Finished: Just the Nicest Couple (Kubica) A pretty good book...one that picks up a bit more during the last half. It is told in alternating viewpoints by Christian and Nina. Christian is happily married to Lily, and they are expecting their first child after several first trimester miscarriages. He comes home one night to find Lily in a state of panic and finally gets her to tell him what is wrong. Lily teaches high school math and has a good friend there, Nina. Nina is five or six years older than Lily and took her under her wing when Lily began teaching, and they became fast friends. Nina is married to neurosurgeon, Jake. Jake is a bit full of himself and loves living the high life that his salary provides. He and Nina are pretty happy in their marriage until Nina has to start spending weekends with her mom, who has been diagnosed with macular degeneration. Jake is very childish about not getting all of Nina's time, so their marriage has been a bit rocky lately. Lily finally tells Christian that when she went for a walk on the trail in the park that day, she ran into Jake, who convinced her to go down a more remote trail with him to see some deer. Once there, Jake put the moves on Lily and got out of control angry when she told him no. He grabbed her and pushed her down and Lily picked up a rock and bashed him in the head...more than once. She's afraid she might have killed him. Meanwhile, Nina can't believe that Jake has not come home after their fight the night before. More importantly, he hasn't shown up at his work for his patients and surgeries. Christian has Lily take him to the exact spot where everything happened, and there is so much blood, but no body. As Christian panics and moves to erase any evidence of Lily being in the park, weird things start happening at Nina's house. Weird because Christian has snuck in looking for Jake's car key to move his car, which is parked at the park. Nina's mother thinks, with her poor vision, that Jake has returned home briefly when he runs out the door. Nina, who has filed a missing person's report with the police, tells them it's not necessary any more. She still just can't figure out how Jake could have disappeared and not want to see her. Certainly things hadn't been THAT bad. The story unfolds and we find out what really happened in the woods between Lily and Jake, what happened to Jake, and who did it! My guess was right. It's always the one you least suspect. :-) Pretty good book, but not one that kept me up late reading. 

 Finished: One True Loves (Jenkins Reid) Not my favorite Taylor Jenkins Reid book, especially after starting with Malibu Rising and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and then the amazing, Daisy Jones and the Six. Anyway, this one was written earlier and is a solid book, just not one of my favs. :-) It's the story of a woman, Emma, who has moved back home to the small hometown in the northeast, after the death of her husband of one year, Jesse. Jesse was the absolute love of her life...her one true love. They met in high school, realized they were kindred spirits, and then traveled the world together for ten years before finally tying the knot. When Jesse accepts a work assignment right before their first anniversary, Emma asks him not to go, but he says no worries, he'll be back in a flash. Of course, his helicopter goes down over the ocean and his body is never found. The pilot's and co-pilot's bodies are both found. Emma is devastated and refuses to believe Jesse is gone. Her sister finally convinces her that Jesse isn't coming back. Emma breaks down then, and returns home to work at the family bookstore...the one she didn't want to take over as an adult...the one she ran away from. Emma deals with her grief day by day and finally starts going about the town...and working at the book store! She reconnects with another boy from high school, Sam. Sam had always been in love with Emma and was heartbroken himself when she suddenly fell for Jesse. Of course, Emma had no idea how he felt, as they were just the best of friends. Sam is now back in town and teaching music, what he always wanted to do. After gradually dating, and then moving in together, they finally get engaged. Emma loves Sam and loves that he knows her so well. He has become her true love as well. The wedding is only a couple of months away when Emma gets a phone call from a number she doesn't recognize....it's Jesse. He's alive! He's been stranded on an obscure island and trying everything he can to get back to his wife, to his Emma. And, from there the book goes as you'd expect. Emma becomes torn between Sam, who knows the person she is now and loves her for it...and Jesse, who is in love with the girl he left behind who would never have moved back home. Who does Emma end up picking? Of course, you've got to read to find out. :-) 

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

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

 Finished: AfterLives (Gurnah) A very well written book about a subject I know very little about....the colonization of parts of eastern Africa by the Germans in the late 1800's. The Germans brutally swept through the land, destroying villages and intimidating many of the men who lived in the villages to join their security forces. In AfterLives, two of the main characters join the German Schutztruppe, Ilyas and Hamza. Ilyas joins willingly after running away from home. He supports the Germans and comes to respect them. But, he is fighting against his own people. He is fighting against the tribes who try to rise up and revolt about the colonization. Hamza also joins voluntarily, but warily. He's got no other way to exist but to rely on the Germans to feed him and clothe him. The two don't know each other, but we read about their experiences in depth, while also reading about the history of the domination of the Germans in East Africa. The book is written by a Nobel Prize winner and was fascinating to me! Here is the description of the author:

"Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." 

