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

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

Finished: The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) Joan Didion's memoir of the year after her husband, writer John Dunne's, sudden death. For some reason I was thinking this book would be more uplifting, but it was really a study in the depth of grief, many of the experiences so similar to what I experienced after my brother's death. Things like this "One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" I can't tell you how real a moment something like that is. Well, I mean, you understand if you have lost someone close to you. Anyway, in writing what her first year without her husband of forty years was like, Didion also writes "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention." I thought that was very profound as well and wonder if I've been grieving for almost twenty years, but not yet dealing with the grief? Hmm... In Didion's book, the other horrifying event was that her newly married daughter happened to be in the ICU battling pneumonia which had morphed into life-threatening sepsis. I'm sure the stress of that added to her husband's heart attack. How completely shocking and awful for Joan Didion. :-( I'm honestly surprised she was able to write about her experiences, but I'm glad she did. When she writes about bounding into the house, eager to talk to John about something from her day, only to realize that he wasn't there to talk to, I know that exact feeling. I remember so completely intuitively wanting to call my brother after seeing Titanic to compare notes, only to realize, yet again, that he wasn't there to talk to. Anyway....a very deep and moving book, but certainly one that takes me back to all these thoughts rather than propelling me forward!

Finished: The Fixer (Malamud) Pulitzer Prize winning novel about, Yakov Bok, a Jewish man in 1911 Russia who is falsely accused of killing a young Christian boy, and imprisoned in detestable conditions before finally being brought to trial! The book ends as Yakov is finally being carried by carriage to his trial, so book readers never know his fate (though it is assumed that he will be found guilty, even though there is no evidence against him). In fact, The Fixer is based on the infamous real life story, imprisonment, trial and release of Russian Jewish man, Menahem Beilis. In real life, enough people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, apparently cried out for justice when it was obvious that Beilis had been falsely accused of a "blood ritual" killing of a young boy. In the book, very few people cry out, and some who do are actually imprisoned themselves, but there is a lawyer who believes in Yakov Bok, so we are led to believe there might be hope for the right verdict, but most likely not. Throughout his horrific prison trials, the prosecutor tries to get Yakov to confess many times, telling him it will go easier on him. In reality, the prosecutor actually suspects the child's mother of being involved in the murder, but since he's got a Jew in prison and Tsarist Russia was getting uncomfortable with giving Jewish people their rights, the prosecutor intends to make an example of Yakov Bok. Meanwhile, Yakov deeply examines both is life and the bigger world that he has been living in. The book is really a wider statement on how people who are feared are terribly mistreated. I guess it was a good Pulitzer choice, but again, it was one of those very depressing books that makes you question where the goodness in the world is or was.

If on a winter's night a traveler (Calvino) Well, a very interesting book, with a neat hook, that started with promise, but ended up dragging to the end. At the beginning of the book, the author talks to the reader and tells them to sit back and enjoy the book. In the first chapter we start reading about a train traveler on a winter's night who disembarks at a tiny train station where some suspense ensues, and just as the chapter is getting to a climax, it ends. The first line of the book is "If on a winter's night a traveler". The next chapter is told from the viewpoint of "the reader". The reader has been reading this book about the traveler and suddenly when he gets to the climax, there's an error in the book and the pages begin repeating themselves! Over and over they repeat, the only pages being the pages he's already read. Anxious to finish the story and to get a book that is not defective, the reader takes it back to the bookstore where he bought it. The bookseller is so very sorry and says they have had a few books like this of Calvino's latest and tells him the correct book that finishes the story is actually by a Polish author. The reader runs into a pretty woman there for the same reason....to return her defective Calvino book. Her name is Ludmilla and she becomes known as the second reader. So, the reader and Ludmilla exchange a bit of talk, and he asks for her phone number so they can compare the end of the story when they get to it. The next chapter begins in what each of them think is a continuation of the Calvino book, but in actuality, it is an entirely different book with the first line "outside the town of Malbork". At first the reader is dismayed that this is a totally different book than the first one, but he again gets caught up in the story, which is a completely different story, which again ends abruptly right at a climatic point! In this case, the remainder of the book's pages are blank! The reader and Ludmilla get together to try and get to the bottom of things, and then the book gets rather perverse. Every other chapter, the author basically talks to the true reader about reading and writing...or we hear the story of a crazy man whose life mission is to go around creating these false books...or we read the diary of an author who has HAD some of his books hijacked and mistranslated into completely different stories in other languages. So, after each one of those chapters, we get another intriguing chapter of another new book, with a different first line. This goes on until we have read ten different stories that all end right at a crucial point. We never find out the ending of any of the stories or the fates of those characters. It was a clever idea, and people have called Calvino a genius in writing this book, but I felt it got too bogged down with his droning on and on about the expectations of both readers and authors in his "in between" chapters. And, of course, I figured out early on that the first sentence of each book made one long paragraph that kind of made sense, but didn't tie anything together. The reader and Ludmilla have a bit of a love story and are married by the end. For me, I was left really just wanting to know the ending of about eight of the stories. :-) I'm glad I read the book, because it was on a list of "must reads" that I'd been putting off. Done and done and I'm none the worse for it, but really none the wiser either. :-)

