Finished: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (Schwab) In July of 1714, Addie LaRue is a 23 year old young woman who lives in the small French village of Villon with her parents, who are insisting that she finally get married to a young man from the town. Addie has never wanted to live the "standard" life of get married, have children and never set eyes on anything past her village. She longs to be free to do as she pleases, and not belong to anyone...to live life to the fullest. On the evening of the wedding, she runs away to the forest and prays to the gods to please intervene so that she will not have to get married. She forgets a cardinal rule about praying to the gods, though...never pray to the gods after dark, for you'll get a dark god. Sure enough, the devil himself answers her calling and materializes in the form of a handsome young man. Addie can feel his dark presence, though. She begs him to help her be free to live how she wants to, free of belonging to a man. The devil, who she calls Luc, grants her wish...but it will cost her her soul. When she's tired of living her life, she will owe the devil her soul. The deal is struck, but little does Addie know that everything is about to change dramatically. When Addie runs home to her parents, neither of them recognizes her. It's as if she was never their child. She also goes to see her best friend, who also doesn't recognize her. And it gets worse....anyone who she DOES meet, forgets her the minute they leave her company, even if just for a moment. It's as if she doesn't exist. She can live in the moment, but no one remembers her. And, she can't say her name...it won't come from her mouth, so she must always use a different name. She can't write or even draw in the sand. She can also not be hurt without healing instantly, or die. This life of Addie's goes on for 300 years. She makes her way to Paris and nearly freezes to death and starves to death, and she feels all the symptoms of those realities, but her body is just fine. Once a year on the anniversary of their deal, Luc appears and asks if she's ready to surrender and give him her soul. Stubborn Addie never agrees! The story goes back and forth between the 1700's, 1800's and 1900's, as we see Addie "meet" the same people over and over again. She finds a way to leave an impression of herself by having one night stands with artists who paint her portrait. Of course, they fall for her in that one night, and then all over again the next night, and on and on, until she finally moves on, and they've created a piece of art about a woman they think was only in their dreams. Addie manages to travel the world and survives through several wars in her 300 years. She also develops a strangely co-dependent relationship with Luc, and comes to look forward to his visits, since he's the only being who actually knows who she is and that she exists. Sometimes he tortures her and goes years, maybe decades, without visiting her, only to then come and say "surrender?" In 2014, she is living in New York in her usual style. She can't hold a job, so she steals the food she needs. She stays in people's cottages or apartments while they're gone. She can sneak into a building and a doorman will forget he saw her the next instant. One day, Addie goes into a book store and steals a book to read. All she has to do is make it around the corner running and the book store owner who is chasing her will forget why he's running. The young book seller, Henry, is exasperated when he actually catches up to her, and seeing her desperation, just tells her to keep the book and he heads back to the store. The next day Addie takes the book back to the book store, as she usually does, and she expects Henry to look at her as if he's never met her, but instead he says "You! What are you doing here? You've got some nerve returning here after stealing that book." Addie is stunned, shocked, elated, all at once. Someone actually remembers her! She can't believe it and is certain that any moment the bubble will burst, but it doesn't! Addie and Henry begin seeing each other and develop feelings for each other. He finally wants Addie to meet his friends, but she knows what will happen if one of them leaves the table and then comes back. Sure enough, it happens and the friend who leaves the table and comes back says "well, who have we got here Henry?" even though he'd just met Addie in front of the other friend. Addie flees the table and Henry chases after her. She finally has to tell Henry the whole truth, but she doesn't think Henry will believe a word. However, what Addie doesn't know is that Henry had made his own deal with the devil a few month before. He'd been experiencing severe depression on and off for years, and had been rejected in his recent marriage proposal to his girlfriend when he