50. Secrets in the Heather

By Gwen Kirkwood
Rated:★★★

A new family saga from the well-loved Scottish author. When the woman orphaned Victoria Pringle believes to be her great-grandmother dies, Victoria is offered a job in the kitchens of the Pringle family, tenants of the Laird of Darlonachie. But times are changing, both above and below stairs, and Victoria must face up to new choices, and come to terms with a long-buried secret in her past.

I love family sagas. The problem that I had with this one is that it's about the fifth book in a series and this is the obnly one that my library system has. It's a pretty good story but I was too far behind to really enjoy it.

At Some Disputed Barricade

By Anne Perry
Rated DNF

I returned this book to the library unfinished. I found that I could no longer deal with life in the trenches of WWI. I fully intend to check this book out again and read it but I needed a break. Maybe in July.

49. Angels in the Gloom

By Anne Perry
Rated:★★★★


"Angels in the Gloom is a saga of love, hate, obsession, and murder that features an honorable English family - brothers Joseph and Matthew Reavley and their sisters, Judith and Hannah. In March 1916, Joseph, a chaplain at the front, and Judith, an ambulance driver, are fighting not only the Germans but the bitter cold and the appalling casualties at Ypres. Scarcely less at risk, Matthew, an officer in England's Secret Intelligence Service, fights the war covertly from London. Only Hannah, living with her children in the family home in tranquil Cambridgeshire, seems safe." "Appearances, however, are deceiving. By the time Joseph returns home to Cambridgeshire, rumors of spies and traitors are rampant. And when the savagely brutalized body of a weapons scientist is discovered in a village byway, the fear that haunts the battlefields settles over the town - along with the shadow of the obsessed ideologue who murdered the Reavleys' parents on the eve of the war. Once again, this icy, anonymous powerbroker, the Peacemaker, is plotting to kill." "Perry's kaleidoscopic new novel illuminates an entire world, from the hell of the trenches to the London nightclub where a beautiful Irish spy plies her trade, from the sequestered laboratory where a weapon that can end the war is being perfected to the matchless glory of the English countryside in spring. Steeped in history and radiant with truth, Angels in the Gloom is a masterpiece that warms the heart even as it chills the blood."--BOOK JACKET.

48. Nineteen minutes

By Jodi Picoult
Rated:★★★★

I expected this to be a powerful book but I was still almost floored by it. The subject matter couldn't be more topical but more than that I think it's the randomness of the different school shootings that really disturbs me the most. It was kind of like when I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and realized that no matter who or where you are this kind of thing could happen at anywhere. Below is the blurb from the book jacket:

"Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens - until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence. In the aftermath, the town's residents must not only seek justice in order to begin healing but also come to terms with the role they played in the tragedy. For them, the lines between truth and fiction, right and wrong, insider and outsider have been obscured forever. Josie Cormier, the teenage daughter of the judge sitting on the case, could be the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. And as the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show, destroying the closest friendships and families." "Nineteen Minutes asks simple questions that have no easy answers: Can your own child become a mystery to you? What does it mean to be different in our society? Is it ever okay for a victim to strike back? And who - if anyone - has the right to judge someone else?"--BOOK JACKET.

47. One Perfect Rose

By Mary Jo Putney
Rated: ★★★★


This is one of the better romances I have read, and it is certainly the best in the "Fallen Angel" series. Below is from the library site:

Stunned when his family physician tells him that he only has a few months to live, Stephen Kenyon, Duke of Ashburton, escapes Ashburton Hall and temporarily leaves his responsibilities behind to wander the countryside anonymously as he tries to sort out his feelings and reconcile himself to his apparent fate. However, when his heroic rescue of a young boy results in his becoming part of a traveling theater company, he meets the compelling Rosalind Jordan.

46. In A Sunburnt Country

By Bill Bryson
Rated: ★★★★★


I love this author. When I grow up I want to be a travel writer and he is my inspiration.

From the summary on my library site:

Taking readers on a rollicking ride far beyond packaged-tour routes, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY introduces a country where interesting things happen all the time, from a Prime Minister who was lost at sea while swimming at a Victoria beach to Japanese cult members who managed to set off an atomic bomb unnoticed on their 500,000-acre property. Leaving no Vegemite unsavored, readers will accompany Bryson as he dodges jellyfish while learning to surf at Bondi Beach, discovers a fish that can climb trees, dehydrates in deserts where the temperatures leap to 140 degrees, and tells the true story of the rejected Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House. Published just in time for the Olympics, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY provides a singularly intriguing, wonderfully wacky take on a glorious, adventure-filled locale.

45. Dream When You're Feeling Blue

By Elizabeth Berg
Rated: ★★★

A Rita Hayworth look-alike and her sister keep the home fires burning for young men going off to fight WWII in Berg's nostalgic tale of wartime romance and family sacrifice.

This was an OK book but not one I would particularly recommend. I liked the detail about the era because it was my childhood so it was a nostalgic read for me. However, I did not think the relationships were particularly realistic. I think that Berg prides herself on being an edgy author and I think that she has tried a little too hard with this novel and sacraficed some realism in the process. I thought the ending was from way out in left field somewhere.

44. Pied Piper

By Nevil Shute
Rated: ★★★★★


It is the summer of 1940 and in Europe the time of Blitzkreig. John Howard, a 70-year-old Englishman vacationing in France, cuts shorts his tour and heads for home. He agrees to take two children with him.

