book reviews

I’ve accumulated 11 books since my last book review post and since I have nothing new to write about since Monday here are the first five. I’ll post the next six later.

Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin - Vivvy is the daughter of a psychic and has visions of her own that come unbidden when touches pictures, things, people. When she was 10 she started having dreams of a blue horse killing a boy, Mike, at her school and took to hanging around outside his house. One day she pushes him out of the way of a blue Mustang about to run him down. Grown now, Vivvy has gone off to college and become an astrophysicist, Mike has become a cop who believes in Vivvy’s visions and asks her to come in after hours and go through files of cases to see if she comes up with anything helpful, a success rate of about 42%. This day though, Mike has asked her to come in and review a file of a case belonging to Jesse Sharp, a skeptic but when Vivvy pulls a photo of a charm bracelet out of the file telling him it doesn’t belong and that the missing girl the file is about is alive he keeps his eye on her as she conducts her own investigation to find the child and the kidnapper. I’m not going to say anymore about this story, it’s worth a read. There’s the relationship with her mother, recently dead from a brain tumor, with her sister Brig, with Mike, and ultimately with Sharp, and attempts to reconcile her visions with her scientist mind.

The Institute by Stephen King - 12 year old Luke Ellis is extremely intelligent, he absorbs knowledge like a sponge absorbs water only he never becomes saturated like a sponge does and he remembers everything he reads. He doesn’t just remember, he understands everything he reads. He is also capable of very weak telekinesis. One night his parents are murdered and he is drugged and kidnapped and wakes up in a room that is exactly like his except for no window where there should be a window, a prisoner at the Institute, a secrete installation in the woods of Maine. He meets the other kids and learn that they too were kidnapped for telekinesis and telepathy and the kids stay in Front Half for several weeks being tested and given injections to enhance their abilities before being sent to Back Half from which no one returns and no one knows what happens there. Then 10 year old Avery arrives who has very high telepathic ability. When Luke escapes, a team is sent to capture or kill him, his friends are sent to Back Half who try to hold onto their sanity hoping Luke will find someone who will believe his story and bring help. When the kids in Back Half finally figure out what they are being used for and discover their true power they start wreaking havoc in Back Half but their revolt is doomed unless Luke gets there in time. I had stopped reading Stephen King for reasons which aren’t important but I enjoyed this one. It’s a good story and he’s a good storyteller but I could have used a little less detail on how train yards work. But that’s just me.

We Are All The Same In The Dark by Julia Heaberlin - When Odette was 16 she went to Wyatt’s house for their scrabble date. Wyatt met her at the door, told her to run and never come back. He had blood on his clothes. She left and in her panic rolled her car and nearly died and by the time she was found had to have one of her legs amputated. Wyatt’s sister Trumanell, the darling of their small town, and their father were missing, her bloody handprint on the door, and Wyatt was found wandering out of his mind in the fields. The town accuses Wyatt of their murders but no bodies are ever found and no proof. Odette graduates and leaves for college and returns five years later and joins the police force, obsessed with Trumanells’ disappearance ten years earlier. Then Wyatt sees a young girl with one eye laying in a field. He stops and brings her home to protect her. Odette gets wind of it and shows up at Wyatt’s house and tries to shield him from the town’s conviction that he is a murderer and whisks the girl to a safe house run by her cousin, daughter of her Baptist preacher uncle, brother to her dead revered cop father. Odette is desperate to solve Trumanell’s murder and uncover the shocking truth of that night and clear her ex-boyfriend as well as the mystery of this young girl with one eye who refuses to talk and who Odette feels will somehow help to uncover the truth in this twisty psychological thriller. It’s a good story, well written.

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods - I’m not really sure how to write about what this book is about so here’s the blurb on the back…”On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found…For too long Opaline, Martha, and Henry have been the side characters in their lives. But when a vanishing bookstore casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. By unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder…where nothing is as it seems.” It intrigued me enough to check it out. The story is told in the first person by the three characters. Opaline’s story begins in 1921 in London when she flees to Paris and then again to Dublin to escape from a forced marriage. In Dublin she finds safe harbor taking over a nostalgia shop after its owner had died, adding books to the inventory. The nostalgia shop was originally a library in a remote Italian village which had the extraordinary ability to direct the visitor to the one book that would change and set their lives on a new path. The villagers wanted to burn it down, spooked by its uncanniness. Instead a man from London had it dismantled and shipped to Dublin where he had it rebuilt for his nostalgia shop. Martha’s story starts in the modern day when she flees her Irish village and her abusive and violent husband ending up in Dublin and getting a job and a home as a ladies housekeeper for Madam Bowden. Henry’s story also starts in the modern day. A literary researcher convinced that Emily Bronte was writing a second novel, he meets Martha while looking for the lost bookshop run by Opaline that he thinks is the key to this lost manuscript and that should be next door to Madam Bowden’s house but isn’t. As Martha and Henry search for more information about Opaline, who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth when her brother finds her once again, their own stories become intertwined. I don’t want to say much more but it’s a good book full of magic and self discovery and I enjoyed it.

Shoot The Moon by Isa Arsen - Annie is the only child of the only couple with a child in her neighborhood in Santa Fe whose residents live there because they are nuclear scientists working at the nearby facility. Annie finds little things under her mother’s rose bush in the back garden, inexplicably there. In 1948 when Annie is 8 years old a little girl appears in her backyard, she’s just visiting she says and is gone a few minutes later. When Annie is 15, her father, who she adored, died and Annie represses her memories in order to repress the pain of her father’s death, represses the need to love things that will leave her. Annie is brilliant and after high school she leaves for college and a double degree in physics. After graduation, inexplicably drawn to the moon, Annie heads to Houston and NASA where she gets hired as a secretary, leaving her artist girlfriend Evelyn behind. After correcting mistaken calculations from one of the engineers working on the moon shot/landing she confronts him and is eventually brought to the attention of the director who promotes her to the computer room/programming suite. As her relationship with the engineer, Norm, blooms, Annie discovers an anomaly in the back corner amongst the massive computer banks. Things that fall onto a certain spot disappear and then reappear 6 minutes later, a discovery that completely changes the course of Annie’s life. I’m not going to reveal any more, it’s a good story told by jumping back and forth from the past to the present, just that Annie must learn to let love in her life even though that comes sometimes with loss and that she must learn to reign in the single minded curiosity of her brilliant mind to let that happen. I liked this one a lot.