found himself on the rooftop of the building about to jump off and end his life. However, the long hand of the devil reached out his hand and saved him. He gave Henry what he wanted most of all. In exchange for his soul, he'd give Henry one year of being loved and cherished by everyone, instead of ridiculed and rejected. Everyone Henry meets gets foggy-eyed and sees only good in him....they see him as they want him to be. Even his disapproving family is suddenly very loving. His friends already loved him, so they aren't any different, but strangers are. When he meets Addie, though, her eyes don't cloud over either. When she tells him her story about her deal with the devil, he tells Addie about his deal as well. They can't believe they each have a deal, but now realize this is why Henry can remember Addie. Henry fails to tell Addie about the time limit on his life though. As the year anniversary of Henry's deal approaches, he finally tells Addie and she can't accept it. She calls Luc to come and begs him to cancel Henry's deal. As we've known for a long time now, Luc doesn't really want Addie's soul, because then she'll be dead. What he really wants is for Addie to be with him and only him all the time. Addie makes a deal with Luc that she'll stay with him as long as he wants her by his side if he releases Henry from his deal. When Henry's last minute ticks down, Addie tells him what she's done and she begins to fade away. He begs her not to go, but it's too late. She tells him to remember her always and she's gone. Henry goes on to write a book based on all the stories of her life that Addie told him in their months together. He'd written them all in journals for her since she couldn't write anything. A  year after they're parted, Addie sees Henry's book in the book store "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue", and it's her story. He's told her story. In the dedication line he says simply. "I remember you." As Luc comes upon Addie as she's reading, she goes with him as usual, but thinks to herself.....she learned from the master and used very careful wording in her deal. She knows there will come a time that Luc gets tired of her, even if it's just a fight in anger, and then she'll be free of their deal. Until then, she'll have all the patience she needs because she's got all the time in the world. This was a very good book, but took me awhile to read because it was pretty long and went back to the past quite a bit to show us Addie's trials and her relationship dealing with Luc. I preferred the story more when it was just Addie and Henry. A good book though! :-) 

 Finished: Where The Crawdads Sing (Owens) Beautifully written book about a young girl growing up alone in the marshland of North Carolina in the 1960's, deserted by her entire family by the time she is ten, left to fend for herself, living off the land, her only friends the birds and other animals of the marsh, and a nearby town who considers her to be dirty and feral and calls her the Marsh Girl. Kya is only six when her mother walks out on her abusive father, leaving her and her older siblings, never to return. As the siblings leave the abusive shack one by one, no one takes Kya with them, leaving her to deal with their father and eek out a living as best she can. When her father finally leaves for good as well, Kya starts driving his small boat, knowing all the ins and outs of the marshes leading to the town, figures out how to dig for mussels, and then sell them to the man who owns the gas store, Jumpin'. Jumpin' and his wife, Mabel, live in the "colored" section of town and are the only town people who are kind to Kya...until she meets Tate. Tate is a boy who is 3 or 4 years older, who had been a friend of Jodie's, the brother she was closest to. Tate is a friendly, compassionate young boy who ends up teaching Kya to read and write. They are both in sync with the marshes and as they grow older, their deep friendship blossoms into first love. Before Tate goes off to college, her promises Kya that he will be back, but then he breaks that promise. In her heartbreak, Kya ends up having a relationship with the richest boy in town, the popular quarterback, Chase. Chase pursues her and charms her and eventually tells her that he wants to build her a house and marry her someday. He basically gets her to trust him before he plans a trip for them to a motel where she loses her virginity to him. Though he keeps seeing her, Kya doesn't realize that he brags about his sex with the Marsh Girl to his buddies in town, and that he has a pretty blonde girlfriend. When she eventually sees an engagement announcement for Chase and his girlfriend in the town paper, she realizes that she's been made a fool of, and worse, left once again. When he's done with college, Tate comes back to be a wildlife biologist in