Finished: Truly Madly Guilty (Moriarty) Another good page-turner, set in Australia, about the lives of three ordinary couples who get turned upside down by a near tragic event at a neighborhood barbecue, and how they are each affected and why they each feel their own level of guilt after the event. And, how three other people on the periphery arre affected in a major way without any of the rather self-absorbent couples even realizing it. Clementine and Erika have been best friends since elementary school, when Clementine's social worker mother forced Clementine to befriend the friendless Erika, who was growing up in a home with a mother who was a hoarder of massive proportions. Clementine resented Erika more than befriended her, but still as young, married adults, they have an unbreakable bond. Clementine is pretty, talented, married to a lovely man, Sam, and has two adorable little girls, 4 year old Holly and 2 year old Ruby. Clementine is a talented cellist who has an audition for the Sydney Opera House coming up, so she's rather preoccupied with herself and her own feelings. Sam is a great dad who has a new job, but also does more "stay at home dad" type parenting with the girls. Erika is an obsessive, compulsive neat freak with a very orderly life after her horrible, hoarding childhood. She's married to semi-hypochondriac, Oliver, who grew up as an only child with alcoholic parents. They love each other terribly, and have tried In-vitro Fertilization for the past two years to have their own child. Erika is the godmother to Holly and Ruby, and both she and Oliver love the two girls dearly. They often judge Clementine and Sam, though, thinking they are too lax in their parenting. Vid is a loud, friendly, huge man in his second marriage to his beautiful, younger, ex-stripper wife, Tiffany. They have a ten year old daughter, Dakota. Vid and Tiffany have lots of money and love to entertain in their ostentatious house, complete with twinkling lights and replica Trevi fountain in the backyard. Harry is the cranky octogenarian that lives next door to Vid and Tiffany and is constantly complaining about their music being too loud, their dog tearing up his yard, and anything else he can think to complain about. He's usually fairly rude, even when Vid always invites him over for the backyard get together's. He never comes, but just stays alone in his house next door. The only person he ever bothers to talk to and be friendly with is Oliver, because Oliver is just a super nice guy. So, one day Vid and Brittany have a barbecue and invite Erika, Oliver, Clementine, Sam and the girls. Vid, though he loves his wife dearly, is mesmerized by classical music and loves hearing about Clementine's playing. Tiffany is rather flirty with the other men, but nothing that bothers anyone. Of course, Erika feels inferior and proceeds to get tipsy, while Oliver constantly plays with the girls and points things out to them. At one point, Erika goes into the house to retrieve some dessert plates, while Oliver goes to the restroom in the backyard cabana. Dakota, who has also been watching the little girls, tells her mother she's going to her room to read. Tiffany tells Clementine that Dakota is no longer watching the girls, and Clementine says, that's fine...she'd done more than enough already. So, Clementine and Sam start watching their own daughters. They're good parents, but not the hovering always three feet away type. While Erika and Oliver are in the house and restroom, Clementine, Sam, Vid and Tiffany get caught up in a conversation and no one sees little Ruby toddle off with Holly's precious purse of collected rocks slung over her shoulder towards the huge fountain. Not until Erika comes out of the house and sees Ruby lying face down in the fountain and screams bloody murder does anyone jump into action. Oliver comes tearing around the cabana and he and Erika get to Ruby first, pulling her out and performing the CPR they have so carefully learned as they feel prospective parents should. It looks for awhile like little Ruby might not make it, but she finally gasps and throws up all the water and is helicoptered to the hospital. The near tragedy changes everything for everyone as different levels of guilt affect each one. Sam becomes despondent that "super dad" that he is let himself get enthralled in a story by ex-stripper Tiffany. Clementine feels the same way. They both blame themselves and each other and their marriage starts crumbling. Vid takes a sledge hammer to the fountain the next day and tears it apart. Erika can't remember any of the details leading up to the grabbing of  Ruby from the fountain, but something is niggling at her conscience. She does remember one thing very clearly though. Right before the party, she and Oliver had privately asked Clementine if she'd be an egg donor for them...the next step in having their own child after IVF had