82. The Boy From the Woods by Harlan Coben

listened on my Audible, purchased
narrated by Steven Weber!!
Unabridged audio (
2020 Grand Central Publishing
384 pgs.
Adult Mystery/Suspense
Finished 5/21/2020
Goodreads rating: 4.07 - 16,725 ratings
My rating: 5
Setting: Contemporary upstate NY

First line/s:  "How does she survive?  How does she manage to get through this torment every day?"

My comments :  Another excellent mystery from Harlan Coben.  The protagonist is a man who, as a boy, was found living by himself at seven or eight years old, in the middle of the woods in New York state, with no memory of his past, his name, or even how he knew how to read.  As an adult he is somewhat of a super-guy: smart, fearless, military background and loyal to a local family that became HIS family of a sort.  The 70ish year old matriarch of that family, a female lawyer, is investigating a perplexing mystery with all sorts of twists and turns involving a wealthy family, a spoiled teenage son, a bullied girl, and a shady guy in politics.  Read brilliantly by Steven Weber, this was super enjoyable.

Goodreads synopsis:  In the shocking new thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Run Away, a man whose past is shrouded in mystery must find a missing teenage girl before her disappearance brings about disastrous consequences for her community . . . and the world.
          The man known as Wilde is a mystery to everyone, including himself. Decades ago, he was found as a boy living feral in the woods, with no memory of his past. After the police concluded an exhaustive hunt for the child's family, which was never found, he was turned over to the foster system.
          Now, thirty years later, Wilde still doesn't know where he comes from, and he's back living in the woods on the outskirts of town, content to be an outcast, comfortable only outdoors, preferably alone, and with few deep connections to other people.
          When a local girl goes missing, famous TV lawyer Hester Crimstein--with whom Wilde shares a tragic connection--asks him to use his unique skills to help find her. Meanwhile, a group of ex-military security experts arrive in town, and when another teen disappears, the case's impact expands far beyond the borders of the peaceful suburb. Wilde must return to the community where he has never fit in, and where the powerful are protected even when they harbor secrets that could destroy the lives of millions . . . secrets that Wilde must uncover before it's too late.

38. The Silver Star - Jeannette Walls

audio read by the author (it was okay, but I've heard better, no offense Ms. Walls)

2013, Simon & Schuster Audio

7 unabridged cds

288 pgs.

Written for adults, but I think it's almost more YA

Finished 9/9/2013

Genre: HistFiction (1970 America-smalll town CA, but mostly rural VA)

Goodreads Rating: 3.64

My Rating: Liked it (3) 

TPPL

My comments:This is my first Jeannette Walls, and I enjoyed the story. Bean, the 6th grade protagonist, was a feisty, gutsy first person narrator. I'm not sure why this is billed as an adult novel, though, I would definitely consider it a young adult novel.  Sure there are some heavy-ish issues, but minor compared to some of the current YAs out there.  I enjoyed the 1970 spin on things (the mother sure seemed bipolar, but that would not have been the terminology in 1970), though other than the integration issues, it had a very contemporary feel (did anyone homeschool...or call it homeschooling...in 1970?)

Goodreads Review: It is 1970 in a small town in California. “Bean” Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who “found something wrong with every place she ever lived,” takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that’s been in Charlotte’s family for generations.

An impetuous optimist, Bean soon discovers who her father was, and hears many stories about why their mother left Virginia in the first place. Because money is tight, Liz and Bean start babysitting and doing office work for Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town—a big man who bullies his workers, his tenants, his children, and his wife. Bean adores her whip-smart older sister—inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, nonconformist. But when school starts in the fall, it’s Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz.

20. If You Find Me - Emily Murdoch

2013, St. Martin's Griffin

248 pgs.

Written for young adults

Finished 5/29/2013

CRF

Goodreads Rating: 4.09

My Rating:

4.5 Really loved it

TPPL

Setting:  Contemporary Tennessee, deep in the woods of the Obed River National Forest and in a small Tennessee town

1^st sentence/s: "Mama says no matter how poor folks are, whether you're a have, a have-not, or break your mama's back on the cracks in between, the world gives away the best stuff on the cheap.  Like, the way the white-hot mornin' light dances in diamonds across the surface of our creek."