the area and goes to see Kya to beg her forgiveness and explain why he never came back. She won't have anything to do with him, but when he sees her detailed drawings and descriptions of the intricate marsh wildlife, he convinces her to at least let him submit some of her work to a publisher since no books exist about the coastal wildlife like what she could create. Kya agrees, and though she won't see Tate, she goes on to have more than one successful book! The money from the books allows her to update the inside of the cabin and put some money aside. As the story opens, it has advanced to the year 1969 and the body of Chase has been found disfigured on the ground near the marsh fire tower. He has seemingly been pushed from the tower floor and the small town sheriff has a murder on his hands. Eventually, Kya is put on trial for his murder, but I won't give away what happens. She does end up with Tate and her brother Jodie, who has come back, rooting for her, as well as Jumpin', Mabel and her lawyer, who comes out of retirement just to defend her. There is so much beautiful prose in the book, and such detailed descriptions of the wildlife, and poetry is smattered throughout. I could feel Kya's pain every time she was shunned and every time she was deserted by someone she loved, but I can't begin to imagine the isolation and loneliness of being left at such a young age. The ending was a very nice surprise as the murderer of Chase was revealed. :-)

Finished: The Midnight Library (Haig) When a despondent Nora Seed attempts to take her own life, she finds herself in the midnight library, a place where she wavers between life and death, with a guide to help her choose any book she wants to see what her life could have been (and still could be) if she'd made a simple different choice at any one turn. What if she'd kept up with swimming for her dad and made the Olympics? What if she'd stayed in the band with her brother and become a famous singer? What if she had married the man who she'd broken off her engagement with? This is a very well written book about reexamining the choices you've made in life, your regrets, your "could-have-beens", and finding out that maybe, just maybe, you were on the right path all along. A bit predictable, with shades of It's A Wonderful Life, but an uplifting read when you see that there is always someone whose life you may have affected without even knowing it and that loving yourself goes a long way towards creating a happy life for yourself. :-) 

 Finished: My Sister's Keeper (Picoult) An exceptionally beautiful and heartbreaking story about a couple who decides to have a third child, picking the IVF embryo that is an exact match to their two year old daughter who is diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of leukemia. Years later, when that baby, Anna, is 13 and her ill sister, Kate, is 16, and after Anna has been through numerous medical donation procedures for her sister, Anna brings a lawsuit against her parents to sue them for the right to make her own decisions about donating a kidney to Kate. Kate is finally out of hope when it comes to her cancer treatments, and to make matters worse, her kidneys are failing and she doesn't have long to live. What follows is the beautifully written, emotionally wrenching viewpoint of each party involved: Sara, the mother of both girls; Brian, the father of both girls; Jesse, the older brother of both girls who is spiraling out of control because when tested years ago, he was the one who wasn't able to save his baby sister; Kate, the dying sister; Anna, the donor sister; Campbell, the attorney Anna hires; and Laura, the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna. You will feel as conflicted as Anna does, feel as fiercely as Sara does, feel as protective as Brian does, and feel as hopeless as Jesse does at different times during the story. Just when all is said and done and the trial has been decided, and Anna confides in her lawyer about what she'd really like to do now, one of the biggest shocking endings I've ever read in a book happens and decides everything for everyone. I truly believe my mouth hung open as I read the remaining pages of the book after the shocking event. It's a story that will stay with me for a long time. I'm so thankful I never had to make any of the decisions the members of this family had to make! Thank you to my dear friend Marla for gifting me with this book! :-) 

