Ask the Passengers

Author: A.S. King
Pages: 293


Loved this book! It was a little slow in places but Astrid has so much stacked against her, especially in her home life and it's great to see her come out of it with a sense of humor and love. I recommend it!
cover blurb:

Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions . . . like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.

In this truly original portrayal of a girl struggling to break free of society's definitions, Printz Honor author A.S. King asks readers to question everything--and offers hope to those who will never stop seeking real love.

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"Dracula" by Bram Stoker

As a fan of vampire stories, I was looking forward to reading the most famous one of all - "Dracula."  However, I was disappointed at how slow it moved due to what I think was an overabundance of description.  Written in 1897, it is told in epistolary format; that is, it is told through the journals and notes of most of the major characters (though not Count Dracula).  Although this allows the reader to see the actions of the novel explained by various characters rather than an omnipresent narrator, I found Stoker to be way too wordy for it to be very effective.  Not until the final pages does the action pick up when the main characters are finally able to come face to face with the Count.

It was interesting to see just how much of what has become the popular idea of "Dracula" was really in the novel.  One thing I noticed is that Count Dracula does not believe Mina Harker to be his dead wife reincarnated centuries after her suicide as several modern versions of the story have stated.  I was surprised to learn that not only can the Count become a bat but also a dog, a wolf, and mist.  I can see how this book terrified readers when it was first published, especially women, to whom the Count was especially malevolent.

I'm glad that I finally read this classic tale but am disappointed that I did not enjoy it.  402 pages.

Amethyst by Lauraine Snelling

Amethyst Colleen O'Shaunasy is sent to Dakotah Territory to locate and return her nephew, Joel, for her obnoxious father. Once there it becomes apparent that Joel prefers ranch life to city life. Amethyst starts to see the appeal, and decides to stay herself. As the worst blizzard ever ensues, the families of Dakotah Territory struggle to survive. Book four in the Dakota Treasures series.320 pages.

Opal by Lauraine Snelling

Opal Torvald is settling into life in the Dakotah Territory just fine. Even though it is hard work, ranching is her passion. Then one day while swimming, she is confronted by a drifter who wants to do her harm. She is saved by her friend, Atticus, who later is beaten for his chivalry. Now Opal has lost her feeling of security and suffers greatly from guilt.

In the meantime, Reverend Jacob Chandler discovers a son, Joel, he never knew he had. They head to the Dakotah Territory to start a new life. Jacob thinks he has left all ties to the church behind, but God continues to guide him into new opportunities. This is book three in the Dakotah Treasures series. 348 pages.

Pearl by Lauraine Snelling

Pearl Hossfuss decides to teach in Little Missouri in the Dakotah Territory rather than marry a man of her father's choosing in Chicago. Carl Hegland, a young carpenter, loses his job in Minneapolis and heads to Medora in the Dakotah Territory, where building jobs are plentiful. Carl and Pearl meet at the boarding house, Dove House, where their quiet friendship blossoms into love. Book two in the Dakotah Treasure series. 349 pages.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author: Mark Twain
Pages: 366

I started this book many, many years ago and never finished it. I decided to re-start it again and I loved the adventure and sweet boys in Huckleberry Finn and toward the end Tom Sawyer. Doing the right thing by Jim and getting into adventures the whole way.


A young runaway boards a raft and sets off down the Mississippi, setting in motion a series of memorable adventures that have intrigued readers of all ages for over a century. Huck Finn and his loyal companion, the escaped slave Jim, form one of literature's greatest friendships.

206 bones

by Kathy Reichs

Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist, has problems.

It's pitch black, and she can't see a thing. She's hurt, so moving is laborious and painful. When she does manage to move one limb, the others move with it. So she's bound hand and foot in a dark place that's cold and wet.

When she does manage to free a hand, it lands in something wet and yielding. The stench indicates she just put her hand into a decaying corpse. She's been buried in what seems to be an occupied grave.

Through a series of flashbacks, the events that got her in this pickle are revealed. Bit by bit, she pieces together what happened, who did it, and why.

audio: 10 hours
text: 384 pages

The rope

by Nevada Barr

For those who enjoy the Anna Pigeon series, here's where Anna's life in the Park Service all began.

