Paper Towns by John Green

 

 

John Green takes you through the souls and thoughts of what teens are thinking about as they enter and mature through their senior year.  Paper Towns is a love story that we all can think back on from when we were in high school and makes you remember that ultimate crush you had.

Paper Towns takes you on an adventure through lost towns that are abandoned but never forgotten by Margo Roth Spieglman.  As Margo’s “friend” Quentin goes to these paper towns he finds out who Margo Roth Spieglman truly is and that she is not a lost soul after all.  This book even creates its own version of Wikipedia called Omnictionary.  It is through Omnictionary that the adventurious suspense of where Margo Roth Spieglman can be found will come to fruition.

If you like suspense, true love and adventure, then this is the book for you.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

This is a novel about Nora, a lonely, thirty-seven year old teacher living in a two bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even though Nora has set up her second bedroom as an art studio, she cannot find the inspiration needed to pursue her art. Her life changes when her new student Reza Shahid is attacked by bullies on her watch, and she meets Reza’s mother, a beautiful Italian artist married to a Lebanese professor teaching at Harvard on a fellowship for a year.

Nora soon becomes obsessed with this family. Through knowing them, she feels she has new purpose in life, and even begins to pursue her art. But with any obsession, there is always a price to pay.

This is a well written, psychological suspense novel, and the twist at the end will stay with you for some time.

The Well-Tended Perennial Garden

Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s book is a great resource for information on perennial maintenance.  She addresses subjects like designing with maintenance in mind, bed preparation, pruning, deadheading, pinching and division. The second half of the book, which I find the most useful, includes dozens of entries on specific perennials and their pruning requirements along with other maintenance tasks. If you have ever wondered if deadheading a particular perennial will give you that extra flush of bloom, read this book. There are also useful lists in the back with such titles as “lower maintenance perennials”, “clay busters” and ” deer-resistant perennials”. Tracy has over twenty years of experience designing and maintaining perennial gardens.  She has experimented with cutting back perennials in her customer’s gardens to find what works best for various species. This book is a very handy guide for keeping your garden beds beautiful and floriferous.

Double Deuce by Robert B. Parker

"A 14 year old girl and her baby are killed in a drive-by shooting in one of Boston's projects called Double Deuce.  Hawk is asked by the residents of Double Deuce to find the killer and to get rid of the Double Deuce gangs.  Hawk enlists his friend, Spenser, to help him."  While Hawk is a professional thug, Spenser is a private eye.  They use their unorthodox methods to find the killer.


I like reading Spenser books because of Parker's writing style.  He writes short chapters that move along quickly.  Before you know it, you are almost done with the book.  You may like a Spenser book if you like a quick read.



Tapestry of Fortunes by Elizabeth Berg

     "Four women venture into their pasts in order to shape their futures, fates, and fortunes."  (Amazon).  When her best friend dies, Cece, a motivational speaker and writer, moves into a house with three other women of various ages and careers. She is lonesome and realizes that she does not need the big house that she owns as well as the many accumulated possessions.  With a few bumps she eventually becomes friends with the others and one by one they begin opening up to each other about their pasts and current sorrows.  Unexpectedly, Cece gets a letter from an old flame. She decides to visit him as part of a road trip. This leads to a grand roadtrip including all the women who realize they could benefit by making an attempt to visit someone from their pasts.  Much of the plot is predictable, but there are many sweet moments related to friendships and to a vision of hope beyond ones feeling of loss and change.

The Dinner by Herman Koch

This novel is dark and disturbing, yet a delightfully addictive read. An international best seller, The Dinner has been called the "European Gone Girl."

On a summer night in Amsterdam two couples, Paul and Claire and Serge and Babette meet in a chic restaurant to talk about their children. Each has a fifteen-year old son, and together the teens commit an unspeakable crime. Between entrees we learn that Paul, the father of Michel, has a dark past. Paul's disturbing secrets slowly unfold, chilling this reader to the bone. Serge, the father of the other boy is a prominent politician soon to become the Netherlands' prime minister. The mothers of the teens, Claire and Babette, have their own ideas of how to deal with the situation.

What's a parent to do? What would you do if you loved someone who committed a horrific crime?

Alan Bradley’s first novel introduces us to 11 year old Flavia de Luce.  Living in a run-down English estate in the 1950’s with her father and two sisters, Flavia fancies herself a detective.  She has a well-equipped chemistry lab to aid in her investigation.  Here she also loves to experiment with poisons, dreaming up ways to retaliate against the older sisters who torment her.  When a dead bird with a stamp on its beak appears on the family’s doorstep and a stranger is found murdered in the cucumber patch, Flavia sets out to investigate.  When it appears that Flavia’s stamp-collecting father may be involved, Flavia tries even harder to solve this case, despite resistance from the local police.  

Flavia is an endearing, intelligent character.  Author Bradley has received numerous awards for this book including the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award.  There are currently 5 books in this series with a sixth due out in January.