That pretty much sums up the historical, eye-opening aspect to the book. Gurnah weaves his story around Ilyas, Hamza, Ilyas' best friend, Khalifa, and Ilyas' younger sister, Afiya. Before Ilyas leaves to join the Schutztruppe, he's been away with them for years, having run away from home at the age of eleven. He returns home, only to find that he has a sister who is ten years his junior, Afiya. She's only ten when he meets her, but he immediately takes her away from her abusive temporary family. He teaches her to read and write, and both she and Ilyas live with Khalifa, who is older than Ilyas, but has become one of his best friends. When Ilyas departs to rejoin the Germans in their battles, he enlists Khalifa to watch after Afiya. She grows up with Khalifa and his wife, Asha, and never stops wondering when Ilyas will return from the wars. We then turn to Hamza and the story of his experiences in the Schutztruppe. When the Germans are finally defeated by the British, who also want to colonize East Africa, but in a different way, Hamza returns home battered physically and emotionally, seeking out anyone who he may have known from his younger years. Finding no one, he ends up working under Khalifa at his warehouse job. Of course...when Hamza and Afiya meet, they fall in love. It's a slow process, but eventually they are married. Ilyas has still never returned home after several years, and Hamza does his best to find out any information he can for Afiya. Afiya eventually gives birth to a baby boy who they name, Ilyas. When young Ilyas grows up, he goes in search of the uncle he was named after and is finally successful in learning Ilyas' fate. The book ends rather abruptly there, which was a little unsettling, but on the whole, it was a very good book, letting us get to know and care for real people who were deeply affected by the colonization of their home country, first by Germany and then the British. 

 Finished: If We Were Villains (Rio) I really loved this one! Seven students at the small, but exclusive, Dellecher Classical Conservatory are deeply immersed in their Shakespearean curriculum...so much so that they even speak to each other using quotes from Shakespeare quite often in their every day conversations...and they make sense! Oliver, James, Meredith, Richard Wren, Alexander and Filippa are fourth year students, set to graduate at the end of the year. They all live together in one old, classical building, and are the only fourth year drama students. Last year they studied all the comedies, and this year they've finally made it to the tragedies. And, there IS real life drama and tragedy! As they wonder who will be cast in each role for their upcoming main stage production of Julius Caesar, Alexander bets the others that he can name the entire cast already based on how they have all been typecast in previous productions as the hero, the villain, the temptress, the tyrant, the ingenue and the "bit parts". Sure enough, Julius Caesar is cast exactly that way. Richard is pleased to be playing Caesar and never doubted for a moment that he would get the shining lead role. He's played most of the lead roles in the previous year's productions. He's a bit arrogant, and he and Meredith, the beauty, have been dating for over a year. Interestingly, each of the students pretty much has the attributes of the characters they are usually assigned. For instance, James is always cast as the hero, Oliver as the sidekick, Alexander as the villain, Meredith as the temptress, Wren as the ingenue, Filippa as the "go to" character, and Richard as the lead, which is quite often a tyrant. James and Oliver are roommates and the best of friends. Alexander is the one to go to for drugs. Meredith is the seductive, flirty beauty. Wren is the innocent, quiet girl, etc. All of the friends have their own faults...none are perfect, but they are extremely close and the best of friends. I really loved this aspect of the book. I loved that they could all predict how one of the others would feel in a given situation, and how they all rushed to stand beside any one of them who might be hurt or in trouble. When the fourth years are assigned their roles in the annual one night performance, where they perform selected scenes from a play, they are instructed to tell no one their roles! They are to just learn their lines and scenes and be prepared to perform the night of the event. This year's selected scenes will be from Hamlet. Upon receiving their assignments, Richard is clearly livid and has some sort of internal meltdown. When the night arrives, everyone is shocked that James is playing Hamlet and Oliver is playing Banquo. Everyone had assumed Richard would be Hamlet, but he has only a minor role. His behavior becomes more and more volatile, as he becomes verbally and physically abusive to all of them...going so far as to almost drown James after the Hamlet event. We continue to get to know each of the students, and their relationships to each other to the point of really caring for each of these kids. After Richard's behavior escalates even more at dress rehearsal and the first performance of Julius Caesar, a tragedy occurs and one of the students is dead. I won't spoil who it is. This event throws the remaining students into a tailspin as they wonder who could have done what was done. Their lives implode and we only hear the details of all these experiences ten years later as Oliver is released from prison and finally agrees to tell the now retiring detective, who has been on the case since the beginning, the entire truth of what really happened. I can't tell you how much I really loved this book, despite the tragedy. I'd love for there to be a sequel, but then it might just be best left alone with it's jaw-dropping epilogue. :-)