failed so many times. Clementine had been shocked and said she'd think about it before they all headed to the party. Privately, she told Sam that the thought disgusted her and why did Erika always, her entire life, have to have a piece of her to make her life right? Sadly, Erika overhears this conversation and she's devastated. She's still thinking about that when she goes out and sees Ruby in the fountain. Unbeknownst to her parents, Dakota, the ten year old of Vid and Tiffany's assumes a terrible guilt on her own shoulders. She thinks it's her fault that Ruby nearly drowned because she went inside to read. She starts have terrible spells of just sitting and staring and hating her once beloved books until Vid and Tiffany finally pry it out of her and convince her it wasn't her fault. They take her to see the recovered Ruby and Clementine reemphasizes to Dakota that it wasn't her fault, and she's much better. Sadly, one day Oliver and Tiffany realize that the old neighbor, Harry, hasn't put his trash out in weeks, so they go to the door to check on him. No one has seen him since he was cranky about the dog the day of the barbecue. They get into his house and discover to their horror that he's dead at the foot of the stairs and must have been like that for weeks! They are wracked with guilt that they weren't friendlier to him or checking on him earlier. We also come to find out a few weeks later that Erika has secretly taken things from Clementine all her life! She's got an old necklace, her grandmother's pearl-handled scissors, a missing family ice cream scoop, and even little Ruby's light up tennis shoe that they couldn't find earlier the day of the bbq. When Oliver discovers Erika's secret hoard, he doesn't worry about her becoming a hoarder, but does freak out that she has an obsession with things from Clementine. He ixnay's the egg donor process, which Clementine, out of guilt, has finally said that she'd do, and insists that Erika give back the missing things, a little at a time. In the meantime, when Sam almost implodes at a CPR life-saving course that he and Clementine start to take, he breaks down and cries and Clementine realizes that he might be suffering from PTSD about the near-drowning. Sure enough, he goes to a therapist and they begin to get back on track with their marriage. At the end of the book, we are hit with a couple of surprises, one which I assumed all along. Erika finally remembers everything that happened the day of the barbecue and what she remembers is walking outside with the dessert plates and hearing an incessant knocking! When she finally looks up she sees the old Harry banging on his window and pointing at the fountain. The tipsy Erika looks at the fountain and at first thinks that Harry is complaining about some trash floating in the fountain. It takes her a minute to realize that it's Ruby and she drops the plates, screams and runs! Harry, not understanding why Erika is just standing there, runs as fast as his 80-something arthritic legs will let him to go downstairs. He never makes it, though, because he trips on the top step and tumbles to his death. Yes, Harry the crank, died trying to save little Ruby. :-( Then, we also see the flashback of little Holly asking her grandmother that night if Ruby was going to die. She's very upset and confesses that she was mad at her for taking her rock purse so she pushed her! That's the one I kind of saw coming. Holly's grandmother tries to force the memory away from young Holly by telling her that Ruby slipped and fell. Anyway....everyone ends up pretty un-psychologically scarred by the end of the book. Erika and Oliver decide to try foster parenting first, Sam gets his head back into his new job, and Clementine does make the Sydney Opera House orchestra. I, myself, am so very glad that the author did not have two year old Ruby, who carried around a kitchen whisk like it was a teddy bear, die!! She was my favorite character. :-)

Finished: The Couple Next Door (Lapena) I just read this book in a few hours...couldn't put it down! It's about a couple who goes to a dinner party in the house next door, leaving their sleeping six month baby home alone, using the baby monitor to keep tabs on her, and going over every thirty minutes to check on her. Needless to say, when they get back home at 1:30 in the morning, the front door is open, and the baby is gone!!! What follows isn't exactly the best literary read, but it sure is a page-turner. Do we suspect one of the parents who took turns going over every thirty minutes? Who else knew the baby would be home alone after the babysitter canceled at the last minute?? No one is without their faults or suspicions! I'm not even going to do a recap. :-) Just a nice summer read! For anyone who may be reading this....I will spoil one thing about the ending...so stop reading now if you don't want to know. The baby is alive at the end!!

