Finished: Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons) An actual book with happy endings all around for once!! Even though it's supposed to be rather a satirical send-up of the drama filled British literature, it was nicely lighthearted for me. :-) Flora Poste is a young woman in England of the upper crust whose parents die. Because she was practically raised in boarding schools, she doesn't really mourn them much....but is left with "only" 100 pounds a month income after all her father's debts are paid. She decides to leave her socialite life and go visit her cousins (her mother's older sister's children) in the country in Sussex on Cold Comfort Farm. She mysteriously hears from her relatives that they wondered when they'd finally hear from her, since she had rights she'd been cheated out of. When she arrives at the run down, dreary farm, no one is very receptive to her. The Starkadders are all farm people, deeply ingrained in routine, and with an iron fist held over them by the fake-crazy matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom. If any Starkadders ever think of leaving the farm, Aunt Ada Doom has a "fit" and wails on and on about how she witnessed something awful in the shed when she was a young girl...so they all back off and kowtow to Aunt Ada. Flora can see right through Aunt Ada's act the first time she sees it, but she deals with Aunt Ada last. First, Flora spends several months helping each of her cousins and their children realize their dreams...even if it means leaving the farm! Aunt Ada's son, Amos Starkadder, though he runs the farm and toils each day, really longs to be a traveling, evangelical preacher! Flora encourages him to go ahead and travel, thus leaving the farm to his nephew, the beleaguered Reuben, who is the only one who wants to really make the farm succeed. Reuben is the son of Judith, the daughter of Aunt Ada. Judith fawns over her other son, Seth, the good-looking cad of a lady's man, and pretty much ignores Reuben. Judith is totally under her mother's thumb, and spends most of her time depressed. Flora also sees through Seth and when he tells her that he loves the "talkies" aka movies, she introduces him to a movie producer friend of hers who happens to be looking for the next Clark Gable, and voila....Seth is off to Hollywood! Reuben, who mistrusts Flora at first and thinks she's there to claim the farm, comes to respect Flora when she finally makes him believe she wants nothing to do with the farm and wants him to run it like he has always wanted. Elfine, a flighty granddaughter, who I'm not sure of her parentage, is in love with a rich neighbor boy...but Elfine has been raised in almost a Bohemian fashion. Flora takes Elfine under her wing and in a month's time, has given her a makeover and taught her to be more refined, so that when they both go to the 21st birthday party of the boy, he realizes how much he is also in love with Elfine and, after she wins over his mother, they are married. After Seth leaves, Judith drops into even more of a depression and hangs little black veils all over her son's pictures. Flora insists that Judith accompany her to London one day and introduces her to her psychiatrist friend who redirects Judith's interests to old churches, and he whisks her off for a six month tour around Europe! Finally, Flora heads back to Cold Comfort Farm and spends an entire day locked in the bedroom of the formidable Aunt Ada Doom. When she finally reappears, she insists to the remaining relatives that Aunt Ada will not only accept the marriage of Elfine, but will also spring another surprise on them! Sure enough, the day of Elfine's wedding, Aunt Ada Doom comes downstairs, a rarity in itself, all dressed to the nines and actually shocks everyone by enjoying the wedding. She then announces that she herself is off to Paris and that she's going to start enjoying life instead of wallowing at the farm. She entrusts the farm and the money-handling to Reuben and off she flies in a small airplane with a pilot! Her work at Cold Comfort Farm done, Flora finally calls Charles...the young man she had met and got along with swimmingly right before she began her journey. He had told her to call him any time and he would fly HIS little airplane down there and rescue her at a moment's notice. They correspond by letters the entire time that Flora is there, and when she feels her mission is complete, she calls up Charles to come and get her. He lands his airplane and bounds toward her and they fall into a passionate embrace. He asks Flora to marry him and she says yes! Her only regrets are that she doesn't find out what exactly those rights of hers were, i.e., what the mysterious family story was...and she doesn't ever find out what it is Aunt Ada Doom saw in the shed as a young girl! Anyway...Finally, a happily ever after! :-)

