24. Backtrack by Paul Doiron

#9.5 Mike Bowditch

read on Kindle 

2019
21 pgs.
Adult short story - mystery
Finished 3/19/2021
Goodreads rating: 4.02 - 273 ratings
My rating: 3
Setting: Maine woods, perhaps 1980

First line/s: "There were four doctors staying at the hunting camp."

My comments: Depressing, very short story about a doctor who has decided to end his cancer-ridden life by freezing to death in the woods instead of going through the ups and mostly downs of end-of-life in a sickbed and Charlie takes on finding him when he disappears.  He was only 28 when this happened, and he's reflecting on it as an older gentleman.

Goodreads synopsis:  When a visiting hunter goes missing in the middle of a snowstorm, a young Charley Stevens (later the mentor to game warden Mike Bowditch) sets off to rescue him—but begins to suspect the man may not want to be found.

60. Ellie Dwyer's Great Escape by Diane Winger

read on my iPhone
2019 KDP
250 pgs.
Adult CRF
Finished 7/6/19 at camp
Goodreads rating:  4.19 - 175 ratings
My rating:  3
Setting:  Driving all around the US; lots of Colorado and Arizona, contemporary

First line/s:  "If bad luck really does come in threes, I've finally reached my quota."

My comments:  A 61-year-old woman, on her own for the first time in 40 years, tries to figure out what to do with the rest of her life after her husband has purposely "disappeared."  Becoming mobile - hitting the road - rediscovering herself - hiking and camping and trying to become more outgoing.  She also is a bit klutzy and her comedy of errors - one after another (reminding me of myself!) are really quite comical and fun.  The one totally unreal coincidence takes this down a point....

Goodreads synopsis: You're never too old to run away from home
          Ellie Dwyer, 61, is convinced bad luck comes in threes, and not just garden-variety, oh-well bad luck. How many people have to flee not one, but two natural disasters? And in between the wildfire and the hurricane, her husband of nearly forty years suddenly up and left her for no reason she could fathom, disappearing from her life without a clue to his whereabouts.
          Determined to reinvent her life, Ellie sets out on a journey across the country – her own “great escape.” Along the way to nowhere in particular, she buys a camper, becomes friends with a remarkable older woman, and starts to believe that good luck might also come in threes.
          Or does it? That depends on how she defines good luck.

51. Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah

listened on Audible
read by Lauren Ezzo
Unabridged audio (9:57)
2019 Lake Union Publishing
332 pgs.
Adult CRF
Finished 6/7/2019
Goodreads rating:  4.22 - 22,437 ratings
My rating:  4.5

First line/s:  "The girl could be a changeling.  She was almost invisible, her pale face, hoodie and pants fading into the twilit woods behind her.  Her feet were bare.  She stood motionless, one arm hooked around a hickory trunk , and she didn't move when the car crunched to the end of the gravel driveway and stopped a few yards away."

My comments:  There might be a few very small spoilers in the following response to this book.  Every now and then you read a story that is so touching and so different that you don't care as much about the coincidences and the too-good-to-be-true ending as you might usually.  This was a charming story from beginning to end, where a broken, genius, - and I must say, with a bit of a rolling eye: manipulative - child wins all the good things she deserves.  It's about people that aren't' as broken as they thought they were coming together to make things right.  And make things work.  I enjoyed everything about this book - the characters, the setting, and even the reality of too-stupid-to-be-real laws and child welfare rules.  Highly recommended.

Goodreads synopsis: An Amazon Charts, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Postbestseller.
          In this gorgeously stunning debut, a mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again.
          After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises.
          The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles. With concerns about the child’s home situation, Jo reluctantly agrees to let her stay—just until she learns more about Ursa’s past.
          Jo enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the mystery of the charming child. But the more time they spend together, the more questions they have. How does a young girl not only read but understand Shakespeare? Why do good things keep happening in her presence? And why aren’t Jo and Gabe checking the missing children’s website anymore?
          Though the three have formed an incredible bond, they know difficult choices must be made. As the summer nears an end and Ursa gets closer to her fifth miracle, her dangerous past closes in. When it finally catches up to them, all of their painful secrets will be forced into the open, and their fates will be left to the stars. 

15. The Widower's Tale - Julia Glass

Audio read by Mark Bramhall

Ebook through the library (also read the hard copy, back and forth...)

Publishing Info: Pantheon Books, 2010

Pgs.402 pages

Written for adults

Finished: April 21, 2013

Genre: CRF

Goodreads Rating:  3.63 

My Rating: 5 (I ended up loving it)

Setting: Contemporary just-outside-Boston/ suburbs (Cambridge, Boston, just out Rt. 2 from the city, up the coast a little toward Ipswich & Gloucester...)