Finished: Housekeeping (Robinson) I'm having to let this book sink in. Very beautiful prose, at times bordering on stream of conscious that gets a bit tedious, but very moving piece on how profoundly the loss of loved ones affects a family, specifically, two young girls left behind when their mother commits suicide. This remembering of her mother by the narrator, Ruthie, as a teenager, resonated very strongly in me:

There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

I guess this is really pretty much a depressing tale. The girls, Ruthie and Lucille, one year apart in age, are left on the porch of their grandmother's house in a tiny town in the "west" near a huge lake by their mother who proceeds to go and drive her car off a cliff into the lake. This is the same lake that her own father had died in years before when the train he was riding in (on the railroad he worked for) plunged off the bridge traveling over the lake and perished in the depths of the water. I suppose that would set the tone for the mother's life. In any event, she doesn't even let her own mother know that she's leaving the girls there, and they spend hours on the porch alone, thinking their mother is coming back before their grandmother gets home and finds them. The girls are then raised by their grandmother for a few years until she passes away. Then, their mother's sister, who has become a homeless drifter, comes back to town when she hears of her mother's death and she attempts to continue raising the girls who are now in their teens. It's really a recipe for disaster since the aunt, Sylvie, isn't really "all there" herself. Ruthie grows close to her, however, and starts to become just like her, while Lucille determines to break away and lead a more normal life. In the end, Lucille removes herself and goes to live with one of her teachers. When the sheriff informs Sylvie that there will be a hearing to see about the removal of Ruthie from her care, Sylvie and Ruthie burn down the house and run away in the night across the huge expanse of the railroad bridge!! They barely make it across by daylight, where they hop on the morning train just as it begins to cross. Sylvie is going to take Ruthie and teach her to become a drifter. The rest of the town, including Lucille, is left thinking that Sylvie and Ruthie perished off the bridge into the lake which had already claimed the lives of Sylvie's father and Ruthie's mother. They don't ever let Lucille know any differently since they don't want to be caught. I totally did not understand the ending, and had to reread it three times. sigh. Ruthie was just kind of rambling on about what Lucille must be doing and how maybe she was waiting in a cafe in Boston for her to show up or her mother, but they never would? Other than the kind of weird ending, there were so many beautiful passages in the book. I'll put a few more of them down. I think I definitely need to read a book that isn't so depressing the next time around, though!

I always love descriptions involving wind. Here, a description of how the spirit passes on:

....just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. 

Ruthie describing her family: Then, too, for whatever reasons, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. 

And this last one I just visualized instantly because I have some of these exact old pictures that belonged to my parents with the same black paper on the back having been torn from their old photo albums to give to us:

There was a shoe box full of old photos, each with four patches of black, felty paper on the back. These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. 