Finished: Gilead (Robinson) Pulitzer Prize winner that is one long, thoughtful, mesmerizing letter written by a seventy-six year old man who is dying, to his seven year old son who will never know him as he grows older. The dying man is Reverend John Ames, who has lived his entire life in Gilead, Iowa. He is the son of a preacher, who was also the son of a preacher. John Ames pretty much lays out his life story for his young son, and in the process, gives a moving tale about fathers, sons, religion, beliefs, and struggles. We meet John Ames' lifelong best friend, "Old Boughton", who lives next door and has several grown children. John Ames, on the other hand, had tragically lost his young wife and baby daughter in childbirth and not remarried until he was in his late sixties when his current, and younger wife, walked into his church one day when he was preaching and he fell for her instantly. So, his young son is a product of a second marriage, and comes so late in John Ames' life that he is lamenting that he will never be able to pass along the words of wisdom he needs to. And, being a preacher, he has a lot to say about faith, right from wrong, struggling with one's own conscience, etc. The narrative is completely authentic. I heard an elderly man's voice the entire time I read...and so I seemed to read at that pace, as if he were talking out loud. It reminded me so much of my father, who was brought up in a very religious Baptist family...but then my father didn't grow up to become a preacher, lol. Anyway, John Ames recounts the story of how his "force of nature" grandfather moved his family from Maine to the midwest so he could battle abolition. He preached ferociously for young men to go and join the battle against slavery, and then preached to the widows' young wives and mothers. Heartbreaking. His own son grew up as a pacifist and even became estranged from his own father for a time because, even though he was also a man of the cloth, his beliefs on war were the complete opposite. It's such a compelling story to see what made each of these men tick. Then, during the story, Boughton's youngest son comes home. In his early forties, John Ames Boughton, named after John Ames, and the Godson of John Ames, has an extremely troubled past, and troubled present to be honest. Young Boughton forms an instant bond with Reverend John Ames' wife and young son, and the Reverend worries what influence young Boughton will have over his wife and son after he dies. Young Boughton and Reverend Ames have a few tense, uncomfortable talks...but eventually young Boughton tells John Ames what is going on in his life...an estranged African American wife and mixed race son, in the 1950's, and no job to support them. John Ames feels guilty for the feelings he had towards young Boughton and is finally, sincerely, able to come to terms with his feelings and bless young Boughton before he leaves town for good. John Ames gets weaker as the story ends, but he doesn't die. I can only imagine getting such an amazing missive from a parent who passes away when a child is at such a young age. I look forward to reading another of Marilynne Robinson's books!