1^st sentence/s: " 'Why Thank you.  I'm getting in shape to die.'  Those were the first words I spoke aloud on the final Thursday in August of last summer: Thursday, I recall for certain, because it was the day on which I read in our weekly town paper about the first of what I would so blithely come to call the Crusades; the end of the month  I can also say for certain, because Elves & Fairies was scheduled, that very evening, to fling open its brand-new, gloriously purple doors --- formerly the entrance to my beloved barn --- and usher in another flight of tiny perfect children, along with their preened and privileged parents."

My comments: I hated for this book to end as I had become really involved with many of the characters. And there are lots of characters, but it wasn't difficult to keep them straight. Julia Glass' gift for characterization (and beautiful writing) is just splendid. The curmudgeony protagonist is by far the most wonderful voice; humorous, wry, sarcastic, c::ever. His voice dominates the story, but there are three others that we hear; his beloved grandson Robert (a premed student at Harvard), Guatemalan immigrant Celestino (an undocumented gardener/day worker), and preschool teacher Ira (whose gay relationship with a divorce lawyer is interestingly woven into the story). I listened to much (though not all) of this, and the aristocratic lilt that the reader gave to Percy's voice put me off at first. However, as I got to know Percy, it didn't matter. The other three voices were not in this accent, and after awhile I liked the way I could tell the speaker by the way it was read. True, all sorts of socially conscious themes were introduced, but that didn't bother me at all, the story was relevant and interesting. So was the setting, so close to the places that I grew up and still love - the Boston area. I could picture the whole book clearly. Great writing, great story-telling.

Goodreads Review: In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild, Robert, a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother, a prominent physician, but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preaches—and begins to practice—an extreme form of ecological activism, targeting Boston’s most affluent suburbs.

Meanwhile, two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Robert: Ira, a gay teacher at the preschool, and Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percy’s neighbor, each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men, as well as by the women around them, collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening, upending everyone’s lives, but none more radically than Percy’s.

With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.

57. Word After Word After Word - Patricia MacLachlan

Katherine Tegen Books, 2010
For: younger middle grades
HC: $14.99
128 pgs.
Rating: Hard to say....great for this word-lover adult, but kids? We'll find out, because I'm going to start the year by reading this aloud and teaching a Patricia MacLachlan author study. That means I have to have it ready for n-e-x-t w-e-e-k!!!

This is a simple, lovely story of a children's writer who shares her love of words with a classroom of kids - and we meet five of them. Friends, each with their own unique qualities and stresses, who meet after school under a lilac bush and discover they love to write - and they CAN write.

Told from the point-of-view of one of the kids, a girl who is sad, whose mother is going through chemo. However, this is NOT a sad book. It's a thoughtful look at the way that kids think, and the way that kids relate to one another

47. Waiting for Normal - Leslie Connor

For: Middle Grades
Pub: 2008
290 pgs.
Rating: 5/5
Read: Sept. 3, 2008 (Happy Birthday, Gail!)
"Pollyanna for the 21st Century" OR "a modern-day survival story"

Oh. My. I just finished The Rules of Survival. Now this. So similar. Mothers who should not be mothers. What is the definition of mother? Addie would figure that out, using Websters and her great dyslexic brain, and add it to the vocabulary book that she keeps. She wishes she had the "Love of Learning" like her mother and younger sister. But because she has reading and spatial problems, she thinks this can never be.

Addie's "Mommers" (this was, for some reason, a very irritating name for me) is, I'm sure, bipolar. It's all or nothing. Totally all or absolutely nothing. She's had two husbands, three children, and before the story is over will have lost them all, but have another kid on the way. Dwight, the stepfather that has raised Addie as his own, is not able to take custody of her when he divorces her mother, although he does take the two "Littles." He takes Addie and her Mom to live in the only place he has, an old, tiny trailer on a busy street corner in the city of Schenectedy, NY. He takes the two Littles and goes to reconstruct an inn in nearby Vermont.

Mommers meets up with a man and spends more and more time with him, leaving 12-year-old Addie alone in the trailer. Addie makes close friends with the people who own the mini-mart across the street (one dying of cancer, the other gay). She learns to love to play the flute, and takes great care of her hamster, Picolo. Things get worse and worse until she unwittingly, while alone for an extended period, burns down the trailer.

This IS a very predictable book. But it's predictable in a good way, I think kids need more happy endings. Connors has included a little bit of everything in the story, major timely issues. But instead of being TOO much, everything she brings up touches all of our lives....a little cancer....friends or family members who are gay, or struggle with a mental disorder, or have very little money...sad people, happy people, neglected people, all or nothing people.....Snow storms and broken-cars and feeling helpless and alone.....

One review I read said that this book is a great example of "showing, not tellling." Exactly! Beautifuly writing. A smart, witty protagonist. A plot that keeps you hooked. A great read. If only I hadn't needed tissues!