Finished:  Fool Me Once (Coben) Another great page-turner by one of my favorite current authors, with one of his twistiest endings yet! Maya is a former helicopter pilot who fought in Afghanistan, but was discharged from the military after accidentally ordering the shooting of a vehicle with civilians in it while trying to rescue some of her comrades. Now home in the states, she suffers from PTSD nightmares while trying to raise her two year old daughter, Lily. And, that's not the worst of it. Maya's husband has been murdered. :-( As if that wasn't tragic enough, Maya's sister had been murdered while she was in Afghanistan. Needless to say, her world is reeling. When Maya finds out that the same gun was used to kill her sister and her husband, she is determined to figure out what is going on, all on her own. Matters only become more complicated when Maya views her secret nanny cam and the impossible happens....a man sits down on the couch and plays with Lily...and Lily knows him. When he turns towards the camera, Maya sees Joe's face!!! Could he possibly be alive? As the mystery deepens, Maya speeds around figuring things out. The ending is quite a shocker as we find out first who killed Joe, and then why...and then what actually happens to Maya in the end. I'm always so disappointed when my Harlan Coben books are done!!!

Finished: Arrowsmith (Lewis) Pulitzer Prize winning book about a scientist named Martin Arrowsmith that took me forever to read because it was truly so boring. I believe Sinclair Lewis is more acclaimed for his Babbitt and Main Street, but since he didn't win the Pulitzer for either of those he was maybe awarded it for Arrowsmith as a consolation? Anyway, none of the characters, including Martin, are very compelling or likeable, so that always makes it hard for me to be interested in them or care about them. Martin goes through medical school with a bunch of guys, most who are only concerned about how much money they can make in the future. Martin, on the other hand, just wants to work on experiments in the lab. His mentor is Dr. Gottlieb, who is the one professor who understands him because he is also interested more in making the scientific discoveries than getting rich being a doctor. Anyway, Martin does meet someone, Leora, fall in love, move to her podunk hometown, and become the town doctor for awhile, but his heart isn't into it. He does eventually end up back in a major lab and discovers a potential cure for the bubonic plague. He travels to a tropical island that is being ravaged by the plague and become relatively famous when his cure works. Leora, however, who had insisted on going with him, becomes sick and dies. Martin makes his way back to the states and marries a rich woman who wants to change him from the all-hours-of-the-night lab worker to a socializing socialite. He eventually chucks that life (and their young son) for a cabin in the woods to go back to his first love, working on experiments hoping to cure another disease. I've obviously left out alot of detail, but it simply wasn't that interesting to me. So glad it's over! I think I'll read a page-turner next. :-)

Finished: The Lake House (Morton) Another pretty good Kate Morton page-turner, though this one didn't keep me quite as engaged. Once again the story centers around the secret mystery in a great manor house in England. The Edevane family, Eleanor, Anthony and their three daughters, Deborah, Alice and Clemmie, are living what seems to be a carefree life at their lake house in the country when finally a son is born, Theo. Theo is twelve years younger than the youngest daughter and the light of every one's life! Unfortunately, though, Anthony is plagued by flashbacks from World War I, where he went through the horrors of the trenches. He is particularly disturbed by the horrific memories of his dearest friend, Howard, like a brother to him, who decided to desert the army to be with the young French woman and her child who he has fallen in love with. Though Howard is an officer, he decides to help them escape, but the plan is foiled by the crying baby. Howard is then shot as a deserter. :-( Anthony forever blames himself, and after young Theo comes along, his bursts of "shell shock" violence get worse as he insists on making the baby quit crying. Meanwhile, Eleanor has stuck by her husband and kept his secret since neither of them want their girls to know of his illness. One night, during the annual festival at the lake house, complete with dancing, drinking and fireworks, Eleanor sets a plan in motion that affects the family for the rest of their lives. When they all wake up in the morning, baby Theo is gone. Kidnapped? Murdered? Wandered off? The mystery is never solved. Well, not solved while Eleanor and Anthony are still alive. Seventy years later, a young female detective, Sadie, has been given a month's leave for getting too emotionally involved in her own case of a young mother who left her child alone in an apartment and disappeared. The young mother's own mother suspects foul play, but the police write it off as a runaway mother. Detective Sadie Sparrow feels otherwise, but her insistence on pursuing the case gets her a suspension. When she goes to spend that time off with her grandfather, she gets caught up in the old cold case of the missing Theo Edevane. Her grandfather lives close to the estate where the tragedy occurred so many years before, Loeanneth. Sadie delves into the old library clippings about the kidnapping/possibly murder and discovers that the middle daughter, Alice, is still alive at 86 and the prolific detective novelist, A. Edevane. When Sadie finally gets in touch with Alice, and her thirtyish assistant, Peter, the pieces all start to fall together. Alice has spent years thinking she was the cause of Theo's disappearance because she'd written a wild story about the kidnapping of a toddler from his rich parents as a teenager and shared it with an estate gardener who she realized was in terrible need of money. All these years she has thought herself responsible, but Sadie and Clive,  a retired police officer who was the youngest member of the force during the Edevane case, figure everything out when Alice gives them permission to enter Loeanneth and go through her father's notebooks and her mother's letters. They all go from believing that perhaps Anthony Evedane accidentally killed Theo in a fit of shell shock, with Eleanor helping him to cover it up, to finding out the real truth...which for once, I might add, is a happy ending. :-) It took me much longer to finish this book because I just couldn't get quite as engaged, but all in all, though a little bit predictable, it was still a good Kate Morton book....and I will probably read more of hers! :-)

