Finished: Five Survive (Jackson) A good thriller about six students headed south for spring break in an RV. Four are high school seniors and friends. Two are college students, the big brother of one of the girls and his girlfriend, going along as chaperons. They get lost on a small road with no cell service, looking for the place they are supposed to meet their other friends. It's not long before they are being terrorized by a sniper with a high-powered rifle. The sniper shoots out all the tires and the gas tank of the RV, stranding the kids with no way to leave. He leaves them a walkie talkie and tells them if any of them try to leave, he will kill them on the spot. Then he taunts them, telling them, one of you has a secret and I want to know what it is. When I do, the rest of you are free to go unharmed. He says he'll give them some time to talk it out and figure out who has the secret. A night of accusations, suspicions, guilt and confessions ensues as each of them wonders if their own secret is what the sniper is talking about. When they finally figure out that one of them must be working with the sniper for him to know the things he does, things escalate quickly, and then tragedy strikes. I'm not going to give anything away. The book was slightly slow at first, but then really picks up the pace and was hard to put down trying to put all the pieces together. A good read! :-)

 Finished: Babel (Kuang). The entire title is Babel: On the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. To understand what that means, you really have to read the whole 560 page book! :-) The book is good! I started it during the holidays and it officially becomes my first read book of 2023. It's good, and complicated, and tragic, but also very timely, to me at least. In 1828 a ten year old boy is dying of cholera in Canton. Most of his entire family, and his English born tutor who has been with him for years, are already dead and his mother lays dying beside him. After his mother dies, an English man appears and holds a bar of silver over him that instantly makes him feel funny inside, but ends up healing him. The man is Professor Lovell and he is the man who sent the English tutor to the family so the boy would grow up speaking fluent English, as well as his native Cantonese. (He is also the man who hung around in China for two weeks waiting for the mother to die before he went in and saved the boy.) Professor Lovell insists that the boy come up with an English name and say goodbye to his Chinese name. Having been provided with all kinds of books during his childhood, the boy decides on the name Robin Swift. Professor Lovell takes Robin back to London where he spends the next several years having him trained in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese. The goal? For Robin to be accepted into Oxford University's Royal Institute of Translation...called by all who know it, Babel. Babel is the most important translation center in the world, and England wants to keep it that way. Babel is also the center of the mysterious magic of silver! With the silver bars, translators enchant the silver bars with translations of words from different languages that have enough of a connection to evoke the results they want. The silver can enhance most things...make carts go faster, make music pitch perfect, make buildings sturdier, heal a sick person,etc. They can also be used as weapons of war. In England, they are used by the ultra rich for frivolous things like automatically opening and closing curtains, or making a room appear brighter. While the poor die of diseases that could possibly be cured, or starve from  hunger, the rich enjoy these unnecessary pleasures. What Professor Lovell and his cohorts do is shameless. They "sponsor" children from other countries whose languages they need to master in order to turn around and have dominance over those very countries. The children are so struck by either the loss of their families or by their "luck" at being singled out by a sponsor, that they go along semi-willingly, not knowing that the end result will actually be damaging to their native countries when they are eventually asked to attend important meetings with those countries and translate for the English men who are there to take every advantage they can. It's really just despicable. As Robin grows up in Professor Lovell's household, he is rarely offered true encouragement or caring from the professor, and often physically abused if he strays from his studies. By the time he is seventeen and ready for the Institute of Translation, he is accepted at Oxford and all his expenses and clothing are paid for. However, Oxford is still Oxford and is attended mostly by the elite white children of the rich in England. Being half Chinese and half English (having never met his father, this is his assumption), Robin can blend in somewhat, but most of the students don't accept him. Thankfully in his first week there, before classes even start, Robin meets his roommate, Ramy, a boy from India who has been sponsored by an English man that his family works for. They instantly bond and become best friends. Together they run into Letty and Victoire....two girls! Girls at Oxford is unheard of at the time, so they must dress like and pretend to be boys. Victoire is from France, but Jamaican born. She is the least accepted of the four students because of her black skin. Letty is from a rich white family in England whose son, who all their hopes and dreams were pinned on to attend Oxford, were dashed when he was killed by his own careless actions. Wanting to prove to her father that a girl can be just as smart, she learns all kinds of languages and passes the entry exam to both Oxford and Babel. Though she's not of a foreign nationality, she is a female, so the four of them are completely alone, but with each other, at Oxford. Just the four of them have been brought in this year for the Institute of Translation, so as long as they try and avoid the regular Oxford students, they should be ok. They form an incredible bond, which is why it makes what happens as the years progress and the book hits it's climax, heartbreaking. In addition to meeting Ramy the first week he is at school, Robin also meets a boy that looks strikingly like himself named Griffin. Griffin is a former student of the Institute of Translation who was also sponsored by Professor Lovell, but is now working for a secret society called the Hermes Society. The Hermes Society is all about stealing as much silver as they can from the institute and using it for good and for the poor, and keeping it out of the hands of the rich. Most of them are former students of Babel who realized exactly what was going on and how they were being used. By the time they are fourth year students and actually learning to work with the silver, we realize exactly how involved or not involved in Hermes each of the four friends are, and the tragic results of the revolution they are about to participate in. A long book, but it kept me reading each time I picked it up!