But war closes in. Trains fail, roads clog with refugees. And if things were not difficult enough, other children join in Howard's little band. At last they reach the coast and find not deliverance but desperation. The old Englishman's greatest test lies ahead of him.

I love this author.

43. A Singular Hostage

By Thalassa Ali
Rated: ★½ & ★★★★★


First let me start with why I added on the five stars to the above rating. As a straight historical novel about India and Afghanistan chronicalling the events that led up to the First Afghan War (1839-1842) this is a marvelous book. The author's descriptions of Islamic culture with wonderful and skillfully drawn secondary characters is at times breathtaking. Ali hits the perfect notes to bring you all the rich sights, sounds and smells of the Punjab of the 1830's. At a time when the West is struggling for an accurate understanding of Muslims, wondering, "What do they really think, anyway? And how do they really feel?," this novel, set far away and long ago, is absolutely brilliant.

Now, here is what I disliked about this book. Never have I read a novel that cried out for a co-author as much as this one did. The main story, the one about the young English woman, who arrives straight from the English countryside where she was raised as the daughter of a clergyman strains my credibility to the breaking point. She arrives in India and instantly loves it and everyone in it. She is headstrong to the point of idiocy and lurches from one social disaster to another without ever catching on that she is stupid. She attracts the love of a young British artillery officer which taking into account the constraints of Victorian society with a little effort I could have swallowed . But her marriage to an Indian bureaucrat of good family was arranged on the flimsiest of reasons and then afterward he apparently falls in love with her. But what attracts him to her was beyond my ability to imagine.

Had this author teamed up with someone who could write a decent plot and then added her fabulous descriptions of India and the events surrounding Mariana this book could have rivaled M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions. Sadly it falls far short.

42. Companions of Paradise

By Thalassa Ali
Rated: ★★★★

This is a book that Jani passed along to me and because I am basically an unorganized person it hasn't bothered me one bit that I read this last book of a trilogy before I read the first two. This final volume of Ali's colonial India trilogy is supposed to follow A Singular Hostage and A Beggar at the Gate but is just fine as a stand-a-lone.

The story takes place in Kabul, Afghanistan, where Mariana Givens and her fellow Brits are living in a military camp. Tensions between the Afghanis and the British are on the rise, but the British feel that their military might and modern weaponry are enough to crush the Afghan rebels. Mariana's marriage to Hassan Ali Khan (see A Singular Hostage) makes her an outcast, since Englishwomen aren't expected to interact with the "natives."

The story is ostensibly about a woman torn between two cultures but what really made this book resonate with me was as a description of the role of the British in Afghanistan along with all their faults and blunders. Also there are some really good descriptions of Indian and Afghan characters and the local Afghanistan city of Kabul with it's colorful marketplaces. Where things sort of came apart for me was that Mariana was on one hand extrairordinarily stupid in her relationships and then some kind of a language whiz in which she can learn languages well enough to understand and translate complex poetry. I guess people can be very smart with books and dumb with people but I found it annoying because had the love story been better written this would be a truly great trilogy. Overall I suspect that Mariana exists simply for the author to tell her story of the Afghan War. In that respect this book is beautifully written. This author does history very well. It's a shame she doesn't do relationships as well.

I have the other two books on the reserve list at the library. But one again I have to say a special thanks to Jani. I doubt that I would have been aware of these books had it not been for her.

41. Slaughterhouse Five

by Kurt Vonnegut
Rated: ★★★★

This book is part of my Great 2007 Reread Adventure and is probably the one in which the passage of time is the most noticable to me in the way the story effects me. I first read this back in the early 1960's and I was really such a silly young girl back then with very little idea of what went on in the world around me. If I had a political opinion back then I sure can't remember it. I hadn't even seen my first MASH rerun yet. Since then the US has been involved in several nasty and disasterous wars and I definately have some opinions now.

Billy Pilgram has come unstuck in time. Vonnegut tells the story of Billy Pilgram, a POW in WWII, based on his own experience as the same. He approches this popular, and sometimes over writen topic with a refreshing, and most human manor. Vonnegut uses emotion rather than plain fact and humor rather than contempt. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic of WWII, but not only that, for anyone interested in excellent literature.

This edition also includes an essay by Vonnegut himself discribing his own need to write this book and why he choose to write it in the way he has.

40. Shoulder the Sky

By Anne Perry
Rated:★★★★

This is the second book in Perry's WWI series. Like the first it is a gripping story, beautiful written but it's also Grim. Very Grim. Several times I had to put the book down and back away from it for a while because it was so intense. For those who are avid readers of this period in history I cannot recommend this series highly enough. But it's not easy reading.

In the trenches of Flanders, the Reverend Joseph Reavley goes about the task of trying to keep up the morale of the British soldiers, extending his duties to assisting in bringing men back from the barbed-wired and mud-mired "no man's land." When he retrieves the body of an egotistical correspondent, Eldon Prentice, every person who knew him confesses to being glad he was killed. However, it wasn't the Germans who murdered him, but one of their own, and Reavley decides to investigate. Perry's eye for historical detail masterfully places the main characters in settings exactingly correct for the era, whether London, the trenches, or the English countryside.