Finished: The Sheltering Sky (Bowles) A very well written, and oddly hard to put down book, about three angst-ridden Americans who travel to North Africa post-World War II and face misadventure, mostly brought on by their own stupidity. I'm not really sure how to describe this book. I just read one description that said they were in "existential despair", and when I clicked on that it says "a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life: whether this life has any meaning, purpose, or value." So...I can definitely see this in the three characters, but honestly cannot fathom how any of them thought that traveling to the small towns nestled in North Africa, on the edges of the Sahara, could possibly fix what was wrong? Port and Kit Morseby are a young, married couple who are apparently suffering marital difficulties, though we never hear why. We know only that they are both way too much in their own heads and about their own feelings to truly care about the other. Whine, whine, whine. Angst, angst, angst. Why me? Why me? Why me? On and on. When deciding to leave New York to embark on their possible marriage recovering trip, they invited along a male friend of theirs, Tunner. He hasn't been a friend for long, but eagerly agrees to go along with his new friends. Kit constantly feels as if Tunner would like to put the moves on her, and they do spend one night together. She does what she does best after that and completely avoids Tunner, not really wanting to be with Port either though. Port, who refused to be inoculated for any diseases before traveling, comes down with typhoid fever. He spends a miserable few sick days as he insists on moving to an even smaller town and insisting Tunner go ahead to their final destination to meet them. This leaves the incapable Kit alone to take care of Port, but to no avail. Port dies from the typhoid fever and Kit, rather than face the reality and going back to meet Tunner for help or comfort, takes off on her own out into the Sahara desert. She comes upon a caravan of two men and all their servants carrying supplies back to their home. She lifts her arms up to the youngest of the men and he takes her up onto his camel. Of course, he also begins to force her to have sex with him at night, but she quits struggling and decides she actually likes the comfort and the closeness and she becomes attached to him. She doesn't realize that he will also allow the other, older, man to also have his sex with her each night too. The man takes her back to his home, where he already has three wives, and keeps her locked in a room where he comes to visit her every day for several hours. She lives for her time with him. (This is truly weird. I mean, she's clearly not in her right mind.) Anyway, after he is away for several days, she comes to her senses and decides to escape. She does so, and is actually taken back to the American consulate at one of the larger cities by a French man she comes across. Luckily Tunner, who has stayed in Africa to look for Kit, has put the word out to all the consulates and has been contacted that Kit has been found! When Kit realizes that Tunner will be there and she'll have to face the real world again, she disappears outside the hotel they've taken her to for shelter and blends into the crowd. That's where the book ends! So very well written, as I said, but a very surreal, head-shaking book!

Finished: Edge of Eternity (Follett) Another great story, the third book in Follett's Centuries trilogy which follows the families of four different countries: The U.S., Germany, Russia and Great Britain. The main characters are the children of the main characters we got to know in the second book, and the grandchildren of the people we grew to love in the first book! The families: the Dewars, the Jakes, the Williams, the Murrays, the Francks, the Peshkovs and the Dvorkins. The book is far too long to recap in great detail, but it runs from 1961 to 1989. We follow the characters through major points in history, as each of them is involved in some way in these pieces of history, kind of the way Forrest Gump was inadvertently involved in so many pieces of history in the movie. We see the establishment of the Berlin Wall, the Civil Rights Movement in the deep south, the rise of Martin Luther King, the presidency of JFK, the terror and uncertainty of the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of JFK, then Bobby Kennedy, then Martin Luther King, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the rising up and subsequent crushing of the Solidarity movement by Lech Walesa in Poland, and the Russian leadership of Khrushchev, then Brezhnev, then Andropov, and finally Gorbachev, who helped to undermine the cold war and led to the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. George Jakes, the half-African American grandson of Russian immigrant to the U.S., Lev Peshkov, becomes a