67. The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

listened on Libby - borrowed from the library

narrated by Alana Kerr Collins

Unabridged audio (10:39)
2021
384 pgs.
Adult Historical Fiction
Finished 6/24/2021
Goodreads rating: 4.29 - 18,653 ratings
My rating: 4.5
Setting: 1906 San Francisco, CA, a tiny town south of SF near San Jose, and Tucson, Arizona

First line/s: "Thank you again for coming.  Could you please state your full name, age, birth date, and the city where you were born, for the record, please?"

My comments:  The story is an unfolding mystery including elements that I love, including mail-order-brides.  It's about how women bod and take care of one another.  Beautifully read, though the Irish accent was very slight.

Goodreads synopsis:  April 18, 1906: A massive earthquake rocks San Francisco just before daybreak, igniting a devouring inferno. Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever changed.
        Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.
        Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved.
        The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear.
        From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.

61. Water World Warrior by Lisa Lace

#1 TerraMates
Listened on Audible Escape (I think)
narrated by Addison Spear and Terrance Bayes
Unabridged audio (5:28)
2015 Toppings Publishing
267 pgs.
Adult Sci Fi Romance/Alien Mail Order Bride
Finished 4/8/2020
Goodreads rating:  3.53 - 854 ratings
My rating: 3.5 (not quite a 4)

First line/s:  "The wind whipped the sails of our ship, and we barely held our course."

My comments:  Well, for a sci-fi mail order bride romance, this wasn't bad at all.  It takes place on a water planet where only a few of the physical characteristics of the aliens are different - they have film that goes over their eyes so they can swim underwater with their eyes open for great distances, and they have underwater breathing "gills" so they can swim for indefinite amounts of time.  It was pretty decent world*building and this one had characters that had a bit of depth.  Oh yes, the usual misunderstandings and incorrect second-guessing, but not the  steamy XXX-rated crapola that so many of these mail order bride romances contain.  Just a little, and in the right places, and not until at least 2/3 of the book is behind you.  Quite entertaining, actually.  Not a four, but a good, solid three and a half.

Goodreads synopsis:  Why would I want to be married to an alien?
          I should not have applied to TerraMates. The idea was crazy. I'm a young woman, in the prime of my life.
          But I was desperate.
          When I landed on another world, his appearance intrigued me. He dripped sexuality and moved like an animal. We have three days together before he sets sail without me. Am I going to escape or submit to my desires?

83. The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

listened to audio - borrowed from library
read by Emily Woo Zeller
Unabridged audio (10 hrs.)
2019 Berkley
296 pgs.
Adult Romance
Finished  9/1/2019
Goodreads rating: 3.98 - 27,773 ratings
My rating:  5
Setting: contemporary Vietnam, then San Jose/Palo Alto area of California

First line/s:  "Khai was supposed to be crying.  He knew he was supposed to be crying.  Everyone else was."

My comments:  This one kept me giggling and rolling my eyes.  It was ultra cute and sweet and the perfect thing to read on a long, lazy, overcast three-day-weekend Sunday.  I've got to rate it a five just for being a delightful read.  Nothing ethereal or deep, just a little bit of innocesnce, adult autism, and a young adult from a different country and culture coming to the US and knowing very little about its culture other than what they've seen in a Disney movie or two.

Goodreads synopsis:  Khai Diep has no feelings. Well, he feels irritation when people move his things or contentment when ledgers balance down to the penny, but not big, important emotions—like grief. And love. He thinks he’s defective. His family knows better—that his autism means he just processes emotions differently. When he steadfastly avoids relationships, his mother takes matters into her own hands and returns to Vietnam to find him the perfect bride.
          As a mixed-race girl living in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City, Esme Tran has always felt out of place. When the opportunity arises to come to America and meet a potential husband, she can’t turn it down, thinking this could be the break her family needs. Seducing Khai, however, doesn’t go as planned. Esme’s lessons in love seem to be working…but only on herself. She’s hopelessly smitten with a man who’s convinced he can never return her affection.
          With Esme’s time in the United States dwindling, Khai is forced to understand he’s been wrong all along. And there’s more than one way to love.

54. A Reliable Wife - Robert Goolrick

I read this one!  The only one I could find was Large Print.....
2009, Algonquin Books
291 pgs.
Adult Historical Fiction with a more than touch of mystery...
Finished August, 2015
Goodreads rating: 3.24
My rating: 4
Setting: Winter , 1907, rural Wisconsin

First line/s:  "It was bitter cold, the air was electric with all that had not happened yet."

My comments:  This book was not at all what I expected, and I read it all in one long sitting (a great day to spend inside when it's 110 degrees outside). I enjoyed the surprises and the way they were added to the story. Although I can't define "normal" sexuality, desires, self-admiration, self-loathing, and religious fervor, I do think the author goes a little over the top here and there. The time period and setting added another layer of unexpectedness, as I don't read a whole lot of historical fiction and know very little about the state of Wisconsin. On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book very much. 

Goodreads synopsis:  Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt a passionate man with his own dark secrets has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways. 
With echoes of "Wuthering Heights" and "Rebecca," Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.

43. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

audio read by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie

4 unabridged cds (4 hrs.)

2011, Random House Audio

144 pgs.

Adult Historical Fiction 

Finished 9/19/2013

Goodreads Rating: 3.55

My Rating: 2/ It was okay

TPPL

Setting: mid-California/San Francisco area from the 1920s to mid-1940

My comments:  I just can't consider this a novel - it's more like a very well-researched piece of nonfictiom presented in a way that people who don't really like nonfiction (me) can find it a little more palatable.  Immediately apparent is the use of "we" instead of "I," which took a bit of getting used to until you figured out she was never talking about one person, but a group of women who all had different experiences.  Beautiful writing, but it really got on my nerves after awhile. List after list after list... It was a decent way to get information about Japanese pre-war brides and a taste of what it might have been like to be sent to Japanese interment camps in the US, but I would have so much preferred individual stories of a handful of these woman.  I'm a story/plot/character person and although this was original and different, I can't, personally, recommend it as a piece of fiction....

Goodreads Review:  Julie Otsuka’s long-awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the picture brides’ extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.