A quote I'd like to notate and remember:  "Then I hold on to the edge of the counter for support and cry until I'm all cried out.  I reckon a good cry has been a long time in the making, and I cry until I'm empty, but a goo empty, like the speckled shells left behind by flapping quail babies." (p. 149)

My comments: This is the first novel that I've read in one gulp in a long time. The first person narration was superb, I haven't been able to get inside a protagonist's head like this in awhile. The story was heart-breaking, totally believable, simple-yet-deep. Couldn't put it down, even though I knew exactly where it was going. It didn't matter, it was the WAY the story was told. AND, this was Ms. Murdoch's first (published) book. Super cudos!

Goodreads Review:  A broken-down camper hidden deep in a national forest is the only home fifteen year-old Carey can remember. The trees keep guard over her threadbare existence, with the one bright spot being Carey’s younger sister, Jenessa, who depends on Carey for her very survival. All they have is each other, as their mentally ill mother comes and goes with greater frequency. Until that one fateful day their mother disappears for good, and two strangers arrive. Suddenly, the girls are taken from the woods and thrust into a bright and perplexing new world of high school, clothes and boys.

Now, Carey must face the truth of why her mother abducted her ten years ago, while haunted by a past that won’t let her go… a dark past that hides many a secret, including the reason Jenessa hasn’t spoken a word in over a year. Carey knows she must keep her sister close, and her secrets even closer, or risk watching her new life come crashing down

10. Small As an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson

2011, Candlewick Press
$15.99 TPPL
278 pgs.
Rating:   It was okay

Setting:  Contemporary Mount Desert Island, Maine - Seawall, Bar Harbor, then Trenton, Lamoine, Ellsworth, Bucksport, Searsport...
OSS:  And 11-year old is abandoned in Maine by his bipolar mother and has to figure out how to find her so that the DSS doesn't find out and separate them.
1st sentence/s:  "Elephants can sense danger.  They're able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake befofre it hits.  Unfortuantely, Jack did not have this talent.  The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware."

What a delightful treat to know every single place that Jack visited - whether it was Ben & Bill's on Main Street in Bar Harbor, or the sight of Fort Knox in the distance, or even the long expanse of road between Ellsworth and Bucksport, the author gets every detail down perfectly. That's my home, my tromping ground for 30 years, and it was pretty cool to relive it all in a book that I know children will read and enjoy.

Jack has to figure out what to do.  He has to find his mother, he has to make sure she's okay.  In between the delightful experiences he's had with her throughout his life, he's also had to deal with her "spinning times," when she would spiral out of control and sometimes disappear.  But she has never disappeared like this before, he has always had his home in Jamaica Plain to wait for her.  And he knows that if he goes to the police, the DSS will become involved and he will be separated from her...and this time, she might even have to go to jail!

The entire book is paralleled with his intense interest in all things elephant.  He loves elephants, studies elephants, knows the differences between them and all sorts of stories, facts, fictions related to them.  All this is liberally shared in the book.  Each short chapter begins with a new and interesting fact or story about them.  A small elephant in his pocket helps calm him, and the thought of seeing a live one down the road keeps him going.  My problem....I could care less about elephants.  I didn't like all the extra elephant information.  I'm betting it added great interest for most kids, but.....I'll admit it....I either didn't read or skimmed these parts.

So all in all what did I think?  An 11-year old on the road all by himself for over a week?  As a kid I think I would have loved this premise.  What a great plotline.  Of course, a great setting.  But somehow, I couldn't wait for the book to be over.  I'm thinking it was the elephants.....

76. Solomon's Oak - Jo-Ann Mapson

2010, Bloomsbury
TPPL
371 pgs.
For: adults
Rating: 4

I remember my friend, Carol, talking about Jo-Ann Mapson, so when I was this sitting on the "New Books" shelf at the library, I decided to try it. Thanks, Carol!

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the setting, which is in the farmlands east of Monterey, California. I enjoyed the characters, although I couldn't quite get into the protagonists head, although Mapson tried really hard. I am not an animal lover and this is a book about animal lovers....horses, goats, and dogs, particularly. However, I didn't mind it at all, and enjoyed learning bout the different personalities of each.