Finished: Walk the Wire (Baldacci) The next in the Memory Man series which has FBI partners Amos Decker and Alex Jamison heading to North Dakota to investigate a murder in a small fracking town. The two is torn between two powerful families and situated right next to a U.S. military facility. All sorts of characters become suspects, but the game is really upped when  Decker is stalked one night and nearly killed while investigating. To the rescue? Another one of Baldacci's characters with a book series of his own, Will Robie. Will Robie is basically a trained assassin who can get himself out of most any situation. You know if Will Robie is sent in, then it must be serious. It was lots of fun reading this book with  Decker and Robie brought together in one Baldacci book. Though, as busy as December was, I only picked the book up every few days, so the reading was a bit disjointed, but still another clever who-dunnit! :-) 

 Finished: Leave The World Behind (Alam) I haven't read a book this quickly in a long time! This is a page-turning story of a couple, Amanda and Clay, and their children, Archie, 15, and  Rosie, 13, who head out to a remote rental on Long Island for a week long vacation. ***  Warning: This entire blog post will be spoilers, so if you want to read this book, then don't read this. *** The house is lovely, but so remote that there is very low cell service. Despite that, they have a great first day and seem to be a typical family. The first night there, however, they are greeted by unexpected visitors...the owners of the house! A couple in their sixties, Ruth and George, have fled to their second home, because the power has gone completely out in New York City, where they have a 14th floor apartment. Amanda and Clay are shaken to have the couple come to their door so late, and then actually want to stay in their own basement guest room, but they can tell that something strange is happening because Amanda received four "this is not a test" alerts on her cell phone before all the service went completely down. The television channels are all showing just a blue screen, so the young family, and the older couple, though wary of each other, realize they must make this new arrangement work. After a restless night's sleep, the next day Clay leaves to drive into the nearest small town to see if there is any news, but promptly gets lost on all the small roads. Archie and Rosie head to the nearby woods to explore, and Amanda, Ruth and George make small talk trying to get acquainted. That's when it happens...the horrific sound that nearly shatters the window glass and leaves them all squatting on the ground. A sound none of them have ever heard before....like a sonic boom, only 10 fold. The author lets the reader know in various small asides what the characters don't know: some cities have been flooded and people are dying; Ruth and George's elevator man is trapped in the elevator and will suffocate; and the government has sent a super-secret airplane to intercept what they see as a threat off the east coast of the U.S., hence the booming noise. As Amanda, Clay, Archie, Rosie, Ruth and George all have their various reactions, they also try to maintain some semblance of normalcy. In the dark as to what is happening, though, their panic rises bit by bit. When Archie comes down with a fever, and then his teeth begin just falling out, hysteria sets in and they decide they must get him to a doctor! Rosie has disappeared though. Clay and George leave to take Archie to the doctor in the nearest town while Amanda and Ruth search for Rosie. They don't know that she's simply gone off on another trek into the woods to see if she can find the other vacation home she'd seen yesterday before the boom threw them all off. George decides to stop at the only neighbor he knows before heading to the town, but that neighbor, Danny, receives him rather coldly. He is also going through the unnerving weirdness and has a young wife and 4 year old daughter who are frightened. The author lets us know: little does Danny know, but his own wife's teeth will begin falling out soon. Ack!!! As Amanda falls into a further panic unable to find Rosie, she and Ruth begin to snap at each other. Meanwhile, Rosie finds the house and sees that no one is inside. The author lets us know: the owners of the house are stuck in San Diego, unable to get a flight because there are no flights any more AND the mother will never see that house again because she will die in a medical tent set up at the San Diego airport! :-O !! Rosie breaks into the house and finds batteries, flashlights, canned food, and loads her backpack up. She is proud that she has found something that will help out her gang since they never listen to her suggestions. She heads back to the vacation house and THAT IS THE END OF THE BOOK!!! We never find out exactly what is happening in the country or the world, but we are left to wonder how long before worse happens to them all and if anyone will survive whatever is going on! This is a really well written book and I honestly find myself wanting to know more...maybe a sequel?? It's also very scary, especially in these current times, to realize something like this could really happen. 

