Shadow Singer

By Marcia J. Bennett

Book 2 of the Ni-Lach
Poco and Dhalvad have a secret that they must keep hidden in order to survive. Poco is a half-blood Ni-lach and Dhalvad is a full-blood Ni-lach. Hated and feared by the humans who have settled on their world, the Ni-lach have been driven into exile by the relentless persecution of humans. Besides being Ni-lach, both Poco and Dhalvad know the location of buried Ni-lach treasure, treasure that greedy people would love to get their hands on. What those greedy ones don't know is that Dhalvad also has the healing touch, with the ability to mend wounds, knit broken bones and cure sickness which makes him more valuable than any treasure.
Finding themselves hunted by ruthless thieves, Poco and Dhalvad flee into the wilderness, trying to track down the location of the Ni-lach people who have gone into hiding. They are accompanied by two companions, Poco's friend Ssaal-Ir, an imposing and dangerous catman, and Dhalvad's childhood friend, a small, furry, intelligent being, Gi-arobi. Together they will stand against hostile humans, angry bands of cat people, and the dangerous predators of a largely unsettled world.

This book was the second in  the Ni-lach series, the first of which is Where the Ni-Lach. I did not read the first book in the series, but this one stands alone quite well. It probably would have been helpful to know the back story but not necessary, as the author does a good job at filling in the gaps without having to go into a lot of detail.
Basically a science fiction fantasy, the book has the some pretty standard elements: special people with special powers struggling against the establishment, exotic alien allies, setting out on a quest to find themselves and a place in their world, battling hostile elements and facing down vicious predators. It's all there, including a little romance. And yet somehow I found it a bit boring. Maybe it was just a little too predictable. It's an okay story but I am not interested enough in it to continue on with the series.

Backwater

By Joan Bauer

Ivy Breedlove's family history goes back generations. And in those generations have been many, many lawyers. It's a family tradition that Breedloves grow up to be lawyers. But Ivy doesn't want to be a lawyer, much to her father's consternation. She wants to be an historian. And she also wants to write a Breedlove family history.
Ivy's father continues to push his daughter into a career in the law, despite her resistance. He can be stern and unyielding, just like his father was with him. But there used to be another side to her father and there is one Breedlove who may be able to shed some light the matter and that is her father's sister, the reclusive Josephine.
Josphine lives in a cabin on a mountain in the Adirondacks. No road goes to her cabin, the only way to get there is to hike. Josephine hasn't been seen by anyone in the Breedlove family for many years. But Ivy is determined to discover Josephine's story and, with her father's okay, she hires a mountain guide to lead her into the back country and to her aunt's door. The trip, in late December, is cold and dangerous but the guide knows what she is doing and delivers Ivy safely to her aunt's door. What remains to be seen is whether or not her aunt will welcome an emissary from the Breedloves or will send Ivy packing back down the mountain.

This was an a fairly enjoyable read, although intended for a younger audience than myself. I found the family interactions rather simplistic and, predictably, the teenage Ivy gets every body straightened out, in the process learning a few life lessons herself. Still, it was a pretty good story, the best part being the beginning where Ivy is coping with her various family members. The part where she is up at the cabin with her aunt was less interesting and, I felt, more contrived. Teen or preteen girls would probably enjoy this story quite a lot.

The Past Is Another Country

By Lois Battle

Megan Hanlon is the daughter of a Australian woman and an American soldier. Her parents met when he was in Australia in the 1940s. Theirs was a turbulent marriage and he seemed unable to settle down and support his wife and children. So Megan was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Australia. Megan's mom was Irish Catholic and so Megan attended a Catholic girls' school.  She was a bit of a rebel, which didn't sit well with some of the nuns.
Her parents divorced and her mother remarried and Megan went back to the USA to live with her mother. Her father made sporadic appearances in their lives but more often than not he was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, she loved him even as she hated the way he treated her and her brother and mother.
Fast forward about thirty years and Megan is now a movie director. She has come back to Australia for a film festival featuring a film she directed. She has also been nominated for an Academy Award for a documentary she made about runaway teens living on the streets in New York City. It's an important time in her life, a point at which she can achieve her dreams or crash and burn. But going back home to Australia causes a lot of buried issues to be dredged up and dealt with if she is to have some peace and understanding of herself, of her relationships with her ex-husband and an ex-lover and, of course, with her mother and absent father.