Harvard educated lawyer and resounding fighter for civil rights, and also one of Bobby Kennedy's top advisers. He has two major relationships with strong women and in the end, finds his own happiness. He's a good man! Cameron and Beep Dewar, the grandchildren of American Gus Dewar, go in totally different directions. Beep embraces the free love of the 60's, falling for both main members of an up and coming rock group. Cam becomes an avid Republican, working for Richard Nixon and continuing on with Reagan, eventually working for the CIA to carry out whatever questionable instructions his superiors want. The British Dave and Evie Williams are also a brother and sister duo, grandchildren of Eth Leckwith, the maid turned British parliament woman who we came to love in the first book. Dave becomes the first member of that up and coming rock group, Plum Nellie, despite his father's insistence that he'll never make it as a musician instead of finishing school. Dave falls in love with Beep Dewar, and she with him, until she cheats on fiance Dave with the other main member of the band, and Dave's best friend. Evie becomes a famous actress whose talent enchants the multitudes, until she protests the Vietnam War by posing with North Vietnamese soldiers on a tank in North Vietnam. Jane Fonda anyone? She is eventually forgiven and makes her comeback on Broadway. Jasper Murray, who was basically adopted by the Williams family growing up, turns into a reporter with few scruples who even uses stories about the people who took him in to make his way up the ladder and eventually be there to cover first hand such stories as the assassination of MLK and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Walli and Lili Franck are the children of Carla Franck, the daughter of beloved character from the first book, Maud von Ulrich. They have an adopted sister, Rebecca, who Carla adopted as a teenager in the second book when her parents were killed in the war. The story for all three of these siblings centers around the erection of the Berlin wall, Rebecca's and Walli's escape to West Berlin, the decades long separation of their family, and their eventual reunion with the fall of the wall in 1989. Walli becomes that second member of Plum Nellie! He's a great songwriter and musician, and he and Dave become best friends. However, Walli leaves behind the love of his life, Karolin, when he escapes to West Germany. She refuses to cross over with him when she realizes she is pregnant with his child. She doesn't want to endanger the baby, so little Alice is born in East Germany and isn't reunited with her father for over 20 years. Meanwhile, Walli gets into drugs in the Haight-Ashbury music and free love scene. He sleeps with Beep, and ruins his relationship with both Dave and the band. The band breaks up and Dave sends Walli back to his sister, Rebecca, in West Germany to kick his drug habit. Eventually, Walli has that happy ending when he's reunited with Karolin and also meets his daughter for the first time. The Russian Tanya and Dimka Dvorkin are twin brother and sister who are the grandchildren of the great Grigori Peshkov (brother or Lev) who we got to know in the first book. Again, we have a brother sister duo who are at opposites in their beliefs, but never waver in their love and support of each other. Dimka is a true believer in communism and works for years in the government until he finally becomes disillusioned by the various leaders until Gorbechev comes along. He falls in love twice and ends up happy with his second wife and two children. Tanya works tirelessly behind the scenes in Russia as a TASS news reporter/secret revolutionary who covers such world events as the Bay of Pigs and the Polish solidarity movement for Russia, all the while sending intelligence back to the revolutionaries to try and abolish communism. She falls early on for a dissident named Vasili, who is sentenced to labor camp in Siberia for distributing a mere pamphlet about freedom. Tanya eventually finds Vasili while on assignment in Siberia, and she manages to smuggle his novel out of Russia and into the hands of British publisher Anna Murray, sister of Jasper. So, for years these writings come out of Russia to the frustration of the Russian government. Eventually Vasili is released from Siberia, with some influence by Dimka, but Tanya and Vasili are still stuck living in Russia, unable to leave, and with Vasili still unable to claim authorship of his books. The book ends with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and with the Franck family finally reuniting after so many years of separation. Amazingly, none of the major characters die and most all of them end up happy with children! I'm kind of wondering if there will be another book (even those this was labeled a trilogy) to follow up what continues to happen in these fascinating families! :-) Now, for a shorter book.....

