27. Lone Wolf - Jodi Picoult

2012/Emily Bestler Books/ ATRIA/ Simon & Schuster
HC $28.00 TPPL
for: adults
421 pgs.
Rating:  It was okay (the 2nd half was more engrossing than the first)

1st line:  "In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have freed the tiger."
Setting:  Contemporary Beresford, NH
OSS:  After Cara and Edward's dad, Luke Warren, a famous wolf scientist, suffers severe brain trauma in a car accident, the estranged family tries to decide what's the next step....sustaining his life or pulling the plug?

There were many things I liked about this story.  Each short chapter was in the voice of one of the key players....Luke, the father, Edward, the son, who had left at 18 for Thailand because of some sort of argument with his dad, Cara, the younger sister who lives with and idolizes her dad, Georgie, the ex-wife and Edward and Cara's mom, and Joe Ng, Georgie's new husband and the lawyer that defends Edward.  Each character is given his own font.  Luke's pieces, all italicized, are the story of the wolves and his obsession with them.

This is the story of a family that has had a tough time from the beginning.  When you have a dad that would rather live in the wild with wolves, you have a dysfunctional family, right?  So for most of his adult life Luke was lost between two worlds, never able to fully participate in either (except for the two years he actually lived in the Canadian woods and joined a pack).  There are little mysteries to be solved, actually quite evident ones, that come out as the trial proceeds.  What trial?  The trial that pits brother against sister in who will have legal guardianship of their father.

If you're an animal lover, especially a lover of wild animals, the story would probably be quite enthralling.  For me, a little bit of the wolf information went a long way.  I guess it was entirely based on the work of Shaun Ellis, a guy in England on whom the character of Luke is based.

My daughter loves Jodi Picoult, so I thought I'd try this new book.  The only one I read previously was not a favorite.  Laura says this one has not had the greatest reviews.  I think I'll wait awhile before reading another.

26. The Affair - Lee Child

#16 Jack Reacher (this is the prequel)
audio read by Dick Hill
11 unabridged cds
14 hours
$45.00 TPPL
2011, Random House Audio
416 pages
4 **** (Really liked it)

Setting: 1997, in a tiny town called Carter Crossing, Mississippi, home to Fort Kelham, an army base used as training grounds for special forces troops.
OSS:  When Jack Reacher is dispatched to Carter Crossing, Mississippi to make sure the army isn't involved - or even mentioned - in the murders of three beautiful young women, he teams up with local sheriff Elizabeth Devereaux to get to the bottom of it all.

This is the story of how ... and why ... Jack Reacher left the army.  It's the story of his last job as an Army major.  It is Jack Reacher through and through, his cleverness, his seeing the minute clues that others would never even consider, and it's also about his stance for what's good, and what's right.  The way he decides to deal with it all at the very end of the book does bother me somewhat, but I guess that's what makes Reacher Reacher, right?  He trutsts... and lusts after ... Devereaux right off the bat, but when she becomes implicated in the crimes, you can't help but wonder.  Child keeps the reader thinking every step of the way.  The story went really fast and was really good.

25. Wildwater Walking Club - Claire Cook

read by Kymberly Dakin
6 unabridged discs (7:45)
2009 BBC Audiobooks America

Setting:  contemporary Massachusetts seashore community
OSS:
1st line/s:  "On the day I became redundant, I began to walk.  Okay, not right away.  First I lay in bed and savored the sound of the alarm not going off.  I'd been hearing that stupid beep at the same ridiculous time pretty much every workday morning for the entire eighteen years I'd worked at Balancing Act Shoes."

The narrator of this story reminds me of the voiceover commercial voice of a local ambulance-chaser law firm ad.  In some places it is SO not what I want to hear, putting a slower cadence with drawn-out wording that gives a different affectation than of what I'm hearing in my head.  Oh well, the story was okay, and I also had the book ot look at, so I read over some of the parts I'd listened to in the car.

