This book introduces us to two families who have lived next door to each other and been best friends for years.  The parents are all thrilled when their children Chris and Emily begin dating.  This relationship ends in tragedy with Emily dead, and Chris surviving.  The gunshot that killed Emily came from a gun that Chris brought from his home.  The story tries to figure out what actually happened: whether it was a suicide pact and Chris didn’t follow through, whether he killed Emily or if something else entirely had happened.

This tragedy obviously shatters the friendship of their parents.  Chris also goes through very interesting transformations as he very much blames himself and wants to take responsibility and receive punishment for what happened.  The feelings that Chris goes through of confusion, guilt, depression and anger are all very real and appropriate to the situation.

The story goes between present and past time which helps to develop the characters and relationships more fully.  The highlights for me were the way that a tragic event effected the parents of the children and the things that Chris went through.  This has been one of my favorites by Jodi Picoult.

This story is presented as a murder trial for Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, accused of murdering Carl Heine, a Caucasian American in the early 1950s.  The setting is the Puget Sound area in Washington where it seems everyone is either a fisherman or a strawberry farmer.  Kabuo and Carl’s families have a history of knowing each other and Kabuo’s father had tried to purchase land from Carl’s father.  He made monthly payments for years and then was unable to pay the last two payments due to Pearl Harbor and the aftermath when the United States rounded up many Japanese American’s and put them in internment camps.  Before Kabuo’s father was able to complete his payments Carl Sr. died and his wife did not honor the agreement.  This dispute over land is looked at as the motive for the possible murder.

Carl died on his fishing boat and the trial introduces many of the town members as witnesses as they try to determine what happened.  The story is narrated by Ishmael Chambers who works for the paper and who, as a child/young man, had been in love with the defendant’s wife, Hatsue.  Hatsue and Kabuo were married in the internment camp but a lot of the story is told through memories of what took place before.  These relationships, tensions and passions all come shining through.

What I thought was most interesting about this book is that it did focus on a period of American history that I really don’t hear very much about.  It is horrifying to think about how Japanese American’s, many who had been living in the United States for generations, were treated during and after World War II.  I admire that David Guterson decided to write about these times and about the anti-Japanese sentiment that followed in such a realistic way.

Eliza is the youngest of two children in the Naumann family.  Her father, Saul, had great expectations for his children as he is very intelligent and spends a lot of his time studying.  Eliza’s brother Aaron meets his expectations by being in the gifted program at school and reciting prayers by memory.  Eliza, for the most part, views herself and dull and ordinary and has given up hope in having a relationship with her father the way Aaron does.  That is, until she is 9-years-old and wins her school spelling bee.  She is so proud, yet shy about her accomplishment that she does not even tell her parents at first and has Aaron take her to the next round.

Eliza continues to do well in spelling competitions and her father recognizes in ability in her to study Jewish tests and achieve levels of spirituality that many can not reach.  He works with her daily on her spelling to prepare for the next bee.  This throws family dynamics off kilter and Aaron starts seeking his identity outside of the home and his father’s expectations.  Aaron starts to explore outside of his Jewish faith and looks into Eastern religions and different ways of worship.  Eliza understands how her brother is hurting by having her as the focus of their father’s love and attention, but struggles with relinquishing her new found place in the family.

I loved this book.  I loved the characters, I loved the family relationships, and felt that it read very smoothly.  I think anyone can relate to having times in their life when they feel under appreciated and hopefully we all have times when we excel too.  Great read!

The main character of this book is Juno McKay.  She attended Penrose College and fifteen years later is still living near the school and works doing stained glass restoration.  She has not been very involved with her college, or at least her graduating class, due to how people talk about traumatic things that happened in the past and she does not want to be reminded.  Juno’s ex-husband tried to drown her and her baby fifteen years before, and has been in an institution for the mentally ill ever since.  Juno has not seen him or had contact with him during that time, even though the institution is near the college.

Juno is brought back into the folds of her class through a reunion where her best friend, Christine, gives a lecture about a stained glass window that Juno’s company is going to restore.  Christine had done a lot of research and provides some previously unknown details about the college founders and the figure in the window.  A week later Christine is found dead in the nearby river.  Juno works to uncover the trail that Christine’s research led her on.

This was a very interesting book that kept me up at night reading to see what would happen next.  Again, it does have a lot of references to literature and mythology so if you are not interested in those things it might not be the book for you.  However it is different than any other books that I have read and I really enjoyed it.

Stefan buys a hotel which he builds into a large apartment building.  It is the biggest, grandest building in town.  Stefan marries two American women and has a single child with each before losing them.  Stefan eventually visit Germany and ends up marrying a lifelong friend so that she can be the mother of his children.  She also has a child with him and this family struggles together.  Stefan’s first two children always feel a little out of place with a father so busy with his business and their German stepmother.  Robert, the youngest, wants desperately for the family to get along together and tries to keep the family and the family business together.

The Vision of Emma Blau follows three generations and shows the cultural pulls and strains of being an immigrant trying to fit into a new place.  Ursula Hegi is a wonderful author and the characters are well developed.  The story flowed but yet there were twists and turns that I didn’t quite expect.  I loved it and hope to read more by Ursula Hegi.