Pretty typical entry in the chick-lit genre, featuring three women in their early middle age,  coming to grips with their lives. Megan, the movie director, dealing with her unhappy childhood; Greta, the wife of a successful surgeon, having to face the truth about her marriage, and Joan, a nun, falling in love with a man for the first time in her life. Hearts are broken, relationships are ended, realities are faced and all three make hard choices. But even though typical in its subject matter, it is an engrossing and absorbing story, all the characters quite sympathetic despite their flaws and mistakes and well worth reading. I enjoyed it a lot.

Guess Whose Hair I'm Wearing

By Hildegarde Dolson

A collection of humorous short stories about the author's life in New York City, for the most part.

Most of these stories date from the 1950s and the book was published in the early 1960s, some fifty years ago. Some of the stories are quite amusing and enjoyable and some I just didn't get the joke. That's my fault, not the author's. But the ones that I did understand were pretty funny and I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book, which I have had for ten years or more. In fact, after finishing it, I decided to see if I could find another collection of her short stories, I Shook the Family Tree,  which is about her childhood and her early years in NYC in the 1930s.
Dolson was born in 1908 and always knew she wanted to be a writer.  She decided early on that she never wanted to get married or raise a family, preferring to concentrate on her career. One of her short stories in this collection is, "Why I'd Make an Awful Wife." Her view of herself was as a spinster but she later married a fellow writer when she was in her 50s. She had a very successful writing career, writing short stories and books of nonficition, fiction and mysteries. Many of her stories were published in The New Yorker magazine.

Heaven's Reach

By David Brin

The third novel of the second Uplift trilogy in which the Streaker leaves Jijo and attempts to outrun the Jophur in order to reach the Retired Races and turn their information over to what they hope will be an impartial party. This information is why the Jophur and other races have been trying so hard to capture the Streaker. They think it will reveal hard truths about the universe and its ultimate fate.
But when the Streaker arrives at a star around which is a settlement of the Retired Races, it is to only find calamity. The Retired Races are up in arms, battling against each other and their entire gigantic settlement is breaking apart and falling into the star. Some factions of the Retired want the vital data on board the Streaker but others want the Streaker to continue on. Those ones give Streaker a just enough help to enable them to stay one step ahead of the Jophur vessel.
The Jophur are having problems too. Their vessel has been attacked and invaded by the Zang, a hydrogen life form. What their agenda is is not known. Encountering two human prisoners of the Jophur, the Zang envelope the two and make them part of their community, with a peaceful exchange of ideas.
Meanwhile, something is seriously wrong with the universe, as transfer points become unreliable and dysfunctional. Apparently the disaster is upon them all and chaos is descending.  Who will survive?

This was an OK read. I was sorry to see the story leave the interesting peoples of Jijo. I would have liked to read more about them. But this story is set in space, as the Streaker tries to stay out of the clutches of the Jophur and the universe has its own ideas. It was an interesting story, though, despite the change of locale.

Infinity's Shore

By David Brin

The second book of the second Uplift Trilogy.