24. Taken - Robert Crais

#15 in Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series
Audio read by Luke Daniels (He's really good.  My only wish is that sometimes Joe Pike didn't whisper all the time....)
7 unabridged cds
(7:47)
Brilliance Audio, 2011
However, looks like it was published in 2012
$32.99 TPPL
352 pages
Rating:  4.5 Super storytelling

Setting:  some LA, but most of the action takes place in the desert near the Dalton Sea, Indio/ Coachella/Palm Desert/Palm Springs in southern California

Written in an interesting way - the point-of-view switches, as does the time.  It might go from Elvis Cole in the current time to Joe Pike six days later to the kidnapped couple in the time between.  Keep you on your toes.  I didn't think, at first, that I was going to like it but I did.  Elvis Cole's sections are always in the first person, all the rest of the characters aren't, just in descriptive mode.

This time, Cole and Pike are assisted by , a government mercenary who'll try anything and follows orders from Joe Pike really well.  I see him a tall, cute, blonde, always laughing, nothing bothering him.  His hidden military/government credentials seem to be able to get him out of any predicament.....I bet he's going to show up again.

Elvis is hired by Nita Morales, a mom whose college daughter Christa and her boyfriend, Jack Berman,  have mysteriously disappeared.  She is afraid they've eloped, but this is very far from the truth...they've been kidnapped, in the wrong place at the wrong time when a group of coyotes who were transporting people from all over the world across the border are hijacked by really bad guys called bajadores. These are bandits that steal from bandits.   Life has no meaning to them.  They're just plain mean and heartless---I hate the thought that there really are people in the world like this!

POEM - How to be a Poet - Wendell Berry

How To Be A Poet

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensional life;tay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Wendell Berry

Thanks, Lisa, for posting this on Facebook. I like it a lot. And today is April 1st, the first day National Poetry Month. The birds are singing...merrily and loudly enough to wake me up on this gorgeous Sunday morning. Life is good.

23. The Unwanteds - Lisa McMann

Aladdin, 2011
Rating:  3.5/ It was a good story
for:  Middle Grades
390 pages

Setting:  the community of Quill, unknown present or future.
OSS:  Two 13-year old twins lives are severed forever as one is labeled Wanted and the other Unwanted, sent off to be purged/eliminated/put to death.
1st sentence/s:  "There was a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged."

But there is a surprise awaiting the Unwanteds.  They are 'unwanted ' because their creativity, their artistic inclinations, make them undesirable.  Not so in Artime, where magic and creativity and beauty are nurtured and revered.  That is, until they are discovered and a war begins.  A war with antiquated weapons and rusty vehicles on one side and magic on the other.  There is even a Dumbledore-like leader named Mr. Today.

MOVIE - The Hunger Games

They really did a very good job turning this bestseller into a movie.  Congrats!

22. Here Lies Linc - Delia Ray

2011, Alfred A. Knopf
for:  Middle grades
308 pages
Really good read (4)

First line/s:  Most people end their lives in a graveyard.  Sometimes I think my life began there."
Setting:  Contemporary Iowas City, Iowas, on a dead end street beside Oakland Cemetery.
 
Linc attends public school - 8th grade - for the first time, and attacks making friends with a sense of humor and a knack for storytelling.  And, what's really cool, is that some of the legends and history in the story are based on reality.

When Linc researches the history behind a huge black angel statue in the Oakland Cemetery, he also uncovers some hidden secrets from his own family's past.  I love cemeteries, genealogy, research -- that's what this book is all about, but in a fun, funny, can't-put-it-down read.  Each of the 38 chapters begins with a real epitaph from somewhere in America - including the location.

21. Delirium - Lauren Oliver

#1 in a series
Harper, 2011
for:  YA
441 pages
Really good/4

First line/s:  "It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure."
Setting:  Dystopian Portland, Maine - contemporary parallel
OSS:  Just a few months before the mandated treatment that cures everyone at age 18 of any feelings of love, Lena falls in love.

This is a well-done dystopian adventure.  Lena and her best friend, Hana, will both be cured in September, and they're ready.  love is a disease that can kill you.  Once  you're cured, the only thing you have to worry about is government regulators and raids.  Your mate is chosen for you as is your job, your home...and people find safety in that.

When Lena meets Alex, she learns more about the Resistance, and the "invalids" who live outside the city's electrified fence.  She's reluctant at first to senak out after curfew, attend secret parties, and meet on the sly with Alex - but she can't help it.

Horrifying ending - you just can't wait to read the next segment.