Finished: Winter of the World (Follett). The second book in the epic trilogy which spans from 1933 and the rise of Hitler to 1949, and centers on the children of the main characters from the first book. Much of the book shows the extremes of World War II as faced by characters from the main countries involved, Russia, Germany, Great Britain and America. There is alot of espionage involved, and by the end of the book, one of the scientists who worked on "the bomb" for the U.S.A. has secretly given the bomb plans to the Russians and they have successfully built their own plutonium bomb. Volodya Peshkov, the son of Grigori (but true son of his brother Lev) continues to work for the Red Army in Russia as a spy. One of his main contacts is the German, Werner Franck, who is so against Hitler's Nazism that he gets his hands on whatever war plans he cans and sends them to Volodya. This helps Russia turn the tide and begin to defeat Hitler in the war. Volodya is also instrumental in getting the bomb plans back to Russia, and he just happens to be married to Zoya, a brilliant Russian scientist who helps design the bomb for Russia. Towards the end of the book, Zoya and Volodya have two small children and Volodya finds out that his father is really Lev Peshkov, who he had thought was his uncle. Lev's two children, Daisy and Greg, also continues their stories. Daisy wants so hard to be accepted by society that she almost marries someone she doesn't love. When snubbed because her father is basically a gangster, she moves to England and marries Boy Fitzherbert, the son of the Earl of Fitzherbet who had the affair with Ethel the maid in the first book. Fitz has two sons with his Russian wife, Boy and Andrew. Boy is very self-centered and marries Daisy, but then immediately cheats on her and treats her badly. They try to have children but can't. Boy has been sterilized by having the mumps. Greg Peshkov works for the U.S. government, investigating people who are working on the bomb. They want to weed out any spies who may report back to the countries they have left behind. He has a son, Georgy, by Jacky Jakes, the woman his father hired to sleep with him in the first book as a teenager. Greg actually cares deeply for his half-black son and eventually convinces his parents to accept their grandson. He cannot marry Jacky, however, because he wants to go into politics and move up the ranks, which a black wife would not allow him to do. Meanwhile, while still married to Boy, Daisy falls in love with the Welsh, working class, Lloyd Williams, the illegitimate son of Fitz and Ethel. Lloyd fights in the war and comes home to Daisy when it's over. Boy is killed in the war leaving Daisy and Lloyd free to marry. Lloyd wins a seat in the British parliament as a labour representative and has two children with Daisy by the end of the book. Carla and Erik Von Ulrich, the children of Maude and Walter from the first book, are raised in Berlin by their parents and take two different paths concerning the Nazis. Erik falls for the propaganda hook, line and sinker and joins the Hitler Youth. He goes to fight in the war where he eventually sees the atrocities that Hitler is ordering in the open murdering of the Jewish people. He comes home very disheartened after Germany is beaten and he has spent several years in a prison camp. Carla, on the other hand, helps the young man that she loves, Werner Franck, pass secrets along to the Russians so they can end the war and the loss of German lives quicker! Werner is also held in a prison camp after Germany loses, though, and Carla is repeatedly raped by the Russian soldiers who "free" the Germans from Hitler. Carla gives birth to a son, who she names after her father, Walter, who is tortured and dies earlier in the book for his non-Nazi beliefs. She also adopts a teenager girl named Rebecca whose parents were both killed in the concentration camps. Carla is a nurse and by the end of the book has little Walter and Rebecca, who Werner has now adopted when they marry, and also a baby girl of their own, Lili. And, as for the American Dewar family, Gus, from the first book, has two sons, Woody and Chuck. Chuck joins the Navy and is stationed at Pearl Harbor. He is secretly gay and in love with another sailor, Eddie. Woody is following in the political footsteps of his father and is a junior advisor to the president. He's also in love with Joanne, a girl he's loved since his youth, and finally wins her over. They are engaged to be married. When the Dewar family travels to Hawaii to see Chuck, though, it is the day before Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese and they are right in the thick of the battle. Running for their lives, Joanne is shot and killed and the entire family mourns for her. Chuck continues to work in the decoding and mapping division of the Navy with Eddie, but when one of their maps isn't detailed enough and some U.S. servicemen are killed, Chuck insists on going to battle himself to get a better look at the coastlines of the Pacific Islands. He and Eddie are both assigned there, and when Eddie is injured upon landing, Chuck begins to carry him back to the boat on the beach and is gunned down by the Germans and killed, a hero. :-( The family is devastated. Woody joins the military and fights bravely himself. He finally meets another woman he falls in love with, Bella, and they are married by the end of the second book. After the war, instead of going into politics, Woody works as a photographer, a really good one, after selling his Pearl Harbor shots to a newspaper. The whole book is entirely too long to recap more than this, but needless to say, I was once again swept away by the characters and anxious to see how each of their lives turned out! Now, there is one more book left, so I'm sure all the babies born at the end of this book will be the focus in the next. :-) Another great read by Follett!

Finished: Fall of Giants (Follett) The first book in an epic trilogy series about how members of five different families from England, Wales, Russia, Germany and the U.S. cross paths before, during and after the World War I years. This typically long Follet book was great, and a wonderful combination of history, politics and personal relationships. Edward "Fitz" Fitzherbert is an English nobleman who owns and lives on an estate in Wales, the land of which he licenses out to a company for the coal to be mined. Of course, the miners are the local, working-class, much poorer Welshman. Fitz is married to Russian princess, Bea, from the royal family. Her brother Andrei is a prince in Russia. Fitz's sister, Lady Maud, is 23, five years younger than Fitz, and far more liberal. She's all about speaking her mind, talking about politics, socializing with movers and shakers, and working towards the woman's right to vote in England. When Fitz throws a very important dinner party for the King of England, George V, he invites several important people to the party who become intregal players in the story. One of them is German nobleman, Walter Von Ulrich, a former classmate of Fitz's. Maud and Walter fall madly in love, but must keep their relationship a secret since neither Maud's brother, who controls all the money, or Walter's father, a bigwig in the German government would approve. Also at the party is American, Gus Dewar, a young, but super smart, Harvard educated junior advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. We are taken through the detailed events that led up to World War I, as Germany mobilized troops because Russia mobilized troops, etc. etc. Everyone blames everyone else. Walter would much rather see a peaceful solution than a war begin. He doesn't want to see a loss of life for a war that could be avoided. Mostly, though, he knows that war between Germany and England will keep him away from Maud. Fitz is all for going to war against Germany, who is bearing arms against France. Meanwhile, the Russian army, though huge, appears to be less organized and made up of so many uneducated peasants.