We see Anna just as she leaves New York and starts to work as a seasonal employee. She doesn't love the natural environs yet - she's just trying to escape the pain she suffers in her beloved New York City. And she doesn't yet have the skills necessary for the world of the nation's parks - she's a very different person from the woman we've come to know from previous books.

Another page turner (or whatever the audio equivalent is), I listened to it almost straight through.

audio: 13 hours
text: 357 pages

Anne of the Island

By L. M. Montgomery

260 pages

While waiting for a couple of books to become available from MRRL, I decided that one more stop in my Montgomery collection couldn't hurt, so I hunted down one of my favorite Anne books.  This one follows Anne through her college years, and is as sweet and refreshing as I remembered from my last re-read.

Further Chronicles of Avonlea

By L.M. Montgomery

208 pages

Why stop at just one set of chronicles?  Several of the stories featured in this set were much the same as the first volume of short stories, but there were darker tales weaved in as well.  The rosy glow is off-set and deepened by darker realities in Montgomery’s later books, so this volume is in keeping with the arch of her work.

Chronicles of Avonlea

By L. M. Montgomery

192 pages

After the emotional turmoil of Grapes of Wrath, I decided to turn to my old friend Montgomery for bit of light reading.  I had never read this set of short stories, and they were as sweet and old-fashioned and pleasantly distracting as I had hoped. 

The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

464 pages

I cannot write anything profound about this book that has not already been written.  The tale of the Joad family is sad, harrowing, moving, uniquely American yet universal.   I was alternately maddened, exhausted and touched throughout the reading.

All creatures great and small

by James Herriot

This is a series of stories from a veterinarian's life in rural England in the early 1900s.

I really enjoyed this book, and found it very cozy and comforting. It's written in a way that lends itself to pacing it out and reading short sessions, but I found myself listening to it almost straight through.

Colorful characters and the author's love for the animals, people and countryside about which he writes made the stories rich, comforting and compelling to me.

audio: 16 hours
text: 442 pages

Titan

by Ben Bova


Sci-fi? Soap opera? I wasn't sure how to classify this one. This is a Hugo Award winning author, but I just couldn't get into this story. Some sections were great, but the sections focusing on the politics and the romantic entanglements and the who's-stabbing-whom-in-the-back seemed forced.

That said, there are some interesting facets to this story, though they may seem mundane at first glance. Outcasts are banished from Earth and sent to the outer reaches of the solar system. Only the outcasts are not the types you might expect. They're sent out on a ship, but it's unlike many you encounter in sci-fi.

audio: 14 hours
text: 464

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins

I'm a year behind Sarah on this one (the hold queue was really long), but my reaction was very similar to hers.

I zipped through this book. I needed to know what happened next. Who survived? What devilry did the game masters have planned next?

And now, I need to read the rest of the trilogy. I need to know what happens.

audio: 10.5 hours
text: 384 pages

The Fear Index by Robert Harris

(Posted for Paul Mathews)

This is the paperless company of the future. The company of the future will have no workers and no managers. The computer program has taken over it all. 

Audio:  11 hrs. 1 min.
Print:  304 pages.

Cordoba in Focus, editied by J. Augustin Nunez

We enjoyed a vacation in Spain this year, and visited a number of historical sites.  We stopped in Cordoba for just a day to see the Mosque, which was built in several phases between A.D. 785 and A.D. 987.  You may have seen photos of this mosque, as it is famous for its many rows of columns topped with double red and white striped arches.  While we took many photos, I also purchased this guidebook, which was available in six or seven languages.  The text consists of articles on the history and sites of Cordoba, and gives a good overview of the construction of the mosque, with many good photos. While the translation is clumsy in places, the book filled my desire to get a good description of how this fantastic site was constructed. 94 pages.