 Finished: The Vanishing Half (Bennett) Twin sisters Stella and Desiree Vignes have grown up in the small town of Mallard, Louisiana...a town specifically designed by a "light" black man to be a community for "light" only black families. When the twins are sixteen, they run away to New Orleans to try and make new lives for themselves. When Stella finds work as a secretary passing as a white woman, it is the beginning of the end of the close relationship the sisters have always shared. Stella falls in love with and marries her white boss and leaves for California without so much as a goodbye to Desiree. From there, we witness the two different lives of the sisters, but also how they come back together briefly many years later. Desiree stays away from Mallard and her mother long enough to marry a very dark black man and have an even blacker daughter. When she flees her abusive marriage and heads home to Mallard, the entire town is shocked when beautiful Desiree Vignes comes back to live with her mother, with a "dark" daughter in tow. The little girl, Jude, is never accepted by the other children at school, but she finds solace in track and field. In high school she is offered a track and field scholarship to a college in California, and she sets off leaving her own mother and Mallard for good. Desiree, who was the twin who always WANTED to escape Mallard, ends up living there and working in the local diner until decades later when her mother dies. Meanwhile, Jude falls in love and to make extra money, works for a catering company that caters to the rich. She's fired from her job when she drops and shatters a bottle of wine on the floor at a posh party when the hostess of the party finally comes downstairs and Jude sees that she is the spitting image of her mother. It must be her Aunt Stella, who her mother talked of often and, mad as she was at her for leaving, longed to one day see again. Jude is fired by her boss on the spot, but is determined to see if this beautiful woman is, in fact, her aunt. If she is, then she is married to a handsome, rich white man and has her own beautiful, blonde-haired, violet-eyed, sixteen year old daughter, Kennedy, who seems quite the diva....Jude's cousin, if it's true. We finally then get Stella's story and how she lived in constant fear of being found out...so much so that when a black family tries to move into her neighborhood, she's one of the most vocal, speaking out that they can't let any of  "those" people start moving into their neighborhood. Of course, eventually the black family moves in, and Stella becomes friend with the wife, but is ashamed to be seen with her by the other women. Meanwhile, she's so closed off to her own daughter, who longs to know more about her mother, that she doesn't realize she's raising a nightmarish daughter who is going to act out  just to get her attention. When Jude finally finds Kennedy again, Kennedy has dropped out of college and is acting in a show in a local theater. Jude insinuates herself into Kennedy's life by getting a job at the theater, hoping that she'll see Stella one evening if she comes to watch Kennedy. Stella finally shows at one of Kennedy's last shows and Jude confronts her during the intermission...insisting that they are related. Stella freaks out and leaves. She can't have her husband or daughter finding out she's been lying all these years. When Jude and Kennedy have an argument a few days later, Kennedy says something very mean to Jude and Jude, in return, blurts out that Kennedy's mother is her black mother's twin sister. This sets a great journey of discovery in motion for Kennedy, who actually reacts differently than you think she might. She just wants to know if it's true and know about her mother's family. Her mother, though, keeps denying it. Kennedy goes off for a couple of years, traveling the world, trying to find herself. Panicking when she can't get a hold of Kennedy, Stella actually, desperately, heads to Mallard to see if maybe Kennedy has gone there. She has a bittersweet reunion with her own mother, who now has Alzheimer's and acts as if Stella is just home from work, as if she'd never left. The reunion between Stella and Desiree, however, is fraught with much more emotion. Angry at first, Desiree doesn't want Stella anywhere near her, but Stella begs for her forgiveness, and the sisters spend a few days completely wrapped up in each other as if they'd never been apart. Stella must leave and go back to her white life, though, and once again leaves without telling Desiree goodbye. She arrives home only to hear from Kennedy who wants to come home. Stella goes to pick up Kennedy at the airport, and as they embrace, she tells her to get in the car and she'll tell her everything she wants to know...and she does. They just agree to never tell Kennedy's father. Finally, though, Kennedy has the closeness with her mother that she'd missed all her life...and she now understands the fear her mother was living in. Jude, who is still in love with her longtime beau, is now living her dream of going to medical school. When Desiree and Stella's mother finally passes away, Desiree is free to leave Mallard for good and moves to Houston to start her own new life. This is a very moving, well written story which makes me want to investigate more of what this author has written! 