Speaking of Russia...we meet Grigori and Lev Peshkov, brothers who are in their young 20's who were orphaned as youngsters when first their father was executed by the father of Princess Bea and Prince Andrei for grazing his cows on the royal land! Grigori and Lev will never forget the haughty faces and attitude of Bea and Andrei as they watched Grigori and Lev's father be killed. Then, a few years later, their mother is shot down by the tsar's police as the people of Petrograd execute a peaceful march on the palace. Grigori grows up taking care of Lev, who in turn, grows up to be a charming lady's man who pretty much cares for no one but himself. He constantly gets in trouble, and just when Grigori has painstakingly saved enough money to sail to America where he can work and send for Lev, Lev commits a murder and begs Grigori to let HIM use the ticket in his place, promising he'll earn money and send for Grigori. Also, Lev leaves behind his pregnant girlfriend, who Grigori had met first and fallen in love with. Lev had charmed her into loving him instead. So, Grigori sends Lev to America and marries the girlfriend, Katrina, so she will have his army wages, and her child his name, before he is drafted into the Russian army to fight against the Germans.

Back in Wales, the Williams family consists of Ma, Da, Ethel and Billy. Ethel is twenty and works as a maid at the Fitzherbert estate. Billy is fifteen and has already been working in the mines for two years. Billy is called Billy Twice because his name is William Williams, lol. He's a really great, brave kid with loads of character, who is always shooting off his mouth to stand up for what is right, which does get him in a bit of trouble at times. Naturally, Fitz puts the moves on Ethel, and actually really falls for her. She falls for him as well and becomes pregnant. Of course, his wife, Princess Bea becomes pregnant at the same time. When Fitz breaks up with Ethel and tries to buy her off, very cheaply I might add, she plays hardball and makes him pay for a house for her in London, where she moves to have her child after being thrown out and disowned by her father. In London, Ethel works hard, has her son, Lloyd, and befriends Lady Maud, who comes down to the working class area at times to help the women and children and encourage them to stand up for women's rights.  Ethel does just that, and eventually becomes a huge voice in England's Labour Party.

As the war gets going, all of the main male players are involved: Fitz, Walter, Billy, Gus, and Grigori all end up fighting in various heartbreaking, futile battles...hoping for an end, but never seeing one. We get to see all their personalities, and to all their credit, each of them is very brave and smart during the war. Well, Fitz is not as smart, but he's certainly brave. Grigori finally leaves the Russian army, as many apparently did, and goes to join Lenin in the Russian revolution. He becomes instrumental in overthrowing the royals, only to end up in a regime that is an even worse dictatorship. Walter survives the five year war, but only sees Maud twice during those years. However, unbeknownst to their families, they are married right before the war and remain in love and faithful to each other through all those years. After the war, when Germany has lost and must concede so much, they live in much poorer circumstances than either was ever used to, since Fitz cuts off the money to Maud and Walter's progress in the German government is stagnated because he married an Englishwoman. They are happy, though, and by the story's end, have two young children. Ethel finally falls for political co-worker and by the end of the story, they have their own child as well, and are raising her nine year old son by Fitz. Fitz and Princess Bea have two sons, so an heir and a spare, which appears to be all Fitz wanted out of Bea. Billy makes it out alive and marries a friend of Ethel's who already has two children, and then they have two children of their own. Grigori raises Lev's child and then also has a daughter with Katerina. Lev, who ended up in America working for Russian mobster Joseph Vyalov, becomes Vyalov's chauffeure, but then impregnants his daughter, Olga and is forced to marry her. He loves working at his rich father-in-laws nightclubs, but he also loves the women still. When caught in an affair, Vyalov forces him to enlist in the U.S. army just as the U.S. is entering the war. Gus Deware also enlists in the military. Gus prooves to be very brave and survies the war and finds love afterwards. Lev, also survives the war, but is stationed over in Russia of all places. He allows himself to be captured by the Russians to he can meet up with his brother. He has actually saved enough money to send Grigori and his family back to America, but by now, Grigori wants to stay and be part of the Boshevik regime. Lev, doesnt' care to meet his son by Katrina, and tells Grigori he will head back to America. Grigori transports him back across the lines so he can do that. Lev ends up going back to Olga and their now four year old daughter, Daisy. He actually loves his daughter, but when it's discovered that he still has a mistress who also now has a son, he has a physical fight with his father-in-law who dies of a heart attack. As the story ends, Lev is taking over his father-in-law's business.