Finished: The Able McLaughlins (Wilson) The 1924 Pulitzer Prize winner about a community of Scottish immigrants who have settled in Iowa during the Civil War years...and specifically about the McLaughlin family. We find out quickly enough that the McLaughlin's have thirteen children, but the story focuses on their beloved son, Wully, who has been to fight in the Civil War. He arrives home one day after being held as a prisoner of war in the south. He has escaped and takes refuge at home! His mother, father and siblings are beyond delighted, but after nursing Wully back to health, realize that he's got to go back to the army. Before he goes, though, he runs an errand for his mother and meets neighboring farm girl, Chirstie. He is immediately smitten, as is she. They share an emotional kiss, and then he is off back to the war. He's kept under lock and key by his own army, as are all the soldiers who escaped, but didn't come right back so were considered deserters. Finally, a northern general pooh poohs that idea and frees the young men, but Wully is once again sick and after a few months, honorably discharged and sent home to recover. When he's back on his feet, he rushes over to see Chirstie, only to have her violently rebuff him. It takes some time, but he finally learns from her that in recent months, her cousin, Peter, had forced himself upon her and now she was expecting a baby. Furious, Wully goes to find Peter and makes him leave and never come back. Wully then marries Chirstie and suffers the disdain of his own parents and the community when they all realize that Chirstie's baby is coming so soon that Wully must have had his was with her before their wedding. Wully lets himself be shamed and plans to raise the baby as his own, and makes Chirstie promise not to tell anyone the truth. Eventually, Chirstie does tell Wully's own mother, and she restores her worshipful opinion of her son...but doesn't let him know that she knows. Wully and Chirstie build their home on McLaughlin land that his father had set aside, and happily raise baby Johnnie. Johnnie is the light of the family, and all are happy...until one day Peter comes back and approaches Chirstie when she's alone in the house with the baby! He rips her sleeve and she runs screaming from the door to get Wully. Wully hunts and hunts for Peter, determined to kill him but he's nowhere to be found. Many worrisome months go by, and Wully decides that they can't spend all their days looking over their shoulders, especially with Chirstie having to be way out on the farm alone while he's working the fields, so he decides that they'll give up the farming, which has been quite successful, and move to town. While visiting town, Wully is notified that Peter is actually lying in a nearby stable dying. The townsfolk ask Wully if he'll take Peter back in his wagon to his family to die, and he refuses. When Chirstie finds out, she begs Wully to stop the wagon and take Peter to his family. She hates Peter as much as he does, but it isn't right to let him die alone. They eventually go back to get him, and the ride back is terribly stressful, without a word or smile. Then suddenly, baby Johnnie blurts out his very first complete sentence, and Chirstie turns to Wully with the most beautiful, loving smile. They are both so happy! Peter has lifted his head and witnessed how much in love they are. Wully notices that Peter sees that and is instantly full of forgiveness rather than vengeance. He sees that it must hurt Peter more than anything else possibly could to see that Chirstie loves Wully. With that, the story ends as they continue to drive Peter to his folks. The story is pretty good, but a little, hmmm, what's the word...just a little matter-of-fact like many of the earlier novels have seemed to me. It did keep me interested though! More characters were delved into and a good sense of the upbringing of the Scottish immigrants was represented, and of the community pulling together in what was assuredly a hard life on the cold plains. And, I'm glad that Wully and Chirstie got to end up having a happy ending. :-)