48. Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

listened on Audible (borrowed from CCLS)
read by Bahni Turpin (great job)
Unabridged audio (11.56 - most I listened to at x1.25 because the narration was quite slow...)
2018 Baker & Bray
455 pgs.
YA dystopia
Finished June 1, 2019
Goodreads rating:  4.15 - 12,133 ratings
My rating:  4
Setting:  Baltimore, MD and Kansas outback after the Civil War

First line/s:  "The day I came screaming and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me."

My comments:  The premise of this book was so hatefully racist that it was hard to read.  Our heroine, Jane, is smart, cocky, and very sure of herself - very likable indeed.  She deals with her lot in life with humor and honesty and it's never hard to swallow her decisions and motivations.  I listened to this while driving back-and-forth to Michigan and it certainly kept my attention, the wailing of the Shamblers notwithstanding!

Goodreads synopsis:  Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville—derailing the War Between the States and changing America forever. In this new nation, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Reeducation Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.
          But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems. 

68. The Hired Girl - Laura Amy Schlitz

2015 Candlewick Press
387 pgs.
YS Historical Fiction
Finished 12/12/15
Goodreads rating:  4.05
My rating:4.5 - an excellent read
Setting:  1911 Baltimore, Md.

First line/s:  Sunday, June the fourth, 1911  "Today Miss Chandler gave me this beautiful book.  I vow that I will never forget her kindness to me, and I will use this book as she told me to - I will write in it with truth and refinement."

My comments:  The book is divided into seven "parts," each with a painting as it frontispiece and title. The paintings are acknowledged in the back of the book with painter, date, size, and gallery where each can be found.  I liked this.  The story is about Joan Skaggs (who renamed herself Janet Lovelace), a fourteen year old abused runaway who becomes the hired girl for an upper-class Jewish family in Baltimore.  The story is told from her point-of-view, in first person format, which works really well for this interesting tale.  I particularly enjoyed all the reference to cultural Judaism, which I've learned so much about in my last few years teaching in a Jewish day school.

Becky's review from Becky's Book Reviews

Goodreads Summary:  Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself—because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of—a woman with a future. 

Inspired by her grandmother’s journal, Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz brings her sharp wit and keen eye to early twentieth-century America in a comedic tour de force destined to become a modern classic. Joan’s journey from the muck of the chicken coop to the comforts of a society household in Baltimore (Electricity! Carpet sweepers! Sending out the laundry!) takes its reader on an exploration of feminism and housework, religion and literature, love and loyalty, cats, hats, bunions, and burns.

21. Digging to America - Anne Tyler

Audio read by

Audio discs/hours

2006

277 pgs.

Adult CRF

Finished 3/13/2015

Goodreads rating: 3.51

My rating:   4 - Enjoyed it very much, made me think

PBS

Contemporary rural Baltimore, MD

My comments:  Oftentimes when I take a break from my "usual" murder mystery or YA, I miss them and wonder why I strayed.  This book, however, didn't do that.  I was taken with the story right from the beginning.  Character-driven, this is the story of two families, both American, though the roots of one are Iranian. They are linked by the adoption of two baby girls from Korea, meeting at the Baltimore Airport when both were brought to the US.  This is the story of personalities; how we understand - or don't understand - each other for the simplest of reasons.  Different personalities that are not understood. Misunderstanding. Friendship. Throughout the story the "voice" comes from different characters, but it is the character of Maryam that sings out the loudest to me.  She is no more interesting than any of the others but because she is so different in personality than me but has so many similar feelings, I really related to her and enjoyed looking at the world through her focus.

Goodreads book summary:  In what is perhaps her richest and most deeply searching novel, Anne Tyler gives us a story about what it is to be an American, and about Maryam Yazdan, who after thirty-five years in this country must finally come to terms with her "outsiderness." 
Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport--the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam's fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian American wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate with an "arrival party," an event that is repeated every year as the two families become more deeply intertwined. 
Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently widowed and still recovering from his wife's death, suddenly all the values she cherishes--her traditions, her privacy, her otherness--are threatened. Somehow this big American takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her life feel invaded. 
A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that cast a penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.

21. Another Thing to Fall - Laura Lippman

Tess Monaghan, Baltimore PI #10
Audio read by Linda Emond (excellently)
2008, Harper Collins audio
8 unabridged cds $39.95 (swapped)
9 hrs.
336 pages
Rating: 4

Tess Monaghan is hired as a "bodyguard" for 20 year old Selene Waites, the party-girl lead in a television pilot that's being filmed on location in Baltimore. Flip Tumulty, the show's writer and director, thinks she's pulling pranks around the set so that she can be released from her contract - bigger and better projects in Hollywood are calling. But then Flip's assistant is murdered, and we see there's another "player" with an entirely different motive.

The story went very quickly and kept my attention. I loved some of the things that Tess thought - what she was really thinking was usually clever, right on, and quite funny. I'd read another in the series.

19. Life Sentences - Laura Lippman

Audio read by Linda Emond (excellently)
9 unabridged cds/ 10.5 hours
2009 Recorded Books
352 pages
Rating: 2.5

Cassandra Fallows, well-known memoirist, has returned to Baltimore to write another "true life" story. This time it will be about a woman who was a peripheral character in her elementary school years and has become a media sensation for admitting nothing when charged with murdering her baby son. Cassie begins to dig. About half the book is from her point-of-view, telling what's happening as she unearths clues about Callie Jenkins. Part of the book are excerpts from her first memoir, which give us looks into her past, particularly about her friends Tisha, Donna, and Fatima. And the rest of the book puts us into the minds of some of the characters that she is encountering on her current quest for the truth. Lawyers, police officers, elementary friends, and her parents.

Great reader. So-so story. I didn't like the protagonist at all...I kept hoping she would think or say or do something that would endear me to her even slightly, but no such luck. Then I realized that maybe you're not supposed to like her? I mean, I didn't hate her, but I certainly didn't admire her, or feel sorry for her....I really felt she was a self-centered .....jerk. Ah well. Much of the story centered around her father and his second wife, Annie, a black woman that was the "love of his life." Annie is dead by the time the story takes place, but the father is not. Didn't like him either. Another self-centered....jerk.

Ah well. Life goes on. At least I tried a new author, right?