The entire book is very detailed and goes into the working class versus upper class struggles in England, and Russia. And, with a horrific foreshadowing, shows how the impoverishment of Germany after signing the peace treaty was one of the factors that led to Hitler coming into power with such ruthlessness, which we will see in the next book most likely. Since all of the main characters have children that are around the same age, I'm thinking book two of the trilogy will be the continuing story of them as well! :-)

Finished: One of Ours (Cather) This was the 1923 Pulitzer Prize winner, but I think I've liked other books of Willa Cather's more. It's the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man whose father is a successful Nebraska farmer, and whose mother is very religious. He is overshadowed by both his older and younger brothers, but mostly because he's unhappy with his life himself. He wants more out of life than just following in his father's farming footsteps. And, even though he's educated at college, he's not even happy with the college he attends. He envies almost every other person he meets...their ambitions, their families, their happiness, their talents. After Claude realizes that his fate is to run the family farm, he finally convinces a childhood sweetheart to marry him. He becomes disillusioned, however, when his wife is more interested in charity and mission work than in him. When she leaves for China to help her ailing missionary sister, Claude enlists in the army and heads for World War I in  Europe. His family has been following the war closely and he feels that maybe he will find purpose in his life after all by going to help fight the Germans. Claude DOES find purpose. He feels alive for the first time...but he still envies most of the other soldiers he meets. He becomes best friends with David Gerhardt, who was a former violinist. Claude is envious of David's musical talent and resents that he was never given the opportunity to learn something outside of farming. However, he still admires and respects his friends. Towards the end of the book, Claude's unit is sent to fight in a particularly bad location, in some trenches that had been occupied by the Germans. He has fallen in love with France and the people there, and thinks he will probably live here instead of going back home. He never gets the chance, though, as both he and David fight bravely and are both killed in action trying to keep the Germans from retaking the trench. I didn't become particularly attached to Claude since I didn't really relate to any of his angst. However, Willa Cather is a good writer, so I enjoyed the book somewhat...just not as much as a few of her others. :-)

Finished: The Secret Speech (Smith) The second book in the Child 44 trilogy with Leo Demidov, the former Russian intelligence officer, and his wife, Raisa, at the center of the action once again. In this story, three years have passed since Leo solved the serial killer mystery in Child 44. At the end of that book he and Raisa, unable to have children of their own, adopted the two daughters,  Zoya and Elena, of a man and wife who had been killed by a more sadistic Russian intelligence officer. Unfortunately for Leo, he had been present and under the command of that officer, and Zoya had witnessed the execution of her parents at the age of 11. She agreed to live with Raisa and Leo for Elena's sake, since it was better than the orphanage, but she harbored a deep hatred for Leo and officers like him in general. Three years later, when The Secret Speech opens, Zoya is 14 and still full of hatred, and Elena is 7. Khrushchev is now the leader of Russia instead of Stalin, and he puts out a document, a transcript of a speech he gives, deriding Stalin, and admitting Stalin's crimes and his barbaric techniques, including those of the Russian intelligence officers that tortured, maimed, killed and imprisoned so many Russian citizens. When this speech is made public, old intelligence officers begin being murdered by a clandestine resistance group. The group is led by a woman, Fraera, who has a huge bone to pick with Leo. Many years before, when Leo was first starting out in the ranks, he was assigned undercover to expose a priest, Lazar, who was still supporting the church, even though Stalin had made it a law that there would be no church. Leo, undercover as Maxim, became Lazar's pupil and nearly like a son to him and his wife. When he got the proof he needed that Lazar was breaking the law, Leo had him exposed and arrested, and sent to a gulag in the far north country. The wife, never forgiving Leo, ends up being Fraera, the lady who is leading the mercenary group! She kidnaps Zoya and Leo must pretend to be a prisoner being sent to the gulag to rescue Lazar and help him escape from prison before she will give Zoya back alive. Of course, Zoya actually likes and approves of Fraera's group and their tactics. They are attacking the very people who killed her parents! She becomes one of them, and even though Leo is successful in bringing Lazar back, an entire political story unfolds in which Leo and Raisa must then travel into Hungary to try and rescue the unwilling Zoya from the clutches of Fraera, who is busy helping ignite a revolution in Hungary. Meanwhile, Zoya falls in love with Malysh, the young teenage right-hand-man of Fraera, and together they actually plan to leave Fraera's group when she becomes too erratic. Feeling betrayed, Fraera locks Malysh and Zoya in with the captured Leo and Raisa as the Russian troops approach the hiding place of her and her followers to squash the revolution. The book is far more detailed and exciting than this brief synopsis! Leo, Raisa, Zoya and Malysh must make their way to safety, and Malysh is killed while pretty much saving the lives of the rest of them. :-( It's the second sad death, as Leo's good friend and associate Timur had been killed in the escapade to release Lazar from the gulag. At the end of the book, Zoya is reluctantly back with Leo, Raisa and Elena, but no so filled with hatred anymore. She saw the lengths that Leo and Raisa would go to to save her...and she saw the insanity of what Fraera was doing too. Anyway....I really enjoyed this book and will most definitely read the third installment.