Finished: Palace Walk (Mahfouz) Finally!! Real life got in the way and it seems like it took me forever to read this very good book about an Egyptian patriarch who keeps his wife and children in line through tyranny and hypocrisy. This is the first book in a trilogy. I'll probably read all three, since this was a very moving story despite the early 1900's traditions that had Sayyid Ahmad treating his sons with coldness and harshness out of his misguided idea of tough love in making them men...and keeping his wife and daughters cloistered inside their home, never allowed to show their faces outside...not even to go to worship! However, when out working at his successful store, or spending time with his life-long friends and other women at night, Sayyid Ahmad is friendly, smiling, loving and very respected by his peers. It's truly sad to see the way he treats his devoted wife, Amina, and his children, Yasin, Khadija, Fahmy, Aisha and Kamal. Both daughters are married off to brothers of the same family, and by the end of the story are pregnant and/or giving birth. I imagine their stories and those of their children will expand in the next book. The oldest son, Yasin, follows in his father's footsteps as a philanderer after his marriage. Kamal is still just a ten year old school boy going to school, but very precocious. And Fahmy is a nineteen year old university law student who has honorable ideals that end in tragedy for him as the Egyptians in his city began a revolution against the English who are in control. When English troops make encampment right outside their own home, young and foolish Kamal actually befriends the soldiers with his singing. He thinks they are friends, but for them he is just like a little pet. After the Egyptians prevail and the leader they were protesting for is finally released, Fahmy participates in a peaceful, sanctioned demonstration of happiness, but is shot down and killed by disgruntled English soldiers who didn't like being beat. Sadly, Sayyid Ahmad had spent the last several weeks furious with and not speaking to his son because he knew Fahmy defied his father and refused to swear that he would not participate in any demonstrations. Just the very morning of his death, with peace seemingly on Egypt's horizon, Fahmy had gone to his father and apologized for his defiance and his father had very gruffly replied to him. Fahmy had just been happy that his father had even spoken to him. How sad that is how he went to his death. :-( We get alot of introspection about why Sayyid Ahmad is the way he is, and it's very nice writing, but hard to fathom that people actually lived this way. I know they did though. We also see Amina and her feelings and obedience in great detail, and though we don't understand it, we do respect her. What else can she do? Anyway, I'm thinking the next book will open with the aftermath of Fahmy's death! I think I'll read a few other books before diving back into this world though!

Finished: The Farm (Smith) Pretty good page turner by the same author who wrote the Child 44 trilogy that I really liked! The Farm wasn't quite as good, but still a book I enjoyed. It's about a twenty-something son, Daniel, in the UK whose parents have moved to retire on a farm in Sweden. Daniel, who is gay, has not been to visit his parents in the year since they've gone because he's promised his partner that he would tell his parents about them the next time he sees them. So, in the time that he hasn't seen them, apparently alot has happened to his parents! Daniel gets a call from his father in a panic one night telling him that his mother has gone a bit off the deep end, has had delusions, thinks there's a conspiracy of people out to get her, and that she was put in a mental hospital, but had convinced the doctors there she was lucid and had checked herself out. Daniel is in shock, but immediately books a ticket to head to Sweden! While he's at the airport, he gets an equally emphatic phone call from his mother saying, don't believe a word your father says if he calls you! He's in on a conspiracy to try and have me committed! I've just landed in London if you'll pick me up at the airport. Flummoxed, Daniel doesn't know who or what to believe! Neither of his parents has ever been an alarmist, and as a matter of fact, they've never even fought in front of him. Before he can call his father back, and because he's already at the airport, Daniel sees his mother almost immediately. She's thin, ragged and looking afraid. She insists that Daniel take her where she can start at the beginning and tell him the entire story. What ensues is a tale of possible sexual