Finished: The It Girl (Ware) A page-turning who-done-it centered on a group of Oxford students who meet each other the first day of their first year and become best friends who do everything together. Rich and charismatic, April is the titular "it girl". She's got looks, personality, money, charm and a very mischievous, bordering on mean girl, persona. When small town, unsophisticated, not rich Hannah shows up to school, she finds that she's roommates with April. Despite their differences, they hit if of and become the core best friends of the rest of the gang: Ryan, Emily, Will and Hugh. On that first day, when Hannah meets Will, who is handsome, athletic and nice, she falls instantly in love or infatuation, but whatever it is, her feelings never abate. When she unexpectedly realizes that April and Will have become a couple, she's heartbroken, but keeps it to herself. Ryan is sarcastic and opinionated, but best friends with Will. Hugh is shy, nervous and nerdy, but also best friends with Will, having known him since they were young. No-nonsense Emily is super smart and honest. Each of them seems to bend to April's will, almost as if she has something on each one of them. However, before their first year is even over, April is dead...murdered in their dorm room, and Hannah is the person with the evidence to put the accused murderer away. One of the school porters, John Neville, has been very creepy around Hannah and made her extremely uncomfortable. When she sees John Neville exiting the only entrance leading to their dorm room right before she finds April dead, it's enough for the police to arrest him, accuse him of murder, and for a jury to send him to prison. Hannah is so devastated by April's death and the media frenzy that surrounds her as the best friend and main witness, that she leaves school and never goes back. The others manage to finish their degrees. Ten years after the murder, Hannah is now happily married and pregnant and works in a book store in Edinburgh...as far away from Oxford as she could get. Her adoring husband? Will! Will sought Hannah out after graduating and they fell in love and got married. They will never forget April, but their lives have moved on, until the day that John Neville dies in prison. The news sends both of them reeling and sends a reporter who believes in John Neville's professed innocence and wants Hannah's help proving it. This sets in motion a growing tension in their marriage, as Will wants Hannah to let it go. When it comes to light that Will, Ryan, Hugh and Emily all had motives to murder April, it puts Hannah in great danger as she digs deeper. Does she trust the right person? Did her own husband kill April? There are a few red herrings thrown in, but the truth finally comes out in the end, but I'm not giving the ending away. :-)

 Finished: Our Missing Hearts (Ng) A powerful, heartbreaking, but necessary, book! It is beautifully written and is about the very real danger of how a community can begin to ignore the oppression of and discrimination against members of their own community who happen to be "different" from them. The story is centered around Ethan Gardner and Margaret Miu, a Caucasian man and Chinese American woman who fall in love, move in together and have a child they nickname Bird. They happen to be living in an America that has recently passed the PACT act...Preserving American Culture and Traditions. The passing of this law is brought about by the growing instability of America's economy which has incited discord and violence. The leaders of America decide that China is to blame because they have a better economy, are raising prices, beating America, etc. etc. For this reason, Asian people become targets of violence and prejudice. Margaret is aware of what is going on because both of her parents have been murdered by strangers, just because of what they look like. However, when she meets Ethan, who is a linguistics professor at Harvard, and they begin to have a more fortunate income, unlike the majority of Americans, who are still struggling in long lines for food and other products, Margaret is able to put that knowledge aside and concentrate on their baby to be. During her pregnancy, Margaret writes poetry. She's a talented writer and finds a way to put her feelings about being pregnant and what other mothers must feel like into words. She writes a poem called All Our Missing Hearts, which becomes the cornerstone of the book she publishes. When Bird is born, both parents are thrilled. They are loving, caring parents who do their very best for him. In the meantime, the government has implemented a plan that gives authorities the ability to take a person's child from them, for the very slimmest of reasons, and "relocate" them to another family. Ethan and Margaret are aware of what is going on, but like everyone else, they must struggle between keeping their own family safe, or speaking up when an injustice is committed. When Bird is nine, the anti-PACT movement has become much larger and more vocal as people insist that the missing children be reunited with their parents. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Margaret, her poem, All Our Missing Hearts, is used by the dissidents as their slogan. They begin painting red hears on public property and put up flyers demanding that their missing hearts, aka, their children, be brought home. The government now has Margaret on a list, and she and Ethan feel it's only a matter of time before they come and remove Bird from their home. They make the difficult decision for Margaret to exit their lives and go to another city...and...to burn everything that had belonged to Margaret, especially her poems, so Ethan can claim that he completely supports the PACT and has cut his wife and Bird's mother out of their lives. It is utterly heartbreaking. :-(  Bird and his mother were so very close and one day she's just gone from his life. His father refuses to speak of her and tells Bird that they must forget about her. Of course, he still loves her, but Bird looks more like his mother than his father, and he's terrified that Bird will be persecuted in some way. Because a "known dissident and author of their slogan" was his wife, things take a downturn for Ethan and Bird. Ethan loses his job as a professor and can only work as a librarian shelving books day and night. Bird is relentlessly bullied at school, and has only one friend...a girl named Sadie, who happens to be a child who has been relocated because her parents were in extreme and vocal opposition of the PACT. She wants nothing more than to find her parents and be reunited, but she is powerless to do so. When Bird is twelve and Margaret has been gone for three years without a single communication, Bird receives a cryptic letter in the mail from his mother. Bird figures out the hidden meaning behind his mother's letter and decides to go searching for her in New York City. I'm not going to go into any more detail about whether they reunite, and what Margaret has actually been doing all that time, but the entire situation is emotional in so many ways. I encourage everyone to read this excellent book and absorb these characters and situations for yourselves. Not a book to pass up! 