20. The Amanda Project: The Invisible I - Melissa Kantor

MOVIE - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

MOVIE - Safe House

Released 2-10-12
R (1:55)
RT Critics 54 Audience 69
My rating:  2.5 (It was decent)
Director:  Daniel Espinosa
Universal Pictures

Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington

Matt Weston (Reynolds) sits day after day in a Safe House in Cape Town, South Africa, in an in-between CIA position, waiting for something to happen before he is fully employed in the manner that he wants.  Tobin Frost (Washington) is an ex-intelligence officer who's been "wanted" for over ten years.  There are mercenaries after Frost, as well as the government, as the two have to become reluctant partners...with Frost always seeming to be devilishly untrustable.

19. Prayers for Sale - Sandra Dallas

audio read by Maggi-Meg Reed
2009 Macmillan Audio
8 unabridged cds
$39.95
Adult Historical Fiction
Lovely story, liked it a lot, 4.5stars

18. Irises - Francisco X. Stork

2012, Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic
288 pages
Rating: It was okay/2

1st Sentence/s: (Prologue) "Kate had finally agreed to pose under the willow tree. Mother came and stood behind Mary at her easel. She placed her hand on Mary's shoulder. 'It's beautiful!'"
Setting: Contemporary El Paso, Texas
OSS:  Two sister try to figure out how to survive when their preacher father dies leaving them homeless and fully in charge of caring for their mother, who is in a permanently vegetative state.

Both 18 year old Kate is about to get accepted with as a premed student with a full scholarship to Stanford and 16 year old Mary, who has an incredible artistic gift, have had very religious, protected lives.  And since their mother's accident two years previously, their lives have been pretty joyless.  Their father, who truly loved them, was a preacher of a small protestant congregation in El Paso, had no car, no money, and lived simply.  Hand-me-downs and Walmart...no trips to the mall.  Painting was a frivolous endeavor, and the University of Texas at El Paso was nearby and the only acceptable choice of college.

And then he drops dead of a heart attack, and there's more and more problems dropped on top of the two girls.  Tough choices.  Interesting relationships with boys, best friends. their aunt and only living relative, and the new young preacher that has been hired to take their father's place.

I read this book in one four-hour gulp.  I knew that if I put it down I probably wouldn't come back to it.  Why?  I like the way that Stork developed his characters.  The plot was plausible.  I could relate to both Kate and Mary.  There was just something....missing....for me, I'm not sure what.  I was expecting to be blown away like I was with Stork's previous Marcelo in the Real World, and I wasn't.  I wonder what I would have thought about this if I hadn't read Marcelo. I'll have to read some reviews and see how others feel.

17. Think of a Number - John Verdon

1st in a series:  Dave Gurney, Retired NYC Homicide, Upstate NY
2010, Crown Publishers
BC Library
418 pgs.
Just wonderful writing and storytelling (5)
1st sentence/s:  "Jason Strunk was by all accounts an inconsequential fellow, a bland thirty-something, nearly invisible to his neighbors --- and apparently inaudible as well, since none could recall a single specific thing he'd ever said."
Setting:  Upstate NYC, somewhere in the Catskills near Cooperstown, winter.

This is John Verdon's first book, ever.  It looks like he was a big wig in an advertising firm in NYC, which doesn't even sound like it might be related to homicide investigations.  Well, I don't know what he's best at...intricate, clever storytelling, or writing beautiful prose.  He even used a couple of words that were new to my word bank!  He's created a fascinating protagonist and allows the reader to get completely into his head.  There's an element of psychology in the story that I usually wrinkle my nose at, but this was fascinating.  I couldn't wait to curl up with this story.

Dave Gurney's old college friend, Mark Mellery, discovers that they live fairly near each other in the Catskills of upper New York state and comes to visit him with a perplexing problem.  He's been receiving weird poems in the mail - poems that are threatening and ominous.  Gurney is a retired police wiz from New York City who has an uncanny knack of putting clues together. His relationship with his wife, Madeline, is a bit rocky.  She's ready for him to retire, not be pulled back into his old life, where is becomes obsessed with his cases.  They're only in their late forties, and do seem to love each other.  There's background "stuff" though - a previous marriage with one grown son for him and a son who died in an accident at three years old for the two of them.

The mystery is complex and fascinating! 

The second book in the series, Shut Your Eyes Tight, has already been published and the third, Let the Devil Sleep, will come out in July.  Can't wait to read them.