 Finished: The It Girl (Ware) A page-turning who-done-it centered on a group of Oxford students who meet each other the first day of their first year and become best friends who do everything together. Rich and charismatic, April is the titular "it girl". She's got looks, personality, money, charm and a very mischievous, bordering on mean girl, persona. When small town, unsophisticated, not rich Hannah shows up to school, she finds that she's roommates with April. Despite their differences, they hit if of and become the core best friends of the rest of the gang: Ryan, Emily, Will and Hugh. On that first day, when Hannah meets Will, who is handsome, athletic and nice, she falls instantly in love or infatuation, but whatever it is, her feelings never abate. When she unexpectedly realizes that April and Will have become a couple, she's heartbroken, but keeps it to herself. Ryan is sarcastic and opinionated, but best friends with Will. Hugh is shy, nervous and nerdy, but also best friends with Will, having known him since they were young. No-nonsense Emily is super smart and honest. Each of them seems to bend to April's will, almost as if she has something on each one of them. However, before their first year is even over, April is dead...murdered in their dorm room, and Hannah is the person with the evidence to put the accused murderer away. One of the school porters, John Neville, has been very creepy around Hannah and made her extremely uncomfortable. When she sees John Neville exiting the only entrance leading to their dorm room right before she finds April dead, it's enough for the police to arrest him, accuse him of murder, and for a jury to send him to prison. Hannah is so devastated by April's death and the media frenzy that surrounds her as the best friend and main witness, that she leaves school and never goes back. The others manage to finish their degrees. Ten years after the murder, Hannah is now happily married and pregnant and works in a book store in Edinburgh...as far away from Oxford as she could get. Her adoring husband? Will! Will sought Hannah out after graduating and they fell in love and got married. They will never forget April, but their lives have moved on, until the day that John Neville dies in prison. The news sends both of them reeling and sends a reporter who believes in John Neville's professed innocence and wants Hannah's help proving it. This sets in motion a growing tension in their marriage, as Will wants Hannah to let it go. When it comes to light that Will, Ryan, Hugh and Emily all had motives to murder April, it puts Hannah in great danger as she digs deeper. Does she trust the right person? Did her own husband kill April? There are a few red herrings thrown in, but the truth finally comes out in the end, but I'm not giving the ending away. :-)

 Finished: Our Missing Hearts (Ng) A powerful, heartbreaking, but necessary, book! It is beautifully written and is about the very real danger of how a community can begin to ignore the oppression of and discrimination against members of their own community who happen to be "different" from them. The story is centered around Ethan Gardner and Margaret Miu, a Caucasian man and Chinese American woman who fall in love, move in together and have a child they nickname Bird. They happen to be living in an America that has recently passed the PACT act...Preserving American Culture and Traditions. The passing of this law is brought about by the growing instability of America's economy which has incited discord and violence. The leaders of America decide that China is to blame because they have a better economy, are raising prices, beating America, etc. etc. For this reason, Asian people become targets of violence and prejudice. Margaret is aware of what is going on because both of her parents have been murdered by strangers, just because of what they look like. However, when she meets Ethan, who is a linguistics professor at Harvard, and they begin to have a more fortunate income, unlike the majority of Americans, who are still struggling in long lines for food and other products, Margaret is able to put that knowledge aside and concentrate on their baby to be. During her pregnancy, Margaret writes poetry. She's a talented writer and finds a way to put her feelings about being pregnant and what other mothers must feel like into words. She writes a poem called All Our Missing Hearts, which becomes the cornerstone of the book she publishes. When Bird is born, both parents are thrilled. They are loving, caring parents who do their very best for him. In the meantime, the government has implemented a plan that gives authorities the ability to take a person's child from them, for the very slimmest of reasons, and "relocate" them to another family. Ethan and Margaret are aware of what is going on, but like everyone else, they must struggle between keeping their own family safe, or speaking up when an injustice is committed. When Bird is nine, the anti-PACT movement has become much larger and more vocal as people insist that the missing children be reunited with their parents. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Margaret, her poem, All Our Missing Hearts, is used by the dissidents as their slogan. They begin painting red hears on public property and put up flyers demanding that their missing hearts, aka, their children, be brought home. The government now has Margaret on a list, and she and Ethan feel it's only a matter of time before they come and remove Bird from their home. They make the difficult decision for Margaret to exit their lives and go to another city...and...to burn everything that had belonged to Margaret, especially her poems, so Ethan can claim that he completely supports the PACT and has cut his wife and Bird's mother out of their lives. It is utterly heartbreaking. :-(  Bird and his mother were so very close and one day she's just gone from his life. His father refuses to speak of her and tells Bird that they must forget about her. Of course, he still loves her, but Bird looks more like his mother than his father, and he's terrified that Bird will be persecuted in some way. Because a "known dissident and author of their slogan" was his wife, things take a downturn for Ethan and Bird. Ethan loses his job as a professor and can only work as a librarian shelving books day and night. Bird is relentlessly bullied at school, and has only one friend...a girl named Sadie, who happens to be a child who has been relocated because her parents were in extreme and vocal opposition of the PACT. She wants nothing more than to find her parents and be reunited, but she is powerless to do so. When Bird is twelve and Margaret has been gone for three years without a single communication, Bird receives a cryptic letter in the mail from his mother. Bird figures out the hidden meaning behind his mother's letter and decides to go searching for her in New York City. I'm not going to go into any more detail about whether they reunite, and what Margaret has actually been doing all that time, but the entire situation is emotional in so many ways. I encourage everyone to read this excellent book and absorb these characters and situations for yourselves. Not a book to pass up! 