 Finished: Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other (Heughan & McTavish) What a funny, informative and heartwarming book chronicling the road trip around Scotland that Outlander stars Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish took. They took to the road in a camper, taking themselves on an adventure to learn about the history of several different Scottish clans, various wars between clans, visiting iconic battle sites, and even exploring the history of whisky, all while careening around in their camper, or a tandem bike, or a motorcycle with a side car, or a rowboat, etc. They bantered back and forth the entire time, but also shared some very poignant moments together, each one also opening up and sharing a bit about his private life and what his early years of the acting business were like. They are a likable pair and the book was such a fun read. :-) 

Finished: Verity (Hoover) Oh my! This was a creepy, thriller story that ended a bit differently than I thought it would! Near broke and struggling with personal issues, writer Lowen Ashleigh is hired by the husband of best-selling thriller author, Verity Crawford, to finish writing her last three books in her series after Verity is left critically injured in an automobile accident. Jeremy appears to be everything Lowen could want in a man, except he's married to his unresponsive wife who is cared for by a nurse upstairs in their mansion, paid for by Verity's successful writing career. Lowen agrees to finish the books, mainly because the paycheck is huge. When she packs her bag to spend a few days at the mansion, going through Verity's notes and outlines, what she finds instead is a chilling autobiographic manuscript written by Verity, ending just days before her recent accident. As it turns out, Jeremy has suffered more than just the tragic loss of his wife as he knew her. In the past six months he's also suffered the tragic death of one of his eight year old twin daughters, due to a peanut allergy and the tragic death of the other twin daughter in a boating accident. He's left with just himself and his five year old son, living in the house with the semi-comatose Verity. As Lowen reads a different chapter of the manuscript each night, she dives more and more into the nightmare of Verity's psychotic mind...how obsessed she was with her husband loving her more than anyone else...how she tried to abort her twins with a hanger...how she didn't love her daughters but was jealous of them....how she thought for certain that one twin daughter was responsible for giving her sister the fatal peanuts at a sleepover...how she purposely took her remaining daughter out in a canoe and tipped it over, letting her drown without helping her. It's honestly horrific! So, you do end up rooting for Lowen and Jeremy to fall in love. But when Lowen starts seeing Verity up and moving around, without proof for Jeremy to believe her, things start to really get crazy. What a book! I spent the second half of the book convinced that it was Jeremy who had written the manuscript to implicate Verity because HE was really the one who did all the evil things...but that wasn't the big twist at the end. Definitely one of those books that was hard to put down, but also incredibly creepy! 

The Evening and The Morning (Follett) The prequel to one of my favorite books, The Pillars of the Earth, this was a lovely book, with wonderful characters and vividly described towns, churches and homes of the Dark Ages, as Viking attacks on England were quite rampant and women were clearly at the mercy of men, and the poor even more so at the mercy of the rich and ennobled. The story starts in 997, about 140 years before the start of Pillars, and centers on three main characters, Edgar the intelligent young boat builder, Aldred the godly young Prior and the beautiful, smart Lady Ragna, and how they survive one power hungry family, the Ealdorman of Shiring, Wilwulf, and his loathsome step-brothers, Wigelm and Wynstan. Their lives are forever intertwined after a Viking raid on Edgar's small village leaves his father dead and his boat-building business in ruins. He and his mother and two brothers must go inland and begin farming to keep from starving. Meanwhile, young Lady Ragna from Normandy becomes smitten with the older Ealdorman Wilwulf when he comes to ask her father to quit allowing the Vikings to moor their ships off his coastline. Wilwulf becomes equally smitten with Ragna, and she soon makes the journey to England where they are married, happily so for awhile. When it comes to light that Wilwulf had actually been married and "set aside" his other wife and son so that he may marry Ragna, she is devastated. And, although she gives him three sons in quick succession, he soon finds another younger woman to spend his nights with. Aldred is a good man who is a prior at Shiring and wants only to keep his holy vows, as he's also a monk, and to grow the church according to God. Every step of the way he is thwarted by the conniving and deceptive Bishop Wynstan, the oldest of the step-brothers. Wynstan is determined not to lose any control over Shiring to his brother's new wife, but she proves a formidable foe. Ragna, Aldred and Edgar all face setbacks and devastating losses due to Wynstan's manipulations and lies, but they have also become friends who stand up for each other and share the common goal of seeing Wynstan pay for his crimes. In the end, justice is served, but not until after many years of harassment. Towards the end of the book, we realize that the bridge that Edgar had helped build in the town of Dreng's Ferry actually became the "king's bridge" and thus, the name of Dreng's Ferry was changed to Kingsbridge, which is the town at the center of the story in Pillars. After many ups and down, and 900 pages worth of other characters, things finally turn out positively for all three protagonists and I would say that all of the evil people get their due. Another great book by Follett! Now, I hope he writes one that is in between this one and Pillars!