Finished: Main Street (Lewis) A book about a young woman in the early 1900's who longs to be accepted as an educated, evolved woman when she marries a small town Minnesota doctor and goes back to live with him in the set-in-its-ways, gossip-thriving town. Things only go downhill for Carol Kennicott as she realizes that no one in the town wants to make any changes for the better....no one wants to hear her ideas on improvement, much less on literature or art or music...no one appreciates her flair for fashion. Everyone expects her to be a good little doctor's wife to Will Kennicott, a good-old boy who likes to hunt and hang out with the guys too. I'll give it to Will, though, he perseveres throughout the story, even though he does some things I'm not thrilled with...but he does love Carol and tries his hardest towards the end to evolve. Carol, for her part, spends far too much time in her own head and worrying about what people think of her...and with good reason...the town is a cesspool of gossip and busybodies. When she finally takes their little son, Hugh, and goes to Washington D.C. to find her way in the working world, she does find the fulfilment she wanted...but she also finds that there are just as many cliques in the workplace as there are in good ol' Gopher Prairie. She spends over a year there, and when Will comes to visit, they reconnect and she realizes that Gopher Prairie might not be so bad. She eventually goes back, pregnant with their second child and settles down to small town life again, this time more confident in herself, but still not in love with the stagnation of a small town.

I've had this book on my reading periphery, and thought it might be more a picture of quaint life in a small town...and less of an emotional, stressful journey of this one woman. It was pretty well written, and kept me interested, but certainly wasn't a terribly compelling book that I just couldn't put down. I'm glad I finally read a Sinclair Lewis book though! He wasn't on the list of Top 100 authors I went through three years ago. :-)

Finished: Years of Grace (Barnes) Pulitzer Prize winner from 1931 about the life of Jane Ward, a Chicago girl, and her loves, losses and family, from 1891 to 1928. I'm not really sure this was a Pulitzer worthy book...a little bit too surface, not much depth, but maybe that's just a sign of the writing in that time period? Each section is labeled by what man had the biggest influence in her life...first Andre, her first love at 14, then Stephen, her husband of thirty years, and then Jimmy, her best friend's husband who she falls in love with, but sends away so as to do the proper thing and stay with her husband and children. The last section is labeled for her children, and is about her relationship with them mostly as young adults as she laments that their generation does things so much differently and watches them make decisions she wouldn't have made. When Jane and Andre fall in love as young teens, they declare they want to get married before he must move back to France. Their parents say no, and Jane's parents make Andre promise not to contact her until she's 21, four years later. Jane goes to Bryn Mawr and then back home to debut with her other girlfriends. She never forgets Andre, and as her 21st birthday approaches, she wonders if she'll hear from him and if they will feel the same for each other. Meanwhile, one of her best friend's cousins, Stephen Carver, has fallen madly in love with Jane as they've seen quite a bit of each other. He keeps proposing to her, but she tells him while she's very fond of him, she doesn't love him. When she finally gets a letter from Andre, she's thrilled, but he says that he's been given the opportunity of a lifetime to work for the next year in seclusion mentoring to a great sculptor in France. (Andre is an artist.) Jane feels betrayed and writes Andre a dismissive letter, saying they've both moved on and she's marrying Stephen. Then, pressured because the Spanish American War is about to take Stephen to Cuba, Jane does declare her love for him and marry him. Flash forward fifteen years and Jane is 36, still married to Stephen the dependable banker, with three children. She's bored and unhappy, but loyal to her family. She goes to visit her best friend from childhood, Agnes, in New York, and meets Agnes' restless, carefree husband, Jimmy. Jimmy moves to Chicago for a job and Jane's whole family sees alot of Jimmy and really likes him. Of course, Jane falls in love with Jimmy and Jimmy with Jane, but they don't take it further than a few kisses. Jimmy does beg Jane to leave her husband and children and go off to Europe with him. She is shocked that he'd think she would do such a thing, and ends things abruptly. She feels guilty for the rest of her life that she betrayed her husband and her best friend, but she still holds the love for Jimmy in her heart. Jimmy, distraught when Jane says no, signs up to fight in World War I, and is killed fairly quickly. Agnes never knows that Jimmy fell for Jane. Later, when Jane is watching her own grown children go through loves and losses, she's incredulous when her oldest daughter, Cicily, who is married with three children, falls for HER best friend's husband, who is married to Jane's husband's sister, and has children of his own. Their solution, rather than doing the right thing and breaking up two families, is to each divorce their spouses and marry each other. The whole book is very readable, but not very deep, and rather soap-operish. I kept thinking maybe I was reading a 1930's version of a Jackie Collins novel maybe? Anyway, another one down. Not sure I'll read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, but I'll keep plugging along. :-)