 Finished: Long Shadows (Baldacci) Book #7 in the Memory Man series. The memory man is Amos Decker, a former NFL player (albeit briefly) turned detective, turned invaluable asset to the FBI. Amos suffered a serious head injury which ended his NFL career just a few games in. The injury left him with synesthesia and hyperthymesia. The hyperthymesia means that Amos now has a picture perfect memory, never forgetting a thing that he sees, no matter how small the detail. Unfortunately, this includes the horrific murder scene of his wife and young daughter ten years before. Now, having helped the FBI solve several cases, with his young journalist turned FBI agent partner, Alex, Amos finds himself on his own as Alex has moved to New York to finish her career there. When Amos is assigned a new partner, Freddie White, a feisty single mom who fights hard to work her way up the FBI ladder, he reluctantly goes with her to Florida to solve the murder of a popular judge. As usual, with lots of twists and turns, Amos figures out whodunnit, with some very capable help from Freddie. Suspects include her ex-husband, her security guard lover, a possessive man she dated, and even her neighbors. There's also a Slovakian element to the story! And, by the end of the book, after everything is wrapped up, Amos has gained a very high respect for  Freddie, and vice versa. They've even become friends as well as partners. I can see Freddie definitely being around for more crimes to solve. And, don't worry....Alex is around just a bit. Amos calls her a few times for info in this story and they are as close as ever. :-) I enjoy the series because I do like Amos Decker, and the stories are usually pretty good. 

 Finished: Mad Honey (Picoult and Boylan) A very good book about two teenagers, Lily and Asher, who fall in love when she moves to his small town. Both have been raised by single moms who escaped extremely abusive husbands. Both moms have tried to protect their children all their lives by keeping them away from their fathers. Asher's mom, Olivia, has moved back to the quaint New Hampshire town, back to her old family farm, where her father was a beekeeper. She now takes just as much care of the bees and sells the carefully curated honey and various honey products. Lily's mom, Ava, is a national park ranger who has taken a job in this remote town so she and her daughter can start over. Lily and Asher are just 18, but very much in love. They "get" each other...especially their like circumstances of having no father in their lives. They do go through a couple of fights, and sometimes Asher shows a temper that Olivia worries about. She worries that he may have inherited his father's abusive nature. When Lily and Asher have a big fight, and Lily won't speak to him to the point of missing several days of school, Asher is beside himself and constantly texts and calls her. When he gets no response, he finally goes over to her house, only to find her dead at the foot of the stairs. Or, at least, that's his story. Soon, Asher is arrested and put on trial for Lily's murder. That's when the story really shows it's twists and turns. We hear the story from Olivia's viewpoint, and from Lily's viewpoint. We meet both of the horrible fathers, as well as a couple of best friends, an old flame of Olivia's from her high school days, who happens to be the police chief in town now, and we meet a trans teen trying desperately to hang on to the secret they are afraid that no one would understand. I don't want to give away any spoilers. This book is good though! Jodi Picoult always tells a good story, and she does so just as well with her co-author. The characters are very well developed and you can't help but grow attached to them! :-)