4. Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie

listened on Audible while sick in Tucson

371 pgs. (9:49)

2023
Adult contemporary mystery
Finished 1/22/2025
Goodreads rating: 3.84
My rating: 4
Setting: 2008 northeastern Oklahoma

My comments: A queer Cherokee archaeologist/investigator for the BIA returns home to her native Oklahoma after three years to search for her missing sister.  This one got a little slow in more than one place, but ultimately was pretty decent storytelling, adding fuel to the fire in the history of missing Native American females, which has been going on - and almost completely ignored - for years and years.

Goodreads synopsis:  A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister.

There are secrets in the land.

As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.

While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.

When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women.

But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her back. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd.

The truth will be unearthed.

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. 

32. Betrayed - P. C. Cast & Kristin Cast

House of Night Series #2
2007
For: YA
310 pgs.
$8.95
Rating: 2

Okay. It's not great writing. It's not even very good storytelling. Some of it is pretty stupid and predictable. Repetitive, too. But, as Romantic Times Bookreviews says on the book's cover, "A highly addictive series." It's got s-x scenes that are uncomfortable for one of my male sixth graders, so it's really a YA. But that's what makes so many 8th grade girls love it.....

Zoey, in a month's time, has become the school leader. She's much too smart for a girl of her age, if you ask me. She throws up very easily and constantly. She has the most stereotypical friends that you'll ever meet in a YA novel.
SPOILER ALERT: Her mentor, beautiful, powerful Neferet now becomes an untrustworthy nemesis. She begins to befriend the previously rotten Aphrodite. Her best friend "dies", but doesn't exactly. She imprints with her human boyfriend, Heath, but also has a fledgling boyfriend, Erik, and is mutually attracted to a vamp poet/teacher, Loren. Just a little too...."romantic? ? ?" for me. But I guarantee that I'll read the next book in the series, Chosen because there's still so much unresolved. Darn.

26. Marked - P. C. Cast & Kristin Cast

House of Night Series #1
Mother-daughter authors
Published 2007
320 p.
For: YA
$8.95
Rating: 4
(B & N Sales Rank #213!)

Rayna, one of my eighth graders, insisted that I read this book. She loved it. It was a quick read that was impossible to put down-bad girl/good girl, vampires (spelled vampyre), great-looking hot guys, love, friendship, predictability, and more books to come all make this a great package for young adult females.

When Zoey Redbird is 16, a tracker "marks" her with a half-moon tatoo on her forehead. When you are marked there is nothing you can do, you will now be changed into a vampyre. You must leave your old life behind to learn the ways of vampyres as your body slowly changes. One in ten don't make it, actually. But when Zoey discovers that she has been chosen by the goddess Nix to become a powerful high priestess, she takes on this new challenge in a positive way. She makes wonderful new friends and the current Hight priestess, Neferet, has become her mentor at the School of Night. There's a beautiful bully (aptly named Aphrodite) who is a mean, mean troublemaker, and there's the requisite hot guy that is totally attracted to Zoey immediately. What's not to love? The 320 pages flew by. I might even entice myself to read the next in the series (Rayna tells me she thinks there will be ten or eleven), Betrayed.