The squatter races of Jijo face more danger as a huge Jophur vessel arrives, searching for the dophin-piloted, Earthling space ship, Streaker. The Jophur entomb the Rothen ship and start interrogating the locals as to the location of the Streaker. The traeki, Asx, is captured by the Jophur and converted to one of them with the application of a master ring and is now known as Ewasx. Ewasx  maintains control over the traeki rings that composed Asx through applications of pain and uses Asx's knowledge of the locals to benefit the Jophur.
Meanwhile the Streaker is still hiding on the ocean floor, trying to remove the heavy crust that enveloped their ship as it passed through the Jijo sun's field. This crust makes the ship too heavy and the crew is trying everything they can think of to remove it.
The group of four youngsters who went forth in a wooden sub to study the ocean floor are rescued by the crew of the Streaker but are held captive, since the Streaker folks don't want the locals to know they are on Jijo.
Meanwhile, back on land, Jijo society is in meltdown and under assault by the Jophur who think they can wring the location the of the Streaker out of the locals. But the fact is that the locals don't know anything about the Streaker. The Jophur think they are being deceptive and punish them by destroying some of their towns, In particular, they go after the g'Kek, who the Jophur obliterated from the known universe and who the Jophur hate even more than they hate Earthlings.
Despite their lack of sophisticated technology, the locals are not going down without a fight and they make some surprising inroads against the Jophur. Meanwhile, on the Streaker, they realize if they don't get off Jijo, then everything the Jijoans have built will be ruined by the Jophur and those who come after them.

This was a pretty good story, lots of stuff going on, lots of action and heroics as the most of the locals band together to stand against the Jophur.  Also interesting was the crew of the Streaker's disbelief that the various races on Jijo could have developed such a peaceful and productive society. Gradually they come to understand how things are and how their presence on Jijo in endangering it all. Sometimes it was hard to keep all the characters straight, with all the story lines to keep in mind, but fortunately the book includes a cast of characters.

The Face in the Abyss

By A. Merritt

Graydon and his companions are in South America looking for Inca treasure when they encounter a beautiful girl, Suarra. They have trespassed into the lands of the Yu-Atlanchi, a secret people who desire to remain secret. Graydon and his companions end up in a cavern where they must face Nimir, the Lord of Evil. Nimir was captured a long time ago in a huge golden face and he offers the men everything they ever wanted. Graydon is tempted but manages to resist with the help of the Snake Mother, a demigod that Suarra serves. The other men fall for Nimir's lies and he consumes them.
Graydon is lead out of Yu-Atlanchi but he can't forget Suarra. So he heads back and encounters a group of Yu-Atlanchi rebels. He is taken in by them and, through them, arranges to meet with Suarra. He becomes involved with the rebels' cause, and, as it appears that Nimir is trying to become human again, he joins with Suarra, the Snake Mother, and the rebels to fight against the corrupt Yu-Atlanchians who are allied with Nimir because Nimir doesn't just want to rule Yu-Atlanchi, he wants to rule the whole world.

I didn't really like this story. It just didn't appeal to me. I started reading it and then I left it for several months before going back and finishing it. It is very descriptive and I find descriptive passages boring. I need to be told every little detail of a scene.  I also didn't care for the Snake Mother, a creature half woman, half snake. An unsympathetic heroine, to say the least.

An Irish Country Doctor

By Patrick Taylor

Barry Laverty is fresh out of medical school and on his way to take up a position in a Irish town with an established doctor, Fingal O'Reilly. Ballybucklebo is a small rural town and Dr. O'Reilly is the only local doctor and it may be the perfect place for young Dr. Laverty to figure out if he wants to go into general practice or specialize.
Barry's first introduction to Fingal is when Fingal is tossing a patient out the door and into the bushes. Fingal is a big imposing man and apparently a little short tempered. Barry isn't quite sure he really wants to share an office with this man.
But he decides to give it  a few days and before he knows it, he is involved in the trials and joys of the small community, including getting to know a smart, local woman. As he copes with the demands of his new job and of learning to perform to O'Reilly's expectations and getting to know the locals, he begins to really appreciate Ballybucklebo, O'Reilly and all the interesting characters and patients.

This was an OK story. I have to admit that I stopped reading it for several months as I didn't really find it that interesting or engaging. The story ends with a big party, which was one of the best parts of the book. But, towards the end, O'Reilly and Laverty use information about a patient to blackmail another patient. According to the author, the ends justify the means, but to me it was a shocking and disturbing display of a lack of medical ethics.