Three people with emotional wounds are brought together. The protagonist, a farm woman who lost her dearly beloved husband of 20-or-so years unexpectedly the previous year, a New Mexican crime lab photographer that has been injured in a shootout and must learn to live with intense pain - physically and emotionally - for the rest of his life, and a teenage girl with a huge chip on her shoulder and even more loss. Her sister disappeared four years before, and that led to her mother's death and her father's abandonment. Whoa!

The story is well told, though almost repetitious in places. However, it went fast and was entertaining and made me think....deeply. The widow, Glory Solomon, is coping with money problems and begins a small business holding weddings and the reception at the chapel her husband had built, and in their barn. The cop, Joseph Vigil, is making a photographic studies of trees, and the teenager, Juniper McGuire, complete with multiple piercings and even a tattoo, is quickly put to work helping with catering the weddings and lots of farm chores.

These people, and people like them, are everywhere. Out there. In our world. Trying to live with the heartbreak and anxiety and unfairness of life. Parts of each of them are in many of us. It doesn't hurt to be reminded of this once in awhile.

1. My Lost and Found Life - Melodie Bowsher

For: Gr. 9+
Published: 2006
312 pgs.
Rating: 4/5
Read: Over the Christmas holidays, finished yesterday on the plane home


Ashley Mitchell, a spoiled, popular high school senior gets the surprise of her life when she discoveres her mother has embezzeled money from her firm and left town, leaving Ashley completely alone, destitute, and unprepared. I very much enjoyed watching Ashley's character change and grow and rearrange itself so that she became a survivor and a much nicer person. Set in Burlingame, CA and San Francisco, Ashley sells all the contents of her house, lives in a tiny unheated camper trailer behind a gas station, and gets a job at a coffee shop in SF - all things that she would have previously sneered at/about. She lets down her snobbiness and snootiness more and more, slowly making real (vs. superficial) friends, and discovering what it really takes to survive in life.

This was a really good story, kept me entertained on long airline flights without making my eyes get heavy or my head nodding - -

47. Waiting for Normal - Leslie Connor

For: Middle Grades
Pub: 2008
290 pgs.
Rating: 5/5
Read: Sept. 3, 2008 (Happy Birthday, Gail!)
"Pollyanna for the 21st Century" OR "a modern-day survival story"

Oh. My. I just finished The Rules of Survival. Now this. So similar. Mothers who should not be mothers. What is the definition of mother? Addie would figure that out, using Websters and her great dyslexic brain, and add it to the vocabulary book that she keeps. She wishes she had the "Love of Learning" like her mother and younger sister. But because she has reading and spatial problems, she thinks this can never be.

Addie's "Mommers" (this was, for some reason, a very irritating name for me) is, I'm sure, bipolar. It's all or nothing. Totally all or absolutely nothing. She's had two husbands, three children, and before the story is over will have lost them all, but have another kid on the way. Dwight, the stepfather that has raised Addie as his own, is not able to take custody of her when he divorces her mother, although he does take the two "Littles." He takes Addie and her Mom to live in the only place he has, an old, tiny trailer on a busy street corner in the city of Schenectedy, NY. He takes the two Littles and goes to reconstruct an inn in nearby Vermont.

Mommers meets up with a man and spends more and more time with him, leaving 12-year-old Addie alone in the trailer. Addie makes close friends with the people who own the mini-mart across the street (one dying of cancer, the other gay). She learns to love to play the flute, and takes great care of her hamster, Picolo. Things get worse and worse until she unwittingly, while alone for an extended period, burns down the trailer.

This IS a very predictable book. But it's predictable in a good way, I think kids need more happy endings. Connors has included a little bit of everything in the story, major timely issues. But instead of being TOO much, everything she brings up touches all of our lives....a little cancer....friends or family members who are gay, or struggle with a mental disorder, or have very little money...sad people, happy people, neglected people, all or nothing people.....Snow storms and broken-cars and feeling helpless and alone.....

One review I read said that this book is a great example of "showing, not tellling." Exactly! Beautifuly writing. A smart, witty protagonist. A plot that keeps you hooked. A great read. If only I hadn't needed tissues!