The different stories start in the 1770s with the creation of the song Amazing Grace.  It covers the founding of the chiropractic form of medicine, Alcoholics Anonymous, Netflix and Barbie.  Each of these stories in their own right are interesting.  I found some of the commonalities even more interesting such as that many of the people were out of their home country when they had their Eureka moment.  It also amazed me how many people (who became rich and important) knew or were friends with others who were rich and important.  Lastly, it seemed as though many of these people were so involved and passionate about their creation/idea that they neglected personal relationships or suffered in that area.

I also found the facts that the author included at the end of each short chapter interesting. Who knew that “if every Barbie doll ever manufactured were laid end to end, they would circle the earth three and a half times?”  Slinkys would circle the world 126 times!  Or that Dr. Seuss books have sold more than 500 million copies.

This was a great book filled with short chapters of information about moments of brilliance.  It made it seem as though these moments are attainable to anyone…if you actually try to make it happen.

This is a story of Harrison William Shepherd.  It is told through his own voice in a chapter that he wrote and journals that he kept as a child and young man.  It is also told through letters and news articles.  It starts when he is thirteen and moves to Mexico.  His father is American and his mother Mexican.  When they separate and his mother follows a different man back to Mexico, Shepherd goes.  He befriends the cook and learns both about snorkeling and cooking from him.  Snorkeling becomes a passion to him and cooking a gift.  Through his work cooking he learns skills to help him mix plaster and he becomes an assistant to Diego Rivera, an important artist who expresses many  important and controversial things through his art.

Shepherd is separated from his life in Mexico to do some schooling in America and through this we see how he is torn between two cultures, not completely fitting in anywhere.  He returns to Mexico and works in the home of Diego and his wife Frida, also an important artist, as a cook.  While he is there they become close with Lev Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution, and Shepherd discusses what it is like to be in a household with strict security, surrounded by men doing important things for the world.  After an incident that shakes up the home, Frida, who has become close with Shepherd, finds a way for him to go back to America.  Throughout this time he kept journals, and that is how the story is told.

Shepherd settles in Asheville, NC and upon discovering his journals which he thought he had lost, he finds hope in the written word and writes two books that become widely popular.  As he is gaining his stride as a writer, the Red Scare begins and he becomes a target.  Partly due to his time in Mexico and the people he worked for (Rivera and Trotsky) and partly based on nothing at all.  The love letters that he had been receiving turn into hate mail and his books are banned.  Violet Brown, his assistant and the closest person to him, tries to help him along but he slowly shuts down.

This was an intriguing book.  It actually took me a lot longer to read than most, but I enjoyed it very much.  I wish I had a little more background information on Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky as I knew that they were real people, but not a whole lot more.  However it was realistic, the way information was portrayed, and I liked the different mediums through which the story was told.

In This Charming Man the story is told by the perspective of four women in their early 30s.  They have all been in some way connected to Paddy de Courcy, an Irish politician who is one of the most eligible bachelors around.  Lola was his most recent girlfriend, finding out they were no longer together when the news announces his engagement to someone else.  Grace is a journalist pursuing the story who knew Paddy in his younger days and has recently been reacquainted with him.  Marnie, Grace’s sister, dated Paddy during high school and college.  And Alicia, his current fiance.

All of the women have different voices and have different sentiments about Paddy during the story…however none of them seem to be able to get away from him.  It turns out that Paddy is abusive towards the women he dates and he has left his mark, physically and emotionally, on all of these women.

Overall it was a good book.  I did have a problem with the parts that were written in Lola’s voice because there were a lot of sentence fragments which I find distracting…and a little bit annoying.  It’s not that I don’t write sentence fragments but it seemed like every sentence was not grammatically correct.  I’m sure this was done to bring out Lola’s voice and personality, but I had a hard time getting past it and found myself speed reading her parts so that I didn’t have to look at it.  Otherwise I enjoyed it and thought it was a good summer read.

Doug remains in their home in a neighborhood filled with mostly married couples.  He has a teenage stepson, Russ, who is acting out as he handles his grief.  Russ keeps coming back to Doug and his house rather than going to his birth father.  Doug struggles to play an active “father” role rather than an older peer role, but throughout the book you can see the bond between Doug and Russ is strong.  Doug writes a column about his experience as a young widower and it draws a lot of attention, with his agent even wanting to make a book out of it. Doug expresses how difficult it is to be seeing success with work when he could not care less about it.

Doug’s twin sister Claire, has some life problems of her own and temporarily moves in with Doug.  She starts trying to set him up on dates to get him out in the world again.  Most of the dating adventures don’t go very well.  Doug ends up having an affair with a married neighbor woman, and having intimacy issues with a woman he is dating who he is actually interested in.  Claire does somehow manage to pull Doug and Russ together into more of a family unit and helps motivate Doug to get out of the house a little more.

This is the second book that I have read by Jonathan Tropper and I enjoyed it just as much as the first.  His characters are full of life and you end up really liking them…even when they are a little messed up.  There are parts that are laugh out loud funny and parts that touch you as being hard and true.  I thought it was a fast, enjoyable read.

He talks about growing up in a time when people were innocent and didn’t see danger in every little thing.  He describes different places in Des Moines where the kids would hang out and how they spent most of the time running around outside… sometimes behind trucks spraying DDT, playing happily in the mists.  I did not live during these happy times and, to me, some of it was a little hard to imagine.  However, told by Bill Bryson, it was very enjoyable.  He is one of the few authors that I find myself laughing out loud.

While this was not quite as entertaining to me as In a Sunburned Country or A Walk in the Woods, if you like Bill Bryson, you will like this book.