Finished: Palace of Desire (Mahfouz) The second book in the Cairo Trilogy, the family saga written by Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story of tyrannical Egyptian patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad abd al-Jawad, his dutiful wife, and their five children continues five years after the first book and the tragic death of middle son and aspiring law student, Fahmy. Though al-Sayyid Ahmad swore off his drinking, womanizing, and carousing with friends for an entire year after Fahmy's death, he is now back to his old ways, once again going out every night, only to come home in the middle of the night and expect his wife, Amina, to help him get undressed, wash his feet, etc. And, as he did with his old habits, al-Sayyid Ahmad falls in love with a prostitute much younger than himself, going so far as to buy her a houseboat to live on. When she insists that he marry her and have two wives, al-Sayyid Ahmad draws the line and says no. The prostitute then dumps him and goes after his already married oldest son, Yasin. Yasin is much like his father. He falls in love more with the pursuit of women, and then tires of them after a few weeks. Unfortunately, he's on his second marriage and tired of his second wife right after the honeymoon, so when pursued by the prostitute, Zanuba, who wants to be a "real lady", he actually cheats on his second wife with her, divorces his second wife and marries Zanuba. Meanwhile, the years since Fahmy's death have been hard on his mother, Amina. There isn't much story for her, but she's a shell of who she used to be. Youngest son, Kamal, who was only twelve in the first book, is now seventeen and graduating from school, having successfully completed the exams to allow him to continue on with university study. His father wants him to be a lawyer at the very least, but Kamal is the dreamy-eyed romantic and wants to study literature and philosophy, which means going to the Teacher's College instead of the prestigious Law School. Much of the story is spent on Kamal's idealism and his unrequited love for his best friend's sister. For awhile, you think maybe he has a chance, but it ends up she was just using him to make the true person she wanted to propose to her jealous. With Kamal we get the most inner turmoil and reflection with his almost every thought being written by the author before Kamal speaks, usually saying the opposite of his deep, tortured thoughts. The two sisters, Aisha and Khadija, are both still married to the older men (brothers) they were married off to in the first book. Aisha is still the beautiful non-wave making sister, and she now has three young children, a daughter and two sons. Khadija is still the outspoken force she always was and is at constant odds with her mother-in-law who wants to tell her what to do. Khadija now has two young boys. The book is very well written and stays on the verge of delving into the political climate of the time in Egypt. Kamal and his friends have many lengthy political discussions, but not so lengthy that you lose interest. It's hard not to care about the more sympathetic characters. I'm not really so attached to the father or the older brother, since I can't stand their behavior...even if it was typical,"expected" and condoned behavior at that time in that country. As the book was winding down, I was in the process of deciding if I wanted to read book three when a cruel cliffhanger was tossed in at the end. :-( We were left with Aisha's husband and two young sons clinging to life from a typhoid outbreak, while the rest of the grandchildren stayed at al-Sayyid and Amina's house. I have a feeling the next book will take another jump and we will have lost those beings. :-(

Finished: Right Behind You (Gardner) The latest book by one of two authors whose every book I read! In this one, Gardner brings back the married duo of detective Rainie Connor and FBI profiler, Pierce Quincy. The very first book I ever read of Lisa Gardner's years ago involved a crime where Rainie and Quincy met and worked together. Several books later, they ended up married. I love the characters, love the books, and love that they are set on the Oregon coast! In this one, Rainie and Quincy are about to adopt their 13 year old foster daughter, Sharlah, who they took in three years before. Sharlah was only five when her abusive father stabbed her alcoholic mother with a butcher knife and watched as her father then tried to chase down her beloved, protective nine year old brother, Telly. Handing Telly a baseball bat, she then watched as her brother beat their father to death out of self-defense. Blacking out in the process, Telly also accidentally hit Sharlah and broke her arm. When authorities finally got involved, both kids were kept apart "for their own good" and put in separate foster homes. Having finally ended up with Rainie and Quincy, Sharlah hasn't seen Telly in eight years, when his face appears on a surveillance camera showing that he is the number one suspect in the deaths of a convenience store worker, another customer, and as the police soon discover, his two foster parents, great people who had taken him under their wing and were teaching the seventeen year old all about life skills, about caring about other people, about being part of a family. Could Telly really have murdered the only adults to ever have taken an interest in him? And, when Sharlah goes looking for Telly, will he still love his little sister or is she in danger? Another great, page-turning book, again set on the Oregon coast! :-)