Heads You Lose

By Lisa Lutz and David Hayward

This is a book with a little bit of a different premise. We, the readers, are to be let in on the writing process of a mystery story. Novelist Lutz and poet Hayward, who used to be together, are going to share the writing of the book jointly, each submitting alternating chapters with critical notes by the other contributor.
So the story starts out with the two main characters, Lacey and Paul, brother and sister small-time pot growers in a small California town, discovering a headless body of a man on their property.
Not wanting the police poking around because of the pot-growing, they wrap the body in a tarp and haul it out to the countryside. Problem solved. But then the body returns. And Lacey, upon a closer examination, thinks it is the body of her ex-boyfriend, shady meth dealer Hart. Now she decides she wants the police involved, so she and her brother clear all the marijuana plants out of their basement and into a willing friend's place. And then Lacey calls the police.

The book teems with loads of suspicious characters and shady operators. The two authors argue back and forth about each other's choices in their chapters and leave each other snarky notes and footnotes. They variously try to sabotage each others choices by amending and overwriting and just plain killing off the characters they don't care for. At one point Hayward introduces a stripper girl friend for Paul and Lisa then portrays the stripper as a clueless fool at which point Hayward reveals she is actually a secret intellectual. Hayward also introduces a hippy-type fellow named Terry who Lisa kills off later on. Hayward then brings out a cousin of Terry's who looks and sounds just like Terry, named Harry, and Lisa then kills the Terry clone off in short order.
The suspects multiply as do the bodies, but the ending ties it all together for the most part, so neatly that I think the two authors had it planned out beforehand and all that nonsense and arguing about where the story was going was fake.

I did like the ending of the story but I can't help but feel that all the rivalry between the two authors was just a load of hooey -- a gimmick to help sell the book. But even though it felt like I was being conned, I still enjoyed the story a lot.

The Rosie Project

By Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman has decided it is time he was married. In his late thirties and a college professor, Don has never been on a second date or even on many first dates. Don has standards and few women ever manage to measure up. So he comes up with the Wife Project, a questionnaire designed to weed out the unsuitable candidates. Now all he needs is some lonely women who would be willing to fill out the questionnaire. Then he meets Rosie.
Rosie seems to possess every attribute that Don does not want in a wife. She smokes. She drinks alcohol. She is always late. She doesn't eat meat. She doesn't exercise regularly. She seems disorganized. She's a barmaid. But she is also smart, interesting, vibrant and attractive. And she wants Don's help. She wants to find her biological father, and Don, a geneticist, can give her that help.
Soon the Wife Project takes a backseat to the Father Project as Dan and Rosie work together to trace her biological father, gathering DNA samples from a large group of unknowing men that Rosie's dead mother may have slept with. Dan's orderly life gets turned upside down and, at the same time, becomes much more interesting and entertaining. Rosie adds so much to his life that was missing and he didn't even know was missing. But, he tells himself, she is so not right for him! Isn't she?

Don sounds like a person with Asperger's Syndrome, but it is never stated that he does have Asperger's. He is smart, super-organized, and socially inept. Anyway, he is an odd fellow and doesn't relate well to other people. When Don explains to Rosie that he isn't good at understanding what other people want, she replies sarcastically, "Tell me something I don't know." And Don tells her that "...the testicles of drone bees and wasp spiders explode during sex," totally missing that she was being sarcastic. Or did he? Turns out Don isn't quite the boob he sometimes pretends to be. Whether he has Asperger's or not, Don is a memorable character and I enjoyed reading about his search for a life partner and love. This was a good, fun, and entertaining story.