abuse and abduction and death of a teenage girl who has been adopted by their neighbors at the farm. The problem is, their neighbor farmer is also a town bigwig who happens to be best friends with the mayor, the police chief, and the psychiatric doctor! Daniel's mother has arrived with a satchel full of evidence such as newspaper clippings, written letters, etc. When Daniel's father keeps trying to call in the middle of their conversations, Daniel's mother tells him they must find another place to talk because he doesn't know his father anymore, he's changed. He's lying and will actually be on a plane to London to capture her. Daniel takes his mother to a hotel to hear the rest of her far-fetched story and promises her he will think only in her best interests. Sure enough, Daniel's father arrives in London very quickly, along with the psychiatrist who had committed his mother. Daniel doesn't know what to think, but he does take his mother to a local facility for her own safety as her behavior is getting more and more erratic. His mother considers this a huge betrayal, especially after her husband and former doctor arrive. She quickly falls into a state of non-communication and not eating. After a couple of months, Daniel is despondent at his mother's condition and feels terribly guilty. He decides to fly to the farm in Sweden and see if there is anything to his mother's story and all her evidence. He does meet the next door neighbor and sees how controlling a man he is. ****SPOILERS**** If you are reading this and don't want to know the ending, then quit reading now! So, even though the man is very unpleasant, as his mother described, Daniel finds out that he never harmed his adopted daughter, Mia. Instead, Mia got tired of being controlled, and one night when the mayor, her father's friend, comes on to her, she runs away with her boyfriend. She'd actually grown close to Daniel's mother, who had told her the story of running away from her own childhood home in Sweden when she was falsely suspected of drowning her best friend in a fit of jealousy! Daniel finally tracks down Mia, who is living with her boyfriend, and pleads for her to come back to the UK and see his mother so she can see she's alive. He's convinced it will help her out of her psychosis. While in Sweden, Daniel also visits his grandfather, who he has never met, since his mother ran away at 16. He sees a creepy shed that his mother described in the notes of her evidence as being a shed on the property of their neighboring farmer. Daniel goes to the shed, and seeing the inside, realizes that it was a secret room that his grandfather kept. He suddenly realizes that everything was in his mother's head, all her experiences after she moved back to Sweden, because her own father had sexually abused her when she turned 14!! The grandfather makes no apologies, in a very spine-chilling conversation with Daniel. Daniel wants to get the heck out of Dodge, and take Mia back with him to help his mother back to sanity. At the very end, after Mia spends hours talking with his mother, for the first time in months, his mother wants to see both him and his father to talk. Very eerie book at the end. So sad that it was all in her head, but then I guess a somewhat happy ending as she's able to realize it all came from what happened to her as a teenager. As it turns out...there never even WAS a best friend who was drowned. Even that girl was the figment of his mother's imagination who she made up to get through the abuse.

Finished: The Widow (Barton) Creepy page-turner about the widow of a man accused of kidnapping and killing a 3 year old girl. :-(  When I read the flap of the book, it just indicated mystery, etc. I didn't realize I'd be getting into the story of a man who started off with pornography and escalated to having to kidnap a youngster. Anyway, the book does keep you guessing and wondering if the guy was really guilty, since he gets off during his trial! Told from many different viewpoints, the widow, the detective, the reporter, the mother of the missing child and the husband himself, the book goes back and forth in time until finally, by the end of the story, you know for certain that he did it. Just when they're about to re-arrest him, though, his wife, pushes him in front of a bus and he dies. It turns out, he had confessed to her a few days before, after four years of insisting he was innocent, and even taken her to wear he had buried the little body. So, the story ends with the detective finally able to give the mother of the child some closure. However, the story material itself was just a bit too creepy and depressing for me!

