31. It's One of Us by J. T. Ellison

57. The Book of M by Peng Shepherd

listened on Audible
20158 William M0rrow
426 pgs.  (17:06)
Adult Dystopian Mystery
Finished 6/27/18
Goodreads rating:  4.11 - 503 ratings
My rating:  3
Setting:  Dystopian Washington DC to New Orleans, LA (with a short foray to India)

First line/s:  "The end of Ory's world began with a deer."

My comments:  This was a long, endless, DEPRESSING story told from the point of view of four different people.  For quite a while I couldn't help but compare it to The Fifth Wave, with shades of Station Eleven, until it went in its own direction.  So depressing, it's going to take me awhile to climb back out of the hole it put me into.  I did work well as an audio book.

Goodreads synopsis: Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
          One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
          Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
          Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
          As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

41. In the Kingdom of Men - Kim Barnes

2012, Alfred A. Knopf

324 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished 9/16/2013

Genre: Historical Fiction/1967

Goodreads Rating: 3.44

My Rating:  Liked it (3.5)

TPPL

Setting: rural Oklahoma but mainly the American Aramco company housing and desert surrounding it in Saudi Arabia (simply called "Arabia" in the book) in 1967

1^st sentence from the prologue: "Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that."

1st sentence from Chapter 1:  "In the beginning  --- these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the bible open in front of me.":

My comments:  I have ups and downs with my reactions to this book. I loved the setting - a mysterious one, for me. Arabia in the 1960's, in the American-based housing commune - certainly nothing I had any prior knowledge about.  The Bedouin.  The animosity.  The "kingdom of men"......  And I was unprepared for the ending, a feeling that left me pleasantly surprised, because it was unexpected and perfect for the story.

Goodreads Review:   1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. 

   Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. 

36. Skylight Confessions - Alice Hoffman

Audio read by Mare Winningham
6 unabridged cds (7.5 hrs.)
rating:  interesting story, holds attention, depressing and clever
272 pgs.
2007 Hachette Audio
Alice Hoffman's 19th novel

Setting:  Contemporary small-town Connecticut with bits of NYC
OSS:  Arlyn (Arly) Singer, at 17, enters a more-or-less loveless marriage with John Moody thinking he's her destiny.....dying a few short years later after both partners have dabbled in infidelity, leaving a disturbed son, Sam, and baby daughter, Blanca.

The story begins with Arly, switching to Blanca and then to the governess that raises Sam, Blana, and John & his new wife's child.  Secrets are uncovered, ghosts are watched, lives unfold through the years.  It's sad, filled with heartache, and pretty much a downer to listen to, although I was quite mesmerized (beautiful reading by Mare Winningham) by the writing.