Covet

By Tracey Garvis Graves

Chris and Claire Canton have been going through a rough patch in their marriage. Chris lost his well-paying job and was unemployed for quite a time. He became depressed and isolated himself from his wife and two young children. Finally, it got so bad Claire insisted that he see a doctor, who put him on antidepressants. But the pills destroyed his libido, furthering the space between him and his wife. Then he landed a new job that required he spend a lot of time travelling. The end result, money coming in but intimacy going out.
Claire feels more and more lonely. Chris is gone a lot and when he is home, he is working on the computer, trying to stay on top of his increasingly demanding job. Then one day, Claire gets stopped by a policeman because her car's tail light is out. The policeman, Daniel, is very good looking and Claire notices. Then when she see him at a parade, she talks to him briefly about getting some traffic signs in her neighborhood. Over time, she sees more and more of Daniel and they become friends. Daniel is divorced and is lonely like Claire.
Although Claire makes it clear to Daniel that they will never be more than friends, their feelings for each other continue to deepen and grow. And Chris, wrapped up in his work, remains oblivious to Claire's growing estrangement.
Somebody better start paying attention to this marriage before it is too late.

This was an interesting story. Plus I learned some things about diabetes. Claire is a diabetic and reading about her coping with it was enlightening and made me realize what a hard time my uncle, who also had type one diabetes, must of had dealing with his diabetes. I remember my grandma telling me about how he had one of those insulin reactions when dining alone at a restaurant.
Anyway, I found the story engrossing and suspenseful and I had a great deal of sympathy for what they were going through. Good read.

One Summer

By Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson takes a look at the summer of 1927 and with brief and illuminating discussions of  the antecedents of the events of that summer. Charles Lindbergh, record floods in the Mississippi basin, flagpole sitting, Clara Bow, talkies, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Al Capone, Sacco and Vanzetti, Henry Ford, Babe Ruth  and more are all featured in this entertaining and fascinating look at what our ancestors were up to almost a ninety years ago. I am not a fan of baseball but even the stuff about Babe Ruth was pretty interesting.  Bill Bryson has a real gift for making history come alive by telling the human story not just a bunch of dry facts. He knows how to get personal with his subject matter and doesn't shy away from the unsavory aspects of the story. It was a pleasure to read this entertaining and informative book.  

Fallen Women

By Sandra Dallas

New York, 1885. Beret Osmundsen had good reason to hate her beautiful younger sister Lillie.  But when news of Lillie’s murder reached Beret she felt both grief and rage and she needed to know more about the circumstances of Lillie’s life. Last Beret knew, Lillie was living with their aunt and uncle in Denver. But now she finds out that Lillie was killed in a house of prostitution. So she travels to Denver in a quest to understand her sister and determined to bring the killer to justice.

Beret, a woman of wealth and intelligence, is not unfamiliar with the seamy side of life. She runs a halfway house for troubled and endangered women in New York City.  Though the Denver police would rather she stayed home and let them handle the investigation, Beret inserts herself into it and builds a good working relationship with the chief investigator, Mick McCauley. McCauley is not the typical flat foot, he is a man of money and influence, quite equal to the challenge of escorting a society lady through the underbelly of Denver’s tenderloin district.  Together Beret and Mick will dig through Lillie’s hidden history and discover the truth of her murder.

This was a very interesting read. The story of Beret and Lillie and Beret’s growing relationship with Mick were quite engaging. The murder mystery was interesting too, although the murderer was not much of a surprise. Altogether, I enjoyed it a lot.

Wagers of Sin

By Robert Asprin and Linda Evans

Skeeter Jackson is a young scammer with a checkered past. Living with two parents too self-involved to care for their child,  Skeeter turned to petty theft in rebellion. He then became the victim of a random time gate that landed him in the camp of Genghis Khan’s father. Skeeter had to learn to survive the harsh conditions of the Mongol steppes.  Five years with the Mongols taught Skeeter survival skills but when he was rescued and returned to his parents in modern times he still could not cope with his parents’ indifference. He ran away and eventually ended up on Shangri-La Station where he earned his living stealing from and scamming the tourists on their way to visit the past through the time gates.