Finished: Honey in the Horn (Davis) Another Pulitzer Prize winner, but oh my, it's never taken me two weeks to read a 380 page book before! (well, maybe in high school or something, but not since I started this project!) Anyway, it's really not a bad book, just very descriptive, long, prose. The book is about settlers in Oregon, and this is apparently the only book about Oregon that has won the Pulitzer. The story follows a teenage, orphan boy, Clay, who has worked for a man and his family as a ranch hand since he was a young boy. When the father asks Clay to sneak an empty gun into his miscreant son, Wade, in jail, in hopes that Wade will attempt to escape and be killed, thus putting an end to the father's embarrassed misery, Clay does as he's told. Of course, Wade Shively is so feared by the jailers, that all he has to do is wave the gun at them and they let him go!! So, the father's plan doesn't go as hoped and then Clay must go on the run, away from the law, who now knows he helped Wade escape, and away from Wade himself, who goes after Clay for taking his horse and rifle when he goes on the run. As Clay makes his way across the Oregon mountains and down onto the Coos Bay coast, he meets a host of characters, from farmers, to ranchers, to wheat-cutters, to down-on-their luck settlers, to Native Americans trying to make their own way, to a horse-trader and his lovely teenager daughter, Luce. Of course, Clay and Luce fall for each other, but each have secrets they keep from each other: Clay, his part in Wade Shively's escape, and Luce, the fact that SHE is actually the person who killed the man who Wade was finally in jail for killing, not Wade. The underlying story is actually pretty good, but it flows along about as fast as the slow-moving wagontrains ramble through the harsh land. There are really lovely descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna, wild life, coast and mountains and valleys, especially if Oregon holds a dear place in your heart, which is does in mine! However, the book just dragged a bit! Clay and a few of the other settlers he's started traveling with do eventually have a confrontation with Wade which results in the hanging of Wade Shively for making another attempt on someone's life.  Ironically, they are wrong again and Wade only shot into the air, but Western justice is meted out. Poor Wade. Anyway, I'm glad I read the book, though I can't say it was my favorite. I think I'll slowly keep on my path of reading as many Pulitzer Prize winners as I can! Still slowly making my way through the bible too!

Finished: The Forgetting Time (Guskin) The exploration of souls reincarnating themselves into young children is the crux of this book about a four year old boy, Noah, who is plagued with nightmares of the water, and is always asking his single mom when he can go be with his other mother. The mom, Janie, a successful architect, but at her wits end, finally resorts to consulting a psychiatrist when Noah is kicked out of preschool for talking about things he shouldn't...like how guns smell when they are fired, and how spells are cast in Harry Potter, etc. None of these things have ever been discussed with Noah by his mom or anyone else she knows, and the fear of water and nightmares just keep getting worse and worse. When a psychiatrist wants to medicate her young son for schizophrenia, Janie takes the desperate measure of consulting another psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson...one who has dedicated his entire neuro-science career to traveling the world and meeting young children who would appear to have the souls of other dead people in them. In many of the countries, like India, the people actually accept this idea and the family of the child will get to know the family of the deceased, once they figure out who it is. Most of the children, though, outgrow "being" the other person by the time they are six or seven, and go on with their current life. Dr. Anderson knows that in America he'll have a much tougher time convincing parents, especially the ones of the soul who has inhabited Noah's body that such a thing is possible. And, sadly, Dr. Anderson, who is sixty-six, has been diagnosed with a kind of aphasia which has already started robbing words from him. The brilliant man has trouble coming up with the correct words for things, and he's only going to get worse over the next year until he becomes completely dependent on someone else to live. In the meantime, though, he's determined to help Janie and Noah. Dr. Anderson is able to get out of Noah that his name is Tommy and what area of the country he lived in. He begins searching obituaries for any child named Thomas who may have drowned or died in the years since Harry Potter came out! They find a family whose nine year old son has been missing and presumed dead for seven years. The mother, Denise, has never fully recovered and just goes through the motions of life. The father no longer lives in the house. And, the younger brother, Charlie, now fifteen, is a teenager basically raising himself and lonely for his parents' attention. When Janie and Dr. Anderson take Noah to the house, he immediately recognizes it, and when he sees Denise, he throws his arms around her legs crying, "mama, mama". It's all very emotional for Denise and Charlie, but Noah says too many things and knows too many things for them not to believe. As they sit around, pretty