Finished: Apples Never Fall (Moriarty) Another good book from Moriarty that kept me entertained and reading. :-) The story of Stan and Joy Delaney, tennis obsessed since meeting in college, and their four grown children, Logan, Amy, Troy and Brooke. The Delaney's have recently closed their famous tennis academy, where all their children played, up until they didn't. None of them ever made "the big time" for various reasons, though they were all very talented. Stan Delaney did have one prodigy, Harry Haddad, who he thought he would coach to Wimbeldon. He let his adoration and faith in Harry outshine his own children. However, one day, after coaching Harry for years, Harry's father pulled him away from Stan and to another coach to take him further. This, and the fact that none of his own children ever went further, is the great disappointment of Stan's life. Meanwhile, Joy, who had been a potential champion herself, gave up her own game to raise her children and help Stan run the tennis camp. The story opens with the almost 70 year old Joy having gone missing after a cryptic text sent to her grown children. When her cell phone is found under a dresser at home, the police are called and Stan becomea a suspect in her disappearance...along with a mysterious young woman who came knocking on their door for shelter one night the October before. We get to know each of the Delaney children very well, along with their significant others, most of whom have ended up leaving their respective Delaney SO's. The siblings bicker like only competitive siblings can, but also have each other's backs when push comes to shove. They all also have the common dislike and distrust of Savannah, the young woman who has ingratiated herself into their parents' lives. Add in the fact that Harry Haddad is about to release a memoir which a few of the main characters fear the truth of, and the story grows more and more intense; especially as it seems that Joy has definitely met with foul play, and Savannah is more closely linked to the Delaney's than any one of them recognizes. It's a good story with an ending not nearly as nefarious as all the characters' imaginations, and also a good lesson in family and love and what is really more important than whether your kid is good at a sport! 

 Finished: About Grace (Doerr) The first novel of Doerr, the author who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning All The Light We Cannot See (which I loved). I was curious to see what his other writing was like, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. He still has amazing prose, but there was far too much of it. At times it seemed as if I was constantly reading the rambling thoughts of main character, David Winkler. David Winkler is a man who begins as a child seeing the future in his dreams. And the dreams are usually dark and foreboding, involving someone's imminent death. During his first dream as a child he dreams of a man on the street who gets hit by a bus and killed. He sees specific details, like the man's hat flying off, the man's clothing, what he is carrying, and hears the sound of the bus. One day when he's out with his mother, he sees the man from his dream, and sure enough the man steps out into the street in front of the bus, all details the same, even his hat landing where it did in the dream. David feels extremely guilty for not being able to do anything about it. His mother keeps him grounded and is the only person who truly understands him. He loses his mom as a teenager and as he grows older living alone with his dad, he develops an obsession with water, and in particular snow flakes. So much so that he becomes a weather analyst at the television station. The next dream with a huge impact on his life has him meeting a woman in the grocery store as she looks at a map rack. When he is at the grocery store one day and sees that woman, he approaches her and tells her they were meant to meet. Her name is Sandy, and she's married, but she had apparently also had a weird feeling that she should go to the grocery store that day. They begin an affair and fall in love. Sandy tells David all about her husband Herman and particularly how they can't have children because Herman is sterile. Naturally, Sandy gets pregnant and David begs her to run away with him and get married. So, she writes Herman a note, tells him she's divorcing him and she and David drive from Alaska to Cleveland to make a new life. Having married, they await the birth of their baby. They have a baby girl they name Grace, and are both enamored with her. David never knew what it would be like to be a father...how much he would love this little human. Then, when Grace is just a few months old, David has a horrific dream that the river near their house overflows in a storm and that the water is flooding their street and house. He goes downstairs where the water is already lapping at the stairs and finds baby Grace on top of a shelf. He takes her and begins wading through the water yelling for help. The river rushes them along and he hangs on to poles for dear life, always holding Grace above him. Much as he tries to prevent it, they do go under a few times. By the time a boat comes by to help him, the man is telling David to let go of the baby, that she's gone. Grace has drowned. This is the horrific dream he wakes up from! It's only a few days until the huge storm comes. David, who really doesn't communicate very well, decides to just get in the car and drive as far away as he can. If he gets away from Grace, that dream won't happen and she won't drown in his arms. He keeps having the dream until he gets as far away as the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. There, he has spent all his money and he's wandering almost incoherently, but he's not having the dream anymore. He meets a very kind family who takes him in, Felix, his wife Soma, and their very young daughter, Naaliyah. They nurse him back to some kind of health and he still can't tell them exactly who he left and why. He sends a letter every day to Sandy begging her to write him and let him know if Grace is alive, but it's been so many weeks that when Sandy finally writes back, she sends him back all his letters and says to stay away and never come home. She has no idea why he left and she doesn't want to know. He is dead to her. She doesn't tell him whether Grace is alive or not. David is devastated and assumes from this that Grace is dead. He mourns and makes it day by day and eventually spends 25 years on the island with the family. He grows extremely close to Naaliyah as he teaches her all about rain and clouds, and she herself is fascinated with any and all creatures in nature. In their singular interests, they are two peas in a pod. When Naaliyah is in her early twenties, David has a dream one night that she's out in one of her trap collection boats and when she drops the boat anchor, her leg is caught in the chain and she's pulled down and drowns. He begs her not to go out in the boat any more, and she just tells him no way. He goes so far as to sabotage the boat, but she still goes. He gets her mother, Soma, to come and help him watch her and finally tells her about the dreams he's had...the bus man, Grace, and now Naaliyah. Everyone pretty much thinks he's a loon, but he doesn't give up. One day when Naaliyah is going out, he rents his own boat and follows her. He lands on a beach and watches her from afar. Sure enough, that is the day that he sees the chain catch her leg. With all his might he swims to her until his heart is about to burst. As he gets there, it appears she is drowned, but when he finally gets her in her boat, he does chest compressions and she comes back to life. After that, they believe him about his dreams. The story goes on and on as Naaliyah goes on to college in the States and ends up studying insects and the affect that cold has on them in Alaska. David finally makes his way back to Alaska to see if his daughter Grace is alive or not. As I said before, the story goes on and on with lots of David's thoughts just rambling through, so at times it was hard to just get back to the plot! After typing all that, I'd say, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to read. However, David does find out that Sandy has died two years before from cancer. He also finds out that Grace is, in fact, alive and is a single mother with a five year old son of her own. More drama ensues before they become a bit of a family unit with David caring for Christopher and taking him to visit Naaliyah and the various insects while Grace works. whew! I haven't typed that much about a book, especially one that I didn't really like so much, in awhile. :-)