Skeeter joined a group going back to Roman times. He had a plan: he would go to the Coliseum and pose as a bookie and take peoples’ bets on the outcome of contests and then go back through the time gate with his takings before the gamblers can collect on their bets.  An ill-advised scheme that backfired when one of the bettors turned out to be a ferocious gladiator who, upon discovering Skeeter’s scam, pursued him through the time gate and into Shangri-La Station, determined to get back his gold and kill Skeeter for making a fool of him.

And that’s how the story begins, with Skeeter in hot water with an enraged Roman gladiator. It adds in several other story lines, too many to mention here. Most of the related story lines are fairly interesting, but the best is the story of Skeeter. The only story line that was not as interesting was that of Margo which was quite boring and could have been left out of the novel to good effect.

This is the second book in the Time Scout series and probably would make for better reading if the reader is familiar with the first book, Time Scout, which I was not.

Wives Behaving Badly

By Elizabeth Buchan

Minty Lloyd is a homewrecker. She seduced her boss's husband, a man in his fifties, got pregnant (with twins) and got the husband to marry her. She pretty much wrecked her boss's life. (This story is told in Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman.)
Now the twins are toddlers and Minty's marriage is in trouble. The husband, Nathan, is apparently experiencing regrets at leaving a good woman to marry a blatant gold-digger. And Minty know this, although she finds it irritating, it isn't much more than that because, as she admits to herself ,  she doesn't truly love Nathan. She loved his stuff -- his car, his house, his income, his financial security.
But then Nathan suddenly dies, leaving Minty with the sole responsibility of providing for and raising two little boys all on her own. Nathan did make provision for his new wife and his two young sons, but Minty will have to go back to full time work. Plus dealing with settling his estate and coping with the expectations and demands of Nathan's two grown children from his marriage with Rose. But help comes from the last place Minty expected or wanted, Rose, the ex-wife.

This was a pretty good story. I liked that Minty admits she married Nathan for his money and not because she was head over heels in love. I also liked that she admits that her hatred of Rose makes no sense, given that Rose is the one who was sinned against and not the sinner, Minty and Nathan were the ones in the wrong. Minty still envies Rose, even after taking everything from her. She feels like second best compared to Rose and this just fuels her irrational resentment of her husband's first wife. Minty is an interesting character with lots of flaws but she is honest with herself about her failings. I enjoyed the story, it was a good read.

A Vintage Affair

By Isabel Wolff

Phoebe Swift worked for Sotheby's in the textile department. She evaluated vintage clothing and conducted auctions. But events in her personal life led her to reevaluate her priorities and quit Sotheby's and open her own vintage clothing shop.
Her best friend, Emma, died unexpectedly and Phoebe felt she had let her down. Phoebe also blamed her fiance who she felt had her talked into ignoring Emma's last phone call to Phoebe. Emma had called her a lot that last day, saying she wasn't feeling well and asking Phoebe to stop by. But Phoebe put off visiting Emma until the next morning but by then it was too late. And Phoebe blamed it all on Guy, who she believed had talked her into staying with him that night. She was so upset, she broke off the engagement and refused to have any contact with him. This was also when she quit her job at Sotheby's.
Sometime after opening her own shop, Phoebe met a woman who was selling off some old clothes. Phoebe found out in talking to the elderly woman that she too had been burdened all her life with guilt from betraying and letting down her friend when they were young teens in pre-World War II France. The friend, a Jewish girl, was captured and shipped off to a German concentration camp through the inadvertent actions of her friend.
This story, with the old lady's regrets so similar to what Phoebe herself was feeling about Emma, captured her attention and, on a buying trip to France, Phoebe did a little investigating into the old lady's story. But when she presented her finding to the woman she became distraught and asked her not to continue looking into her friend's fate.
Meanwhile, with her shop prospering, Phoebe finds her romantic life heating up. An attractive and successful older man has been courting her and she really likes him a lot. But the man has a teenage daughter who is spoiled rotten and is resentful of her father's attentions to Phoebe, which doesn't bode well for the budding relationship. Luckily there is a handsome young newspaper reporter waiting to step in if given the opportunity.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. Not the typical romance novel, the story is more about Phoebe's guilt over Emma's death than it is about making a love connection. The story of the old lady and her Jewish friend was also very interesting and added a lot to the novel. The end was quite satisfying too. This was a real good read.

