Moonlight on the Magic Flute (Magic Tree House #41) by Mary Pope Osborne
Description:
Jack and Annie head to 18th-century Austria, where they must find and help a brilliant artist. Decked out in the craziest outfits they’ve ever worn—including a wig for Jack and a giant hoopskirt for Annie!—the two siblings search an entire palace to no avail. Their hunt is further hampered by the appearance of a mischievous little boy who is determined to follow them everywhere. But when the boy lets the animals out of the palace zoo, Jack and Annie have to use the only magic at their disposal to save themselves and the naughty little fellow.
My thoughts:
Amber and I read this together, like we have all the Magic Tree House stories. I'm going to be sad when she gets too old for them. Heck, I might just have to keep reading them on my own. In this one, Jack and Annie are off on another great Merlin mission....
The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
From the back:
On a hot summer afternoon, three teenagers drive into an unfamiliar neighborhood—and six lives are changed forever.
Thirty-five years after that harrowing day, one survivor reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor has a different plan, and seizes the moment to claim reparation in any form he can find.
The Turnaround takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from diners and auto garages to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It is a novel at whose heart is an emotionally charged story of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory, and violent redemption.
My thoughts:
The racially-fueled crime happens early in the book, during the 70's. The story picks up again with the teenagers now adults, some with kids of their own. Pelecanos does a wonderful job of showing how "the incident" affected all their lives...
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
From the dust jacket:
Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.
The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, "There are no accidents."
My thoughts:
Even after finishing this book, I'm not sure how I feel about it. The concept was great and I was engrossed, but there was something off for me. Maybe it's because in the first paragraph, Towner, the narrator, tells us she's a liar and...
The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman
From the dustjacket:
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future—a future that she might not want to see.
In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of character confronts a haunting past—and a very current murder—against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probably Future chronicles the Sparrows' legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.
My thoughts:
First of all, the current murder plays very little in the story. It really functions to being the whole...
Second Glance by Jodi Picoult
From the dustjacket:
An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property.
Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancée's death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittsh, mysterious woman who,...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
From the dustjacket:
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It's about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden...and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It's about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance . . . and about Lisbath Salander, a twent-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age - and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it - who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism - and an unexpected connection between themselves.
My thoughts:
This book did start slowly,...