Finished: Lonesome Dove (McMurtry) A great, sprawling, epic of a book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, with characters that you instantly love or hate, who you root for and against...a book that I savored and hated to see end. Lonesome Dove is the story about two famous ex-Texas Rangers, best friends, Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae, who decide to leave the ranch they've settled on in Texas after retiring from the Rangers, to drive hundreds of head of cattle all the way to the unexplored Montana, just on the word of another ex-partner of theirs, Jake Spoon. Jake, who is mostly a self-centered, gambling, lady's man, convinces Call that he should be the first person to drive cattle and horses up through the dangerous Comanche country, and other Indian territories to Montana and make a mint settling the first horse and cattle ranch. Once Call gets the idea in his head, there's no stopping him. Even his best friend and partner of 40 years, Gus, can't get him to see reason. Gus would rather stay in Lonesome Dove and drink whiskey on the porch and visit the one prostitute in town, the beautiful, sweet and young Lorena. However, Gus isn't about to let Call go off and have this adventure on his own, so he agrees to go and take their motley crew of cowhands from the Hat Creek Cattle Company, Call and Gus' livery company. The crew consists of Pea-Eye, who has traveled with the Captain, as Call is known, for years and is loyal and a great cowhand, but very dumb; Deets, Call's right-hand man and superior tracker, a black man who can smell weather and trouble coming a few days out; Bolivar, the Mexican cook; Dish Boggett, the most talented cowboy of the hands, a young man who is hopelessly in love with Lorena; and Newt Dobbs, a teenage boy who has been raised by Call and Gus since his mother, another prostitute named Maggie, and apparently the only woman Call has ever been with, died. Everybody but Newt knows that Newt is Call's son by Maggie, but Call is stubborn and refuses to admit that he didn't do the right thing and stay with Maggie, who loved him. He'd rather never acknowledge Newt than admit being mistaken or weak. Then, there's also the good-looking Jake Spoon. The minute he rides into town and sees Lorena, he falls for her and she for him. The men are used to Lorena never talking much and just doing her business but suddenly she's animated and happy. Jake throws a wrench into Call's plans by insisting that he bring Lorena along on the arduous cattle drive. Call hates this idea, but he also hates to lose Jake as a cowhand. Too much happens to be able to recap the entire book. The gang takes on a few more cowhands, and a few tragedies happen along the way....including the death of one of the young Irish immigrant cowhands as he crosses the very first river they come to and he accidentally rides into a nest of water moccasins and is bitten to death. :-( The biggest tragedy early on is when Jake selfishly rides into town to gamble, leaving Lorena alone in their tent allowing the evil Blue Duck, a half Indian, half Mexican bandit, to kidnap Lorena. He mercilessly drags her across the terrain and sells her first to some other Indians, who constantly abuse her, and then to a couple of trappers who abuse her the same way. By the time Gus comes to the rescue (because Jake is too selfish and cowardly to go after her), Lorena is just a former shell of herself, is half dead, can no longer speak and clings to Gus for dear life for the rest of the cattle drive. He nurses her back to health, but she becomes very dependent on him. Meanwhile, Dish is doing an excellent job driving the cattle, but he is jealous of Gus and Lorena's closeness and he's still head over heels in love with Lorena. And, Newt is learning all about the hardships of living on the land and being at the back of the cattle drive. Other characters come into the story and cross paths with either Gus or Call. The "girl that got away" from Gus, Clara, who turned down his marriage proposal only to marry a "boring" horse-trader, now lives on a ranch in Nebraska. Her husband lies comatose in their house after being kicked in the head by a horse. Clara is raising her two young girls after losing all three of her sons as young boys. Over in Arkansas, we meet sheriff July Johnson. He's been married a short time to Elmira, who is in love with another man and has a ten-year old son, Joe, from yet another man. Elmira is tired of being married to July, even though it's only been a few months. When July's brother is accidentally shot by a gambler, his sister-in-law insists that July chase the culprit to Texas. It ends up, the culprit is none other than Jake Spoon! So, they are all destined to meet up. Elmira insists that July take little Joe with him. When he does, she leaves town in search of the man she loves, Dee Boot. Out on the road July meets up with Gus as he is out to rescue Lorena. He goes with Gus to help out, and doesn't even pull his gun before Gus has gunned down all the men but Blue Duck, who escapes. When July gets back to camp, Blue Duck has killed little Joe and the deputy sheriff who'd been traveling with them. :-( July feels terribly guilty. Elmira takes up with a couple of buffalo hunters who are traveling the direction she wants to go to try and find Dee boot. What she had never told July was that she is pregnant with his child. She ends up at Clara's ranch in Nebraska about to give birth!! She nearly dies giving birth, and then up and leaves the baby, a boy, with Clara and continues her search for Dee. Eventually, after learning through a letter that his wife has left him while he's away, July quits chasing Jake Spoon and starts going after Elmira. July makes his way to Clara's and Clara puts two and two together and realizes that July is the father of the baby she now loves. When July realizes that Elmira truly wants nothing to do with him or their baby, he stays on at the ranch and helps Clara out with duties and her girls. Gosh, so much happens in this book. Sadly, the gang ends up losing Deets, the first major character to die. Call insists that they keep going north. He's determined to make it to Montana, but not before Gus insists on stopping in Nebraska to see Clara, his long lost love. Despite possible jealousy, Clara takes to Lorena like a daughter, and Lorena takes to the "normal" life. Gus and Clara share some memories, and Gus reunites with July Johnson, who is still working there. Clara tells Gus that the trail is no place for Lorena and invites her to stay on with them. Lorena, much to both Gus' and her own surprise, says yes. The Hat Creek gang continues on and has made it into Montana when Gus and Pea Eye ride ahead scouting one day. A small band of Indians catch them by surprise and shoot Gus with a couple of arrows to the leg. Gus sends Pea Eye back to fetch Call, and when the Indians finally leave, he sets out for the closest town. By the time he gets there, his leg is black and must come off. By the time Call gets to the town, the doctor tells him that Gus will die if the second leg doesn't come off as well but Gus refuses. He makes Call promise to deliver letters to Clara and Lorena and to take his body back to Texas to be buried. Call agrees to the promises, and then loses his best friend, the irascible Gus. Call puts Gus on ice until winter is done, and heads back to the herd. They keep driving even further north until Call is finally satisfied with their location. He then enlists the cowhands to build a log cabin, corrals, etc. When spring comes, he wants badly to tell Newt that he's proud of him and how he has turned into a fine horseman....and that he's his son. Instead, Call, the man of few words and fewer emotions, gives Newt his famous mare, Hellbitch, his gun, and his father's pocket watch. He does everything but say the words that Newt is his son. Of course, by now both Gus and Clara had told Newt that Call was his father, so Call's refusal to be able to say it just confuses Newt. Call leaves to take Gus' body back to Texas and has his own misadventures along the way. He nearly dies, but finally makes it to the spot where Gus wanted to be buried, and then back to the run down ranch house of the Hat Creek gang in Lonesome Dove. I see that there is a sequel to Lonesome Dove and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to read it! Larry McMurtry is truly in a class of his own in developing characters and making the reader really feel for them! He is responsible, after all, for my favorite movie of all time, Terms of Endearment! I see more McMurtry in my future. :-)

