59. Fallen Mountains by Kimi Cunningham Grant

read on my iPhone
2019 Amberjack Publishing
256 pgs.
Adult mystery
Finished 7/3/2019
Goodreads rating:  4.13 - 240 ratings
My rating:3
Setting:  Flashing back between current times and a decade earlier in rural Pennsylvania

First line/s:  "The summer heat arrived in Fallen Mountains like a winged thing, swift and startling:  the pansies drooped, the lettuce bolted, the trees shook off their buds."

My comments:  I picked this up to read because it's set in contemporary Pennsylvania and I wanted to add some books set in my new home state to my repertoire.  It flips back-and-forth from "before" and "after," and it references 11 years ago, 17 years ago...and even before that, so that I never really knew what was taking place when.  It worked out okay though, still being pretty easy to follow, but in the end leaving a few unanswered questions in my head that I don't think I missed.  There was definitely vernacular that I've only heard in PA, and it made me laugh because it's one of my worst pet peeves - omitting the infinite "to be."  Her's an example from the book:  "when them cows needed milked, they needed milked."

Goodreads synopsis: “An intense and engaging portrait of characters driven by—and bound by—the secrets of their pasts . . . an absorbing mystery as well as a gracefully layered story of death and loss in a small town.” —Allen Eskens, USA Today bestselling author of The Life We Bury and The Shadows We Hide
          When Transom Shultz goes missing shortly after returning to his sleepy hometown of Fallen Mountains, Pennsylvania, his secrets are not the only ones that threaten to emerge. Red, the sheriff, is haunted by the possibility that a crime Transom was involved in seventeen years earlier—a crime Red secretly helped cover up—may somehow be linked to his disappearance. Possum, the victim of that crime, wants revenge. Laney will do anything to keep Transom quiet about the careless mistake they made that could jeopardize her budding relationship. And Chase, once a close friend, reels from Transom’s betrayal of buying his family’s farm under false pretenses and ruthlessly logging it and leasing the mineral rights to Marcellus shale frackers. As the search for Transom Shultz heats up and the inhabitants’ dark and tangled histories unfold, each one must decide whether to live under the brutal weight of the past or try to move beyond it.

64. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

2014 National Book Award FINALIST
audio read by Kirsten Potter
2014, Random House Audio & Knopf
11 unabridged cds
336 pgs.
Adult fantasy/dystopia
Finished 11/15/15
Goodreads rating:  4.0
My rating: 3
Setting:  Michigan area, contemporary times after a pandemic

First line/s:  "The king stood in a pool of light, unmoored. This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theater in Toronto."

My comments:  This is a tough one for me to rate.  It's the kind of book I'd like to sit down with a book group and discuss.  Great writing, lots of jumping around (most of it's easy to follow, Mandel must have had to use a wall covered with diagrams to keep things straight...), but there's something a little bit missing.  It's not a book that will be easily forgotten, that's for certain, but it left me feeling I'd missed something (or some things)....

Here are some notes I found later on my phone:  I thought for awhile since finishing this book about what I really take away from it.  This is the kind of book I'd like to sit and talk about with friends.  I bet everyone would think the theme of the book was different than others thought.  There are so many levels, so many relationships, and so many things that I haven't even figured out connecting.  I picture the author having a huge black wall in front of her, creating characters and scenarios and overlapping an circling and layering plot and setting, particularly time.  Time.  Plague.  Why some people get sick and others didn't.  TWhy did they live in public buildings and not in houses they could've easily taken over - for comfort and safety alone.  What had happened to the entire company that they missed each other on the road?  Seems totally imporbable.  What was so important about the glass paperweight?  Didn't seem to fit completely into the story.  Would people really turn on each other the way they did?  And how exactly would an entire world ground to a halt the way it did?  The resources were still there and there had to be people still left that knew how to tap them...

Becky's Review from Becky's Book Reviews

Goodreads Summary:  An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. 
      One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. 
      Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. 
      Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

68. The Lost Sisterhood - Anne Fortier

2014, Ballantine books

585 pgs.

Adult CRF/HistFict/Mystery

Finished 11/2/2014

Goodreads rating: 3.80

My rating:  (5) Awesome 

TPPL

Setting: Contemporary Oxford University, Algeria, Turkey, Germany, and Finland, Ancient Algeria, Turkey, Troy

1st sentence/s: "In her own obscure fashion, my grandmother did what she could to arm me for the carnage of life.  Stamping hooves, rushing chariots, rapacious males . . . thanks to Granny, I had it more or less cased by the age of then."

My comments:  For me, this was in incredible piece of storytelling.   Yes, it was a little long, especially through the middle, but the first third and the last third made up for the middle third.  Told in alternating voices in two very different time periods - Myrina of the Amazons and Diana of contemporary scholarship - exploring the world of 3,000 years ago and today; it included strong females, a great grandmother-granddaughter relationship, a bit of sexual tension, and loads of mystery.  I've never been an Odyssey fan, and I still loved the story. The ending went in a direction and to a locale that I never expected.  This was a great read for me.  It even tapped into my Nordic genes!

Goodreads book summary: The Lost Sisterhood tells the story of Diana, a young and aspiring--but somewhat aimless--professor at Oxford. Her fascination with the history of the Amazons, the legendary warrior women of ancient Greece, is deeply connected with her own family's history; her grandmother in particular. When Diana is invited to consult on an archeological excavation, she quickly realizes that here, finally, may be the proof that the Amazons were real.
          The Amazons' "true" story--and Diana's history--is threaded along with this modern day hunt. This historical back-story focuses on a group of women, and more specifically on two sisters, whose fight to survive takes us through ancient Athens and to Troy, where the novel reinvents our perspective on the famous Trojan War.
          The Lost Sisterhood features another group of iconic, legendary characters, another grand adventure--you'll see in these pages that Fortier understands the kind of audience she has built with Juliet, but also she's delivering a fresh new story to keep that audience coming back for more.