4. Summers End

 by Kathleen Gilles Seidel. 

Rated 5 Stars

Keeper Shelves

Re-read

This is an old favorite romance and it  didn't require me to use a single brain cell.

Book Description:

To their respective families, Jack Wells and Amy Legend are outsiders. A free-spirited man-of-all-trades, Jack takes life as it comes—not at all like his supremely organized mother, the admiral’s widow, and his methodical lawyer sister. Amy, a professional athlete with exquisite taste and golden beauty, has a glamorous career a world apart from her bookish older siblings and college professor father.

When Jack’s mother marries Amy’s widowed father, they invite all the children to spend the summer at the Legends’ retreat in northern Minnesota. They never imagine just how well Jack and Amy are going to get along—as affection unexpectedly flares into a burning attraction that threatens to damage already fragile familial bonds. Agreeing to deny their desire until the vacation is over—caught between long-simmering conflicts and clashing personalities—Jack and Amy find, nonetheless, that they are falling deeply in love. And passion this strong couldn’t possibly wait until summer’s end . . . no matter what the consequences.

3. 11/22/63

By:  Stephen King
Rated 5 Stars
Audio Book

I finally finished this book today.  I was 28 years old when Kennedy was murdered and the world that King has described in such wonderful detail is very familiar to me.  1958-1963 was a much kinder and gentler time than now.  It's a trip down memory lane in so many ways and I have been wallowing in it.

Anyway I like time travel books if they are done well and although I am generally not a reader of Stephen King's books I decided to give this one a try.  I am so glad I did.


Library Description:


Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

2. Lionheart

Sharon Kaye Penman
Rated 5 Stars
Audio Book

It's taken me a while with this book but I have been dragging my feet savoring it.

This is not a Historical Romance novel.  It's a little on the dry side, more straight history.  But great stuff.  Authors don't have to gussy up stories about the Plantagnets.  You can't make stuff up about them that is better than what they actually got up to on their own.  History's most dysfunctional family.

Publisher Summary 1

The life and times of Richard the Lionheart and the Plantagenets--Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard's brothers--is recreated against the backdrop of the medieval religious crusades and family conflict

1. World War II On The Air

By:  Mark Bernstien
Rated 5 Stars
Paperback
From:  Connie

 I was only 6 years old when the US entered the war and 10 when it ended.  I have some memories of these years but they are only vignettes and naturally are from a child's perspective so I find these WW2 books very interesting.  So much was happening in the world and the most I remember about it are sugar and shoe rationing and how chaotic Union Station in St. Louis Mo. was when I went with my Grandmother once to meet one of my uncles who was coming home on leave from the Navy.

But really, Lucky Me to have been so little effected by it when some many tragic things were happening in other places in the world.  Reading this book and listening to he live broadcasts on the CD that accompanied this book really brought that home to me.  A real Count Your Blessings moment.
 
Book Description:

The story of World War II was told first not by historians, but by reporters. And no one told that story with more impact than Edward R. Murrow and the remarkable band of reporters he assembled. World War II on the Air recounts the dramatic stories behind these extraordinary correspondents. And it lets you hear their actual broadcasts, culled from the archives and collected here-many for the first time-on audio CD, narrated by Dan Rather.