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! :-)

Finished: White Teeth (Smith) I'd heard a lot about this book, but I have to say I was underwhelmed. It was a thought-provoking book tackling family, race, politics, religion and more. I just couldn't ever click with any of the characters, and frankly didn't find many of them likable. Maybe that's the way it is with many books, but at this busy time while I kept picking up this book and putting it down while we were in the last month of wedding planning, I just couldn't seem to connect. I did find myself more interested at the suspense at the very end, but it was too little too late. I'm not sure I have the desire to recap the whole thing in my own words, so I'm going to cheat and just include a blurb from Amazon about the book:

"...the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons."

Archie's daughter, Irie, and Samad's sons, Magid and Millat, are the focus of most of the book as we watch them age into their late teens and grow in completely different directions...especially the boys, when Samad decides that at least one of his sons must grow up back in their home country instead of England. When they are only ten he separates them by sending his favorite, and the smartest and most selfless of his sons, Magid, back to be schooled in India. Meanwhile, the shallower Millat continues to be influenced by television and other "evil" western influences and becomes part of a bullying gang, before turning to become a member of an extremist Muslim group. Irie seems to be the only character who grows in any way by the end of the book. The indecisive Archie becomes an unwitting hero at the end of the book, and the fates of each character are wrapped up in a last single paragraph a bit too quickly after a very wordy, drawn out previous story. Eh, wish I'd liked it more!