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Vol. 2 of the Hunger Games series.  This was my treat for a vacation read.  There have been plenty of reviews of this series, and I generally agree that this 2nd volume is slower to get moving, but has a good cliffhanger finish.  The story starts with Katniss and her partner, Peeta, taking their victory tour for winning the Hunger Games.  During the tour, they visit each of the districts, and learn of the smoldering rebellion.  In this volume, Katniss moves from innocent to naive and sometimes clueless, to the point where the people really plotting the rebellion leave her out of the plannning, so she won't inadvertently mess it up.  The second half has the action that's expected, and leading well into the final book.
400 p.

MURDER AT MONTICELLO and MURDER ON THE PROWL, Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown

I read lots of book reviews and love to listen to interviews with authors on NPR.  An interview with Rita Mae Brown about her latest collaboration with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, Sneaky Pie for President, led me to checkout and read these books in the “Mrs. Murphy Mysteries” series.

A small town in Virginia, a cast of characters who all know each other and think they know everything about each other but don’t.  The tiny post office serves as town information central and its postmistress, Mary Minor Haristeen, known to all as Harry, is the biped heroine.

 

There’s a four-legged cast as well, Harry’s tiger cat, Mrs. Murphy, her Corgi dog, Tucker, and Pewter, the next door cat who frequently eats, stays-over and adventures w/Mrs. Murphy and Tucker.

 

There’s a lot of chatting going on among the humans and the animals “converse” w/each other as they seek out clues and solve the murder mysteries ahead of the humans.

Characters and dialogue are believably written, on the whole, except for all the murders; hard to accept multiple murders occurring in one small town. It’s mostly fun reading but a little too much background trivia for my taste, for example:  “throwing her alpaca shawl, deep raspberry, over her wildly overpriced Wathne coat”.  There’s lots of detail about taking care of horses; again not my thing.

 

Bantam 1994, 298 p. and Bantam 1998, 230 p.

WOLF HALL, Hilary Mantel

No, not another supernatural novel about wolves, this is a novel of historical fiction telling the story of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII.  Winner of the Man Booker prize for fiction in 2009, I became aware of the author through an NPR interview (of course!) upon the occasion of the spring publication of the sequel, Bring Out the Bodies.

I was poised to be critical reader since I love reading historical fiction and I spent an entire semester as an undergraduate history major studying English history. I, like many others, think of Cromwell as mostly an ambitious villain.

Mantel turns him into a real multi-dimensional person.  I was continually amazed by the detailed description of the place and time and her ability to write dialogue seamlessly into the historical narrative.

I became totally immersed in the 16^th century world of England reading this extraordinary novel:  six sections, a five-page character list. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! I’m now on a wait list for the sequel.

 

Holt 2009, 532 p.

THE LAST WEREWOLF, Glen Duncan

Jacob Marlowe, afflicted by the Curse for 200 years, thinks he is the last of his kind.  This is definitely NOT your warm and fuzzy werewolves of the Twilight series.  The werewolves here kill and eat (devour!) their human victims.

Intermittently written as a journal, Jake inserts “dear reader” into his life story as someone who leads two simultaneous lives, the human and the “wulf”.

Hunted by WOCOP (World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomenon), the story takes on a kind of Jean Valjean pursuit with a cast of characters including vampires with their own unique pursuit of Jake.

This novel is a model of duality; elegant subtle descriptive passages and crude graphic sexual content...the novel is ravishing in all its iterations.

 

Dear Reader, be warned; the plot is mesmerizing and “bloody” horrific.

 

Knoft, 2011, 293 p.

Knowledge of angels / Jill Paton Walsh

Set on a fictional island in medieval Europe, Paton Walsh creates a fable in which the characters attempt to prove the existence of God.  In center of the debate is Palindor, a castaway from a distant land, quite different from the island's society, who is saved by a simple fisherman.  Palindor does not believe in God, and as such is to be condemned as an atheist. The island's clergy, taken with his reason and his new ideas, attempt to save him from certain death by theological reasoning.  A wolf-child being raised in a rural convent is saved as a sort of Plan B, if logic doesn't work, to prove that knowledge of God is innate.  Fascinating story, and one which leaves the reader with much to think about when the last page is turned.  268 p.