor who hopes to bring back not only the hockey team, but the factory in Beartown as well. Pete's daughter, Maya, is the teenager who was raped by the star hockey player, Kevin, in the first book. She is still reeling and dealing with the rape. At the end of Beartown, she had found Kevin alone, pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. She wanted him to feel helpless, and he did. The gun wasn't loaded, but he didn't know that, and the experience terrified him and humbled him. At the beginning of Us Against You, even though he originally deserted to Hed to play for that team like most of the other players, he's been unable to function, so his mother takes him and they move away. Our favorite and most loyal hockey players, Benji, Amat and  Bobo, have all stayed to play for Beartown. The new coach, Zeckell, is a no-nonsense person who plans to build a team around them, and around Vidar Rinnius, the teenager brother  of Teemu, the leader of the "pack" in Beartown...the band of "hooligan" brothers who most people in the town fear. Life intervenes, of course, as a lifestyle secret about our beloved Benji comes to light and the entire town implodes. Also, Vidar decides as much as he loves hockey, he wants to stand  in the stands with his brothers in the pack at the much anticipated Hed versus Beartown first game of the season. Beartown is down 4-0 after the first two quarters, when both Vidar and Benji decide they will jump in and play. This isn't arrogance on either of their parts. They are both troubled young men who are not sure if they even fit on the team, much less in this life, but they realize they are needed, so they decide to play. As the author says, though, hockey's a sport, not a fairy tale, and they still lose, 4-3. However, Benji and Vidar stay committed to the team and Beartown wins all their reamaining games, as does Hed. There are so many intricacies to the rivalry and escalating "pranks" that get out of hand, that right before their next meeting, which once again will decide the champ and have lasting implications for whichever team wins, a tragedy occurs involving the death of one of the players on Beartown's team. Lives are once again shattered and when the two teams meet, hockey seems so unimportant at the time that the author doesn't ever even tell us who wins and who loses. It's another amazing book that still leaves Benji as one of my favorite characters in all the books I've read. I so hope there is another sequel so I can see how all these people have moved on!

Finished: So Big (Ferber) Pulitzer Price winning novel from 1925 which I had put off reading, but am oh so glad I did! It was a really great story of Selina Peake, a vivacious young woman raised by her gambling father in Chicago in the late 1800's. They go through rich times and poor times, and all throughout, he teaches Selina to explore and enjoy all walks of life...to make every life experience an adventure. When Selina is nineteen, her father is killed, and she must now make it on her own. She decides she'll be a teacher, but must make her start as a farm teacher, miles from Chicago proper into the Dutch farming community. Selina lives with, and becomes close to, the Poole family at first. She's particularly close to their twelve year old son, Roelf, who must now fore go schooling to work on the farm...but who is artistically gifted and who devours all the books Selina brings to the house. The farm life is brutal, especially in the cold months, and especially for the woman of the house who never seems to quit working. Selina is determined that this will just be a phase in her adventurous life, but she doesn't count on falling for the young, handsome gentle giant, Dutch farmer, Pervus DeJong. They fall in love and are married two months after they meet. Unfortunately, Pervus' farm is one of the poorest in the county, and Pervus doesn't want to listen to any of Selina's improvement ideas. Soon, Pervus and Selina are parents to a son, Dirk DeJong. However, Dirk's nickname for most of his life is Sobig...due to the baby game that Selina constantly plays with him, whether working in the run down farmhouse, or out in the fields putting calluses on her once refined hands. Selina never misses a moment to hold her arms out wide and ask the baby "how big is baby?" and answer with "sooooooobig". By the time Dirk is eleven, the farm is barely scraping by and much as he loves his wife, Pervus will still not listen to what a woman has to say about improving farming techniques, laughing at her ordering and reading of various farming books to educate herself. When Pervus dies of a sudden illness, Selina is left to drive their vegetables to market day in Chicago by herself, with only her young son along. Never really accepted by the rest of the farming wives, Selina is now truly shunned, because no woman has ever taken the vegetables to market! It's a man's place. While in town, very few people buy from Selina and she's at her wit's end. She decides to take her produce to the rich side of town and go door to door. In doing so, she runs into an old schoolmate and best friend she'd lost touch with. Her best friend insists that Selina talk with her own father, a successful pig butcher turned richest packer in the country. In turn, the father insists on investing in Selina's farming ideas, as she shows a plan for turning her farm around within two years. She will accept only a loan, and in the two years time, is not only making a comfortable living for herself and her son, but she's able to pay back her loan...AND...her "nonstandard" vegetables like asparagus, become the much desired vegetables of many Chicago restaurants and upper crust families. So, as time goes on, Selina's only desire is to provide for Dirk so that he will never have to be a farmer if he doesn't want to (which he doesn't) and so that he can go to college to become what he wants to. She's disappointed in him, though, when he doesn't really show a passion for anything but picking a profession that will make him rich. We then follow Dirk as he becomes an architect, but one with a low paying salary. After several years of not being able to make the money he wants, he gives up architecture to become a bonds salesman. Selina is dismayed, but Dirk is finally rich. When Dirk meets an eclectic, vivacious artist, Dallas O'Mara, he realizes that her viewpoint on life is far more like his mother's...find the beauty in the world and the various people in the world...not money. As it turns out, Dallas knows the now famous sculpture Roelf Poole! Yes, that Roelf. He'd finally left his parents' farm when he turned seventeen, his mother, the hardworking Mrs. Poole, died in childbirth, and his father remarried a rich widow. Roelf has finally realized his dream of becoming an artist and his work is coveted to boot. When he comes to visit Dallas, who Dirk can see is crazy about Roelf, Roelf realizes that Dirk is Selina's baby boy grown up. Roelf insists they drive out to Selina's farm so she can meet Dallas and so Roelf and Selina can be reunited. Dirk is a bit disgruntled, but goes along. There is a glorious reunion, and Selina adores Dallas. The books ends with Dirk pondering his life and wondering if chasing money was truly the right decision for him after all. So Big is such a good book. Ferber delves deep into the characters, the land, the farming life, the century, etc. Now, to figure out where to put this book in my top 100! :-)

Finished: The Outsider (King) Another page-turner by Stephen King! I'm going to be really lazy and use the Amazon recap for this one, because it's so impossible to recap a Stephen King book!

An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.

So, as it says, Terry Maitland is this near saint in this small town...a loving father and husband and beloved little league coach for many years. When his fingerprints AND DNA are found all over the raped and murdered victim, Detective Anderson arrests him in front of the huge crowd at the Little League game that will decide if this year's team goes to the state championships. The town immediately turns against Terry and his family because there are at least two eyewitnesses who saw Coach Maitland with the little boy, Frank Peterson, the day he was murdered, and two who saw him all bloodied up from head to toe right afterwards. The thing is....Terry Maitland was at a conference with three other English teachers for the weekend, in a completely different town, too far away to make it back and forth. AND, he's even shown on video tape asking the author they went to see (Harlan Coben, by the way!!) a question. His fingerprints are also at the convention...so which one is it? Was Terry Maitland in his home town heinously raping and murdering a young boy, or did someone or something somehow mimic his face, his DNA and his fingerprints?? The book is good and suspenseful, with a couple of shocking and tragic deaths of main characters. And, King also brings back Holly Gibney, a main character from his Finders Keepers trilogy, to help solve the big mystery. It's lovely to have her back!! The ending of the book, and frankly the middle, is bittersweet, but Holly and Ralph, with the help of some great new characters, do end up getting their "man"! :-)