Insane City

Fiction by Dave Barry

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Seth Weinstein can't believe his fiancee Tina actually agreed to marry him. Tina is rich, beautiful, and educated, and Seth is astounded by his good luck. He has no problem, therefore, going along with a ridiculously extravagant destination wedding in Miami, although everyone he knows lives in D.C. He's willing to do whatever it takes to make Tina happy. So he travels to South Florida with the wedding entourage.

Tina and her parents (plus a team headed by no less than THREE wedding coordinators) are taking care of all the wedding details. All Seth has to do is show up on time, be dressed appropriately, and make sure to have the ring. Easy, right? But Seth has no idea how many things can go wrong...

This book was hysterical. So SO funny. I loved it.

I also read recently by this author: Tricky Business

In Good Faith

Fiction by Scott Pratt

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Defense attorney-turned-prosecutor Joe Dillard has to help catch and convict a murderous gang with a creepy satanic bent in this legal thriller.

It was good.

I also read by this author: An Innocent Client

Three Things About Elsie

Fiction by Joanna Cannon

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This story is about an octogenarian named Flo, who lives at Cherry Tree Home, an assisted-living type home for the elderly, and worries that her memory is slipping so much that she might be sent to the dreaded Greenbank. Flo relies on her best friend Elsie to help her when she gets confused. Elsie always know the right thing to help Flo feel better. But can Elsie help her when a mysterious new man moves to Cherry Tree, a man Flo is sure died over sixty years ago?

This was a good story and I liked the characters. I wasn't completely sure about the ending.

One Second After

Fiction by William Forstchen.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Retired colonel John Matherson lives quietly with his family in a small Carolina town, teaching at a Christian college and slowly recovering from his wife's untimely death. But then the whole world is turned upside down, as a terrorist attack on the U.S. shuts down all computerized devices in the nation, which in this modern life includes every manner of electronics, even cars. Along with the whole country, John and his neighbors have to learn to rebuild their lives without any of the modern conveniences they've been used to.

I've read an astonishingly similar book series on this subject before, the Restoration Series by Terri Blackstock (Last Light, Night Light, True Light, and Dawn's Light), but I enjoyed this book as well, as a novel. However...

Although both sets of books are, of course, fiction, the Terri Blackstock series does not try to tell the reader that its apocalyptic story of the future is probable. By contrast, One Second After is presented as a cautionary tale, with a political forward by Newt Gingrich that I admittedly didn't read, and an afterward that tells the reader how the government should be guarding us against the terrible future predicted in the story. I'm not sure if this scare-mongering is necessary or true.

Still, this was an interesting story, and I will be checking out the sequel soon.

If You Leave Me

Fiction by Crystal Hana Kim

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This story begins in 1951 with a sixteen-year-old girl called Haemi living with her mother and sickly younger brother as refugees in Busan, Korea. She tries to forget the woes of her war-torn country by sneaking around with a boy from her home village, but her mother has plans for her to marry another young man who can save the family from starvation and ruin.

This was a really good book with a lot of insight into Korea before, after, and during the war.

We Were the Lucky Ones

Fiction by Georgia Hunter

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a great story! It follows the Kurcs, a Jewish family in Radom, Poland, beginning in spring of 1939 and then all through the terrible war years. At the beginning of the book, Mr. and Mrs. Kurc and four of their five grown children (some of them married and one with a baby) are living in Poland, either in Radom or Lvov. The fifth son is living and working in Paris. The reader knows from the start that none of these are safe places for Jews. How many of them will live through the next six years, and what horrors will they face?

What makes this novel most amazing is that it is the story of the author's own ancestors! She listened to the stories of older relatives and then carefully researched the topic, and she has created a wonderful story. (So you know that at least one family member lived! I won't tell you how many of them were the "lucky ones" of the title.)

I definitely recommend this book!!

Harvesting the Heart

Fiction by Jodi Picoult

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This is one of Jodi Picoult's earliest novels. It was not quite as good as her later ones, which I've loved.

In this story, Paige is a young mother overwhelmed by her role who sort of snaps and runs away for a bit. The book starts out with her trying to come back to her husband and baby after the fact, and then flashes back to her earlier life and how she got into that mess, so this is not a spoiler. The reader knows Paige's whole backstory is leading up to her abandoning her child (albeit temporarily), and this gave me a case of "Oh-No-I-Can't-Look Syndrome."**

Her feelings of hopeless inadequacy that lead up to her flight from home are understandable, given her demanding husband, lack of a mother figure, and general postpartum depression, but it was kind of tough for me to read through.

The characters in the book are wonderfully realistic, and the story is good, but I spent a lot of it rather upset by the things that were happening. Still, it was a good book.

I also read recently by this author: A Spark of Light

**Oh-No-I-Can't-Look Syndrome

(see  Saving Grace by Jane Green)

That's when you know a main character is making a major error in judgement that's going to have huge and terrible consequences.

The Three-Body Problem

Fiction by Cixin Liu

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This story is science fiction written in Chinese and translated to English. I had a lot of trouble following it and kept getting confused or bored.

I borrowed this book from a friend who said it was really good, and so I tried to like it, but if it takes me two weeks to sort-of finish a book, I'm obviously not enjoying it. I think maybe I'm not smart enough?

Tourist Season

Fiction by Carl Hiaasen

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

In this darkly comic mystery, someone is killing off tourists in South Florida, and it is up to a reporter-turned-investigator to find out who it is, and hopefully stop them.

This was a good story with funny characters.

I also read by this author: Skink No Surrender

The Mother's Promise

Fiction by Sally Hepworth

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Alice Stanhope is a single mother of Zoe, an emotionally fragile teenager. She has no other family, besides an alcoholic brother she can't possibly depend on. Zoe's father is "not in the picture," and Alice has very few friends. So when Alice is diagnosed with cancer, it falls to a kind nurse and a hospital social worker to "support" her, which they do with varying degrees of helpfulness. 

(For example, it was helpful to answer Alice's phone during chemo and try to straighten things out with Zoe's school. It was NOT helpful to have Zoe forced into foster care while Alice was having surgery.)

This was a really good book!

I also read recently by this author:  The Secrets of Midwives

The Readymade Thief

Fiction by Augustus Rose.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Lee is an eighteen-year-old girl all alone in the world, and she is indeed a thief. Only some of her many troubles are her own fault, and her story is quite absorbing.

I really liked this book most of the time, but some of it was hard to understand. It seemed to keep trying to be an intellectual story, or a puzzle story, when really it worked best as a character story, I thought.

Two Weeks

Fiction by Karen Kingsbury.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

In this story we have a high-school girl who finds her college plans threatened by an unexpected pregnancy, a super-nice boy who falls for her, and a young couple who have been unsuccessfully trying to conceive a baby for years. Hmmm.. can we guess where this might go?

This was a pretty good story, but a little too predictable.

As a side note, this book features characters from the Baxter family, introduced many years ago in Karen Kingsbury's early books. I give the whole list of that series in the post about the book Coming Home. But you don't have to know all those stories to understand this one.

I also read recently by this author: Brush of Wings