The Signature of All Things

By Elizabeth Gilbert

This very long novel, about 500 pages, tells the life story of Alma Whittaker. Her father, a self-made millionaire, of humble origin, made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. Her parents only had the one child, Alma. Alma inherited her parents' intelligence and her father's looks. She grew up to be very tall and very plain. And the sole heir to her father's vast fortune.
When Alma was about ten, her parents adopted a girl of about the same age as Alma. Polly's mother was a loose woman and was murdered by Polly's father, who finally tired of his wife's wandering ways. Her parents worked on the Whittaker estate and young Polly was a child of extraordinary grace and beauty. In order to protect the girl, Alma's mother decided  to adopt her and changed her name to Prudence.
Alma never warmed to Prudence because she felt so ugly and graceless compared to her. And Prudence never warmed to Alma because Alma was so much beyond her in intelligence and learning.
Prudence became an ardent abolitionist (the novel is set in the middle 1800s in the USA) and gets married and leaves home. Alma never marries, despite being a fortune hunter's dream, and stays home studying plants, especially mosses. In the course of time her mother passes on and more and more of Alma's time is taken up with overseeing her father's business matters.
The Whittaker estate features several greenhouses containing many rare plants, including orchids. Alma learns of a talented artist whose paintings of orchids are exquisite. She meets the man, Ambrose Pike, and is captivated by him. She burns for him and craves his love. It seemed that he returned that love and they are soon married. But Pike is not interested in consummating the marriage. He wants a platonic relationship. (Too bad he didn't make that clear before he married her.) Alma is furious and sends him packing. She ships him off to Tahiti to oversee a vanilla plantation. He doesn't last long there and dies about three years later.
Alma eventually inherits everything and comes to understand, in the course of time, that Prudence, seemingly so indifferent to Alma, actually cared deeply. So Alma gives the estate to Prudence and most of the fortune that goes with it. She then boards a ship to set off for Tahiti, desiring to unravel the mystery of the man to whom she was so briefly married.

This was an OK story but very long. Alma is kind of a jerk, a bit too self-involved and really not a very sympathetic character. I didn't care for the brief husband either, who comes across as a weirdo. Also the big secret of his life turns out to be no surprise at all.
 All these characters are so reticent, none of them can be open about anything they are feeling or thinking. Kind of like  characters in a soap opera where, if someone would just speak up, a lot of misery and misunderstandings could be avoided.

Spider Woman's Daughter

By Anne Hillerman

A continuation of Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels, this new story is by Hillerman's daughter, Anne.
The story starts with an unknown assailant shooting Leaphorn in the head in the parking lot of a cafe. Officer Bernie Manuelito witnesses the attack. Leaphorn is rushed off to the hospital, unable to speak or give the police a clue as to who shot him. Manuelito, as the main witness, is officially off the case and the investigation falls to the FBI and to her husband, fellow police officer Jim Chee. Together, Bernie and Jim will figure out the whys and wherefores of the crime while Leaphorn clings to life in the hospital.

I wasn't real pleased with this story. I didn't like that the author decided to take Leaphorn out of action by having him shot. That sort of soured me from the start. Maybe she didn't feel like she could do him justice and so just wrote Leaphorn off.
Other than that, this is a pretty typical entry in the mystery novel genre. It was an OK story, but it certainly didn't feel like a story by Tony Hillerman.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

