Category: general fiction

The Light, the Dark, & Ember Between by J. W. Nicklaus Description: This book is a collection of uplifting images that delve into the reflections of the human condition. These stories will cause you to think, laugh, and even cry at the beauty of emotional memories. You will smile at the thought of love lost and found again in "Paper Doll." You will think about your life's choices in "10:18." You will cry tears of joy while reading about the hidden gift in "Winter Rose." This is a must-have collection of thought-provoking reflections perfect for your bedside or the beach. My thoughts: I was looking at my shelves, trying to decide what to read next and this one popped out at me. Granted, I have others that I should have gotten around to before it, but it just really fit the mood I was in. It's short, but filled with wonderful glimpses of lives. With fifteen stories, it's almost impossible to talk about each of them,...

The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand Description: Greg and Tess MacAvoy are one of four prominent Nantucket couples who count each other as best friends. As pillars of their close-knit community, the MacAvoys, Kapenashes, Drakes, and Wheelers are important to their friends and neighbors, and especially to each other. But just before the beginning of another idyllic summer, Greg and Tess are killed when their boat capsizes during an anniversary sail. As the warm weather approaches and the island mourns their loss, nothing can prepare the MacAvoy's closest friends for what will be revealed. My thoughts: To me, this book is like a soap opera. You've got love, loss, grief, the hint of a mystery, drug addicition, secrets and affairs in these pages, all set against a beautiful summer in Nantucket. You've got the present and the present. You've got the story from each living character's perspective. Each of the individuals in the story is affected by the deaths of Greg and Tess in their own way...

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Description: I was supposed to be having the time of my life. As it turns out, Esther Greenwood--brilliant, talented, successful, and increasingly vulnerable and disturbed--does have an eventful summer. The Bell Jar follows Esther, step by painful step, from her New York City June as a guest editor at a fashion magazine through the following, snow-deluged January. Esther slides ever deeper into devastating depression, attempts suicide, undergoes bungled electroshock therapy, and enters a private hospital. In telling her own story--based on Plath's own summer, fall, and winter of 1953-1954--Esther introduces us to her mother, her boyfriend Buddy, her fellow student editors, college and home-town acquaintances, and fellow patients. She scrutinizes her increasingly strained relationships, her own thoughts and feelings, and society's hypocritical conventions, but is defenseless against the psychological wounds inflicted by others, by her world, and by herself. Pitting her own aspirations against the oppressive expectations of others, Esther cannot keep the airless bell jar of depression and despair...

She Walks These Hills by Sharyn McCrumb Description: Mystery and folklore are skillfully blended in this contemporary Appalachian tale. Driving the plot are "Harm" (Hiram) Sorley, an aging prisoner suffering from recent memory loss, who receives a spiritual message to escape from prison and return home to North Carolina; history grad student Jeremy Cobb, who wants to hike the trail used by Katie Wyler in the late 1700s when she escaped from Indians who held her captive, and members of the sheriff's department. Strong females also figure prominently, not the least of whom is Katie Wyler, dead over 200 years, whose spectral image helps several characters. Assisting Sheriff Arrowwood is his newest deputy, Martha Ayers, who's determined to prove she can do the job. When all these folks converge beside a burning trailer home, more than one mystery is solved. McCrumb's rich use of dialect, accompanied by both physical description of and folklore about the mountains, combine to produce an evocative, haunting story....

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink,translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Description: The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? My thoughts: I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. I wasn't emotionally connected to either of the characters, but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it. Michael and Hanna's relationship is complex and fascinating in its way.  Guilt, love, shame, anger,...