Finished: The Man in the High Castle (Dick) A pretty good page-turner about the world in 1962 as it would be if the Axis powers had won World War II instead of the Allies! The book follows several characters as they survive in either the German controlled east part of the former United States...or the Japan controlled Pacific states. Only in the Rocky Mountain states is there some semblance of the United States, but even that is controlled by the Reich. The book is set in San Francisco, where the Japanese are the elite, and the white people the menial workers. Hitler has since died of syphilis and German chancellor Bormann rules the Reich. The Germans have plugged up and drained the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into farmland, and have also managed to see to the genocide of almost all the Africans in Africa. One character is a German spy posing as a Swedish businessman who meets with the Japanese higher-ups in San Francisco to let them know that a certain faction of the Germans in power is planning to drop a bomb on the Japanese islands and wipe out their co-existing, cold-warring "allies". While the meeting between the German spy and the Japanese is taking place, Bormann dies, setting off an immediate political turmoil while Nazis Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich jockey to become the next leader. In a book within a book, an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, has written a novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is the fictional story of what the world would be like if the Allies had won the war and America and Great Britain thrived! This book is forbidden in the German controlled east, but many copies are floating around in the Pacific states. Many Americans read the book secretly and wish that history could have turned out that way. There are, of course, alot more details and in depth character stories, but I'm not going to do a total recap on this one. The book is really intriguing and scary at the same time. Imagine if it had really happened??

Finished: Lie Down In Darkness (Styron). One of the most depressing books I've read, but what should I have expected from the author who wrote Sophie's Choice? The book tells the story about the Loftis family, a 1940's fairly well-to-do, but very dysfunctional southern family. It opens with the father, Milton Loftis traveling to pick up the body of his 23 year old daughter, Peyton, who has committed suicide. Milton, a promising young lawyer and hopeful judge when married to Helen years before, has basically ruined his family by becoming an alcoholic. Milton and Peyton have always been exceptionally close, especially since first daughter, Maudie, was born with mental and physical disabilities, and Helen has devoted most of her time and emotion to Maudie. Milton has spoiled the beautiful Peyton terribly. Helen, resents the relationship between Milton and Peyton, and is pretty cold to Peyton all her life. Basically, it's just a sad story of two very selfish parents completely wrecking a young life. Peyton could have been a great human being, but she pretty much didn't stand a chance with her mother ignoring her in favor of Maudie, blaming her for anything that went wrong with Maudie, and her father doting on her, and at times even slathering all over her. We see flashbacks of their "family" life, and spend time in the present, seeing how each parent is dealing with Peyton's death. One of the last chapters is done from Peyton's stream of conscience viewpoint on the day that she desperately tries to reconnect with her own husband, Harry, who has left her because of her own drinking, sleeping around and otherwise outrageous behavior, and when failing to reconnect...commits suicide. Such a sad, tragic story. Sigh.