September 5, 2013

August 2013 Reads

enthusiastic reader

58 Silent Wife A.S.A. Harrison
59 If You Were Here Alafair Burke
60 The Wrong Girl Hank Phillippi Ryan
61 Fin & Lady Cathleen Schine
62 Shine Shine Shine Lydia Netzer
63 The Ocean at the End of the Lane Neil Gaiman
64 The Tilted World Tom Franklin & Beth Ann Fennely
65 The Last Policeman Ben H. Winters
66 Accused Lisa Scottoline
67 Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Kerry Hudson
  Before He Stole My Ma  
68 The Bone Season Smantha Shannon
69 A Foreign Country Charles Cummings

This month started out with a bang.  The Silent Wife is the best summer read of 2013, it's been compared to Girl Gone, and I agree.  I don't agree with murdering your husband, after all I've been married over 49 years and have never resorted to murder; but I could disagree with it, in this story!

If You Were Here is another great summer-ish read.  It's a tightly plotted story of friendship, lies, and betrayal.  Not "light" reading, but suspenseful and fun.

The Wrong Girl really got to me.  It's about birth parents searching for their relinquished babies and adoptees searching for their birth parents; what could be more wonderful?  Jane, a reporter, discovers a evil scheme involving matching birth parents with adoptees, not necessarily correct matches, and making money from it!

Fin & Lady is bound to become a book club favorite.  It's a  clever story of NYC in the swinging '60's.  A young boy, Fin, is orphaned.  His guardian is his half sister, Lady.  Fin is 11, Lady is 24 and Fin hasn't seen her in 6 years.  Fin & Lady is a wise, clever, tenderly delivered novel about learning the ways of the world.  I absolutely loved this story and didn't want it to end.

Shine Shine Shine is another fabulous debut novel.  The story is about two quirky people who knew since they were children that there could be no one else.  Sunny is an only child, born bald, and Maxon is the youngest of four boys, autistic, brilliant and bullied.  Sunny is pregnant with their second child when Maxon needs to go to the Moon!  The writing is poetic and utterly original.  Netzer took ten years to write this story, here's hoping she produces her next novel in much less time!

I think The Bone Season will be the "next" Hunger Games.  I really loved the Hunger Games trilogy, so did Bob, and millions of other readers.  I loved The Bone Season, even more.  It's more "grown-up" and the writing is terrific.

Two others were great reads, one, The Last Policeman, a detective/mystery; the other A Foreign Country, an espionage thriller are the type of novels I'd read every time, if all these other fabulous books weren't in the way.

As I implied, this was a great month for reading.
What are you reading?

1 comment

  1. I have The Ocean at the End of the Lane but now quite a few of these are going on my list, thanks.

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