Reading Lately

It took me three months to read the first three books in this post and three days to read the fourth book.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
I picked this book up from the "take a book, leave a book" shelves at work. In Chapter 1, Alice is newly-married, fabulously in love with her husband and expecting her first baby. In Chapter 2, Alice awakens on the floor of the gym, having fallen off the bike in spin class. She is ten years older, has three children and is in the process of a nasty divorce.  Alice spends the next several months acclimating and trying to remember this new life. In her mind, it is ten years ago. 

In Chapter 1, they nickname the little baby-to-be the Sultana. The setting is Australia, so I had no idea what a Sultana was until I was watching "The Great British Baking Show" and found out a Sultana is a type of raisin. Who knew! With interesting subplots about Alice's family, this is a light fun read. 


Free book from the shelves at work. It fell apart after I read it!

The House of Eyes by Kate Ellis
Another book I picked up at work. This is one in a series of Wesley Peterson detective novels. Eyecliffe Castle and the surrounding town of Devon are the setting. At first Wesley is not too concerned when Leanne Hatman is reported missing by her father Darren.  Then Darren turns up dead at the site of a barn he is renovating on Castle property. 

The book goes back and forth between the present and an 1800's diary written by a member of