much in shock, talking about how this could be possible, Noah slips out the back and makes his way over to the house of the person who killed him!!! Acckk!! As it turns out, Tommy was on his bike heading to a friend's house seven years before when the fourteen year old brother of another friend stopped him and said, hey, want to come fire my gun? The fourteen year old, who was verbally abused by his father, just wanted someone to show off to. He promised Tommy he could have a turn shooting the rifle. As Tommy was setting up the third can for Pauly on the side of an old well, Pauly decided to switch his perfect aim from the can to the well bucket. He fired the gun and the bullet ricocheted off the metal bucket and hit Tommy in the back, felling him at once. Panicked, thinking he'd killed Tommy, and knowing his own father would probably kill him, Pauly threw Tommy's body into the well. As he was leaving, he heard Tommy yelling for help! He's wasn't dead! Pauly looked around for a rope, but found nothing to help. Figuring that by the time he came back with help that Tommy would be dead, he just left him to drown. :-( So, little four year old Noah goes over, knocks on the door and confronts now twenty-one year old Pauly, really freaking him out by asking him why he shot him and threw him in the well! Pauly runs out of the house and into the fields, and Noah returns back to Tommy's old backyard and climbs up into his and Charlie's old tree house. By now Janie has called the police to find the missing Noah, and instead, they find Pauly who confesses to what he did years before. Charlie gets an idea of where Noah might be and sure enough, finds him in the tree house. They reminisce a bit, and Denise hears them. This makes her open to embracing Noah more readily and Denise is the only person Noah wants when he then has an asthma attack and is rushed to the hospital. Janie is reeling by all the developments, but Noah throws her a crumb when he asks her not to leave the room either. After they stay for the funeral and burial of Tommy's remains, which were found in the well, Dr. Anderson and Janie tell Noah that it's time to go home now, and he consents, but first he wants Denise to give him a bath...the first bath he's had in over a year due to his fear of the water!! She gives him the bath and then sends him on his way. The families promise to stay in touch. They do stay in touch by phone a couple of times, but by the time Noah is six, when Denise comes to visit, he doesn't recognize her at all. Janie just has to tell him that this is an old friend he met a while before. Denise is upset, but realizes it's what's best for Noah and she is finally able to say goodbye to Tommy. She and Charlie are in a much better and open place now than before as well. It was a pretty good page-turning book...especially when Noah went to confront Pauly and we didn't know the truth yet of how Tommy had died. It was all a horrible accident, though, and at the end of the book, Denise goes to the prison to visit Pauly and hear what happened. She asks him to write to her. Interspersed before every couple of chapters were real-life accounts taken from a book written by a doctor who actually did travel the world studying reincarnation in young children. All in all, a pretty good book!

Finished: Find Her (Gardner) The latest book by one of my favorite suspense authors! This time she revisited Detective D.D. Warner as she tried to break the case of a newly kidnapped young woman who had been kidnapped five years before as well and kept captive for over 400 days. The young woman, Flora, survived the first kidnapping physically, but emotionally she has turned into somewhat of a vigilante trying to make amends for some of the things she was forced to do while kidnapped. Five years before, her kidnapper, Jacob Hess, had been captured by another of Gardner's mainstay characters, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. I'd love another Kimberly Quincy story, by the way. And, Kimberly was introduced in a book after we first go to know her father, FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, who became another recurring character in Gardner's books, along with the detective he aided, Rainie.  Anyway, that was a tangent, but I just love Gardner's books, and all these characters that she keeps bringing back over and over. :-) So, D.D. calls up Kimberly Quincy to get some insight on what happened when she rescued Flora five years before and that helps D.D. figure out what's going on. Flora has been abducted while out in a bar trying to hunt down the person who had kidnapped college student Stacey Summers only three months before. In the process, Flora is taken again herself, but it can't be by Jacob Hess because Flora actually blew his brains out when Kimberly rushed in to save her. So....turns out there was another person who Jacob Hess had been attached to when he was driving Flora around the country in the back of his 18-wheeler, much of the time confined in a pine coffin. Jacob had a daughter whose sociopathic tendencies may have actually outweighed her father's. These five years later, she's out for revenge on Flora for killing her father. So, it all comes to a head with Flora helping to rescue Stacey and Flora and D.D. together bringing down the psycho daughter. At the end, Flora finally realizes that she can try living her life for the future instead of in the past.