Finished: The Reivers (Faulkner) Faulkner's second Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and the last novel he wrote. This was the least difficult Faulkner book I've read, and probably the most entertaining, though, my favorite Faulkner will always be the tragic The Sound and the Fury. The Reivers is set in the early 1900's and is about eleven year old Lucius Priest, a generally good and virtuous boy, who agrees to lie to his parents and grandfather one weekend when the grownups must attend a funeral out of town. Lucius agrees to go from his Mississippi town to Memphis with Boon Hogganbeck, a young man who is one of his grandfather's employees. To make things worse, Boon who is normally in charge of caring for the grandfather's car, convinces Lucius that they will take "Boss's" car, the only one in their county, and have it back home before either it or them are missed. Lucius knows it's wrong, but he struggles with letting "non-virtue" win, and he goes along! Boon's mission is to get to a prostitute in Memphis named Miss Corrie aka Everbe Corinthia, who he is in love with. Before they have gone too far, but far enough to not turn back, they realize that Ned McAslin, an incorrigible black man who also works for Boss, has hidden under a tarp in the back seat intent on going with them to Memphis. They have no choice but to let him go along. Thus ensues quite an adventure for the threesome, especially when Ned trades the Boss's car for a "racehorse" who is known not to be able to win races! Ned has a special feeling about the horse, though, and thinks he knows how to make him run and finally beat the other horse he's run against and lost against twice. He figures he'll bet the man with the car  and wind up taking both the car and the horse back home. All kinds of convolution occurs, all masterminded by Ned, as Lucius is enlisted to be the rider of the horse, Lightening, for the best of three race! Meanwhile, Miss Corrie is so impressed with Lucius' manners and general goodness that she pledges to give up prostituting and get a legitimate job, much to the chagrin of Boon! In the end, Ned does, in fact, know how to make the horse run...but not until after they all get into some legal trouble, some town trouble, some "real owner" of the horse trouble, and of course, some trouble from Boss, whose come looking for Lucius and Boon. Lucius does struggle with his conscience throughout, and almost looks forward to being punished by his father when he's finally home. However, grandfather intercedes and tells the father to let him handle it. Rather than whipping Lucius to let him release the guilt of lying, grandfather tells Lucius that sometimes you just have to learn to live with your bad decisions, and at the same time learn from those life experiences. Lucius has a good cry on his grandfather's lap. Months later, Lucius is called over to Miss Corrie's. It turns out, she and Boon got married after she gave up the business and now they have a new baby son. Corrie tells Lucius that they have named him Lucius Priest Hogganbeck. That's the last line of the book, and it's very satisfying given how close all the main characters got during their adventure. I'm sure there's no way I've done the recap justice, but Faulkner's writing is just spot on southern writing, which he was known for, of course. I could so easily see my southern, Louisiana born dad as a young boy getting caught up in such an adventure. :-) I'm definitely so glad I finally read this book, which I had been putting off!!

Finished: Tell The Wolves I'm Home (Brunt) "What does that even mean? 'Tell The Wolves I'm Home'?" Greta asked. No one said anything, because none of us had any idea. It was just one more mystery Finn had left with us. One more thing I couldn't call and ask. I can't explain how profoundly true that last line is. That's how I've felt every day for the past 20 years and 3 months, since my brother died far too early from a far too insidious disease on August 5, 1996. There's no picking up the phone to ask a quick question, or talk about a movie, or a book, or travel plans, or to get an answer to something I want to know from him. One more thing I couldn't call and ask. So, Tell The Wolves I'm Home is the story of a quirky teenage girl who is extremely close to her even quirkier uncle, her mother's brother, who dies of AIDS. I can't give too much more of a recap than that. I knew this book would cut close to my heart, but I really felt I should read it anyway. Tell The Wolves I'm Home is what Uncle Finn calls the last painting he ever paints, of his two nieces sitting together. Maybe I'll add more later. It's a good book, by the way.