By Fannie Flagg

Set in the 1920s to 1950s, this is the story of Whistle Stop, a very small town in Alabama. Told through a series of flash backs and folksy newsletter articles, the story focuses mainly on Idgie and Ruth, the two women who run the Whistle Stop Cafe.
The story has a brief introduction, a newsletter article announcing the opening of the Whistle Stop Cafe, June 1929. It then moves to 1985, with Evelyn Couch, a depressed and overweight housewife, visiting the nursing home where her mother-in-law is living. Not being a fan of the mother-in-law, Evelyn escapes to another part of the building where she encounters Ninny Threadgood, another resident of the home. Ninny loves to chatter and soon engulfs Evelyn in stories about Whistle Stop and its denizens. At first, Evelyn is rather taken aback by this gabby old lady, but as the weeks pass, she become more involved in the stories and begins to reexamine her life in an effort to understand her own deep unhappiness.
The Whistle Stop stories about Idgie and Ruth tell of a different era, a simpler era but a crueler era.  A time where white racists used terror tactics to keep the blacks "in their place." But at the same time, a real community of caring and connections existed between the two races, if rather covertly.  Some things about life in those days are charming and others horrifying, but overall, this is a charming and nostalgic look at life in a funny little town in Alabama.

I did enjoy reading this book again, just for the sake of nostalgia if nothing more. While the story of Idgie and Ruth didn't really grab me, what I enjoyed the most was Ninny Threadgood and her tales of her friends and family from the old days. I also liked Evelyn too, although I thought she caved into the modern obsession with being thin. I would have liked her better if she had accepted that she was chubby and got on with her life instead of running off to the fat farm.

Invitation to Tea

By Monica Lang

When Monica was a little girl living in England, a boy came to stay with her family, his name was George McCrie. This was in the early 1900s.
George's parents were English citizens living in India. It was the custom among the English to send their children home to England to be educated and that was why George was in England. He spent the next 10 years, studying in England with periodic visits home to India. And in due time, he became the manager of a large tea plantation there.
To Monica, George was her protector against the teasing and torments of her many older brothers. So it wasn't very surprising that the hero of her childhood turned out to be the love of her life. So at the young age of about 18, Monica found herself married to George and living in the wilds of Burma while George ran the tea plantation.
Coping with life in the tropics in the 1920s was quite a challenge for Monica. Unfortunately, she ignored George's advice about protecting herself from mosquitoes and she became very ill with malaria. She was able to recover after a while and realized that she had to grow up and face the realities of her situation. So she set about creating a comfortable and welcoming home for herself and her husband and, in a few years, for their little daughter, Elizabeth.  Despite the dangers of their location, what with the tigers and the cobras and other wildlife, and the brutality of the climate in summer, Monica grew to love it there.  But when their little girl was about seven, George was promoted and made manager of a larger tea plantation and they moved away from the jungle and to a new location.
Life in the jungle had been rather isolated and the new location offered much more opportunity to socialize, as it had quite a few English folks in the area. Monica missed the peace and beauty of the jungle but really enjoyed being around her peers.
But then the day came when it was time to send Elizabeth to England to go to school. Monica and George traveled there with their daughter but George had to return to his job and Monica stayed on to get Elizabeth settled into school. Elizabeth was very unhappy at being separated from her mother and Monica almost decided to stay in England for her daughter's sake but then felt she should be with George.
So back she goes and it all seemed to work out for the best. George got promoted again and their new home had electricity and an indoor toilet and a modern kitchen, quite a change from their previous dwellings. She and George had another baby, Rosemary, born almost ten years after Elizabeth. Life was good. But looming on the horizon was the chaos and destruction of World War II. Before much longer, Monica and Rosemary were refugees headed to South Africa with George staying behind, doing his duty. Nothing would ever be the same again.

This true story was really interesting, a picture of a different life and time. At that time all the normal housekeeping chores were done by servants. The house was lit by oil lamps and candles and food was cooked on a wood fired stove. They had servants for inside the house and servants for outside the house. That was one of the reasons that the social round was so important for Monica, because she had very little with which to occupy her time, all the cooking, cleaning, gardening, child care, laundry, etc was performed by servants. One of the local English people advised her to develop hobbies just so she would have something to do. And it is not as if she and George were wealthy, George had to work for a living. They couldn't even afford to buy a decent car.