 Finished: Long Shadows (Baldacci) Book #7 in the Memory Man series. The memory man is Amos Decker, a former NFL player (albeit briefly) turned detective, turned invaluable asset to the FBI. Amos suffered a serious head injury which ended his NFL career just a few games in. The injury left him with synesthesia and hyperthymesia. The hyperthymesia means that Amos now has a picture perfect memory, never forgetting a thing that he sees, no matter how small the detail. Unfortunately, this includes the horrific murder scene of his wife and young daughter ten years before. Now, having helped the FBI solve several cases, with his young journalist turned FBI agent partner, Alex, Amos finds himself on his own as Alex has moved to New York to finish her career there. When Amos is assigned a new partner, Freddie White, a feisty single mom who fights hard to work her way up the FBI ladder, he reluctantly goes with her to Florida to solve the murder of a popular judge. As usual, with lots of twists and turns, Amos figures out whodunnit, with some very capable help from Freddie. Suspects include her ex-husband, her security guard lover, a possessive man she dated, and even her neighbors. There's also a Slovakian element to the story! And, by the end of the book, after everything is wrapped up, Amos has gained a very high respect for  Freddie, and vice versa. They've even become friends as well as partners. I can see Freddie definitely being around for more crimes to solve. And, don't worry....Alex is around just a bit. Amos calls her a few times for info in this story and they are as close as ever. :-) I enjoy the series because I do like Amos Decker, and the stories are usually pretty good. 

 Finished: Mad Honey (Picoult and Boylan) A very good book about two teenagers, Lily and Asher, who fall in love when she moves to his small town. Both have been raised by single moms who escaped extremely abusive husbands. Both moms have tried to protect their children all their lives by keeping them away from their fathers. Asher's mom, Olivia, has moved back to the quaint New Hampshire town, back to her old family farm, where her father was a beekeeper. She now takes just as much care of the bees and sells the carefully curated honey and various honey products. Lily's mom, Ava, is a national park ranger who has taken a job in this remote town so she and her daughter can start over. Lily and Asher are just 18, but very much in love. They "get" each other...especially their like circumstances of having no father in their lives. They do go through a couple of fights, and sometimes Asher shows a temper that Olivia worries about. She worries that he may have inherited his father's abusive nature. When Lily and Asher have a big fight, and Lily won't speak to him to the point of missing several days of school, Asher is beside himself and constantly texts and calls her. When he gets no response, he finally goes over to her house, only to find her dead at the foot of the stairs. Or, at least, that's his story. Soon, Asher is arrested and put on trial for Lily's murder. That's when the story really shows it's twists and turns. We hear the story from Olivia's viewpoint, and from Lily's viewpoint. We meet both of the horrible fathers, as well as a couple of best friends, an old flame of Olivia's from her high school days, who happens to be the police chief in town now, and we meet a trans teen trying desperately to hang on to the secret they are afraid that no one would understand. I don't want to give away any spoilers. This book is good though! Jodi Picoult always tells a good story, and she does so just as well with her co-author. The characters are very well developed and you can't help but grow attached to them! :-)