Our Quiet Growing Time

This is the second post for a readalong of Stephen King's 11/22/63 hosted by Grace . Today we are posting about the last three sections of the book. My previous post on sections 1-3 is here . SPOILERS! King knows how to write some good foreshadowing:           1. Jake is not a crying man.           2. Sadie is accident-prone.        3. As Jake writes his memoir, he has on the loafers Sadie gave him because "some things are meant to keep." My eyes popped open at 4:00 a.m. one morning when I was half-way through 11/22/63 and it all came together in one lucid moment. I knew Sadie was destined to have an accident and that Jake would become a crying man. He'd be forced to return to the future, leaving behind his One True Love in the smoky Sixties. In 2011, he'd travel to a Texas nursing home or a hospital to visit an elderly--yet still beautiful--woman who he had once lo...

Twenty-two years ago Detective Frank Mackey's heart was broken on the night that he thought he was going to run off to England with his childhood sweetheart. But Rosie never showed. Instead, she left a 'Dear John' letter for him and disappeared out of his life forever. Frank never went back to his home on Faithful Place, unwilling to face his dysfunctional family without Rosie just a few houses away. Now Rosie's suitcase has been found in a derelict house on Faithful Place and 41-year-old Frank is on the trail to discover what happened, finally, to the love of his youthful life. His trail leads him back to Faithful Place, the street so filled with memories and demons that he hoped he'd never have to return.  Faithful Place shows Tana French at her best, back in the groove after the somewhat disappointing The Likeness . Frank was introduced in The Likeness as Cassie's boss from Undercover. He is a renegade. His moral code as a cop is pretty skewed; he...

There are a few authors' blogs that I read regularly... hoping that they will announce Western PA tour dates or post snippets of upcoming titles to hold me over until faraway release dates. This weekend, Maggie Stiefvater, author of The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy (that Sara exposed me to) and the more recent YA release, The Scorpio Races , posted about a book she enjoyed. So, using the same philosophy that is behind the idea that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," I realized that a favorite author of one of my favorite authors is bound to be a favorite author of mine, too. Or something.  So that's why I ran out to Barnes and Noble and used my last remaining gift card from Christmas (that is restraint , I tell you. It's the middle of January!) to grab The Lock Artist .  It's the story of Mike, "the Miracle Boy" from industrial Michigan, who survives something terrible that happened to him when he was eight-years-old. Something so t...

I'm participating in a readalong of Stephen King's 11/22/63 hosted by Grace . Today we are posting about the first 350 pages; in two weeks we will wrap up the last 500 pages or so. This is my first foray into The Land of Stephen King. I've hesitated to read King because his "Uncle Stevie" columns in Entertainment Weekly tend to creep me out. His books are such a fixture in pop culture that, as a fickle and ineffective form of protest, I have boycotted him. But, thus far, I'm really enjoying it. He is a master of suspense. I haven't been so unable to put a book down at bedtime since the days when the chapters I read ended with "...and Nancy blacked out."  Jake Epping is a 30-something divorced schoolteacher who is introduced to a time portal that funnels a traveler backwards through time to 1958 via a pantry in a diner. No matter how long one stays in the portal in the 50s--minutes, months, or years--it only equates to two missed minu...

Ancilla Trent is a governess and a spinster at the ripe old age of 26. Miss Trent has successfully suppressed any youthful romantic dreams she may have had and has instead made the education of her young ward her life's purpose. Never has she felt even the faintest stirring in her heart for any man... until she meets the Nonesuch. The Nonesuch, as he is called, is Sir Waldo Hawkridge, a confirmed bachelor, who is touted for his athletic achievements, wit, handsomeness, and his overall masculine perfection . Indeed, that is the very definition of a nonesuch : unrivaled, an ideal, a paragon. Despite her attempts at remaining aloof, and much to his own surprise, Miss Trent and the Nonesuch find themselves perfectly matched in intellect and humor, and find themselves in love. But in true Regency romance fashion, the road to happy-ever-after is hampered by social gaffes, trivial misunderstandings, and a tangled web of snooty meddling characters and their affairs. I've made an...

I am unequal to the task of summarizing over 9,000 pages of conflict into a concise paragraph to set up where The Scottish Prisoner fits in the whole of Gabaldon's massive canon of delicious tomes.  Let's just say: 1) read the Outlander series; and 2) the events in this latest Gabaldon take place during a gap in Voyager, and is in itself a continuation of Lord John Grey's story. This book has the exquisite double-whammy of featuring both Lord John and our favorite Highland warrior, the strapping Jamie Fraser (the Scottish prisoner of the title), who currently is serving his sentence as a traitor to the Crown as a groom at the estate of friends of Lord John. The last we saw Lord John and Jamie together (in the sequence in which this story fits) was in an uncomfortable scene in a stable in which an angry declaration of desire was made, a punch was thrown, a well-formed nose narrowly avoided smashing, and readers blushed in libraries and living rooms across the w...

There is so much to love about this book that I don't know where to start.  Thisby is a tiny island somewhere off of the coast of Scotland or Ireland or England. This is where the water horses--the capaill uisce* --live. And every October they emerge from the ocean onto Thisby’s shores and they prowl, carnivorous and hungry. And every November first, the very brave or the very foolish run these savage horses across the beach in a bloody and dangerous race. They are man-eaters. They are magic. Their magic may dim after years spent on land, but every November 1 st , the magic of the sea pulls at them as they race on the beach. The depths call to the monsters within them, and these horses would just as soon dismember and eat their riders than carry them safely across the finish line. Sean Kendrick is the four-time Scorpio Races champion and is something of a water-horse whisperer. He’s a quiet boy, a loner, and he feels most comfortable on the back of Corr, the water-h...

Prior to this moment in my life, I've had a strict no re-reading policy. My motto has always been "So many books, so little time," so clearly, I have no time to waste for rereads. I had a sweatshirt sporting this slogan that I wore exactly once to school in sixth grade. That's all the further I'd like to go with that story; the pain is still raw. ;) But I'm glad I revisited Gone with the Wind . You get a lot more out of a book when you're 27 than you did when you were 13.  You know the story: it's the tale of how one Southern woman survives the turbulence of the Civil War and the years following. What struck me this time was that Margaret Mitchell wrote an epic 1000+ page tome with a protagonist who was detestable. Name a bad character trait: Scarlett's got it. She's lied, cheated, stolen, committed adultery in everything but the final act, wished death upon others, hated, and murdered. She's cruel, greedy, selfish, mercenary, manip...

The Premise: Carrie McClelland, best-selling novelist, winters at a Scottish cottage to work on her latest project, a novel using her own real-life ancestor, Sophia McClelland, as the heroine. In the writing of it, memories and voices fill Carrie's mind and she soon realizes that it's not her own hand that's guiding her pen... but Sophia's memories, revealing 300-year-old secrets that could impact Carrie's own life. The Theme:   "...You couldn't just remember something if you hadn't had it in your memory to begin with. Could you?" The Winter Sea explores the idea of genetic memory: the possibility of inheriting ancestors' memories. It's an interesting--though silly--concept, but it was presented in a way that mostly minimized the hokeyness of it. Don't mean to offend you mystics out there, but I just don't buy it.  The Good: How's this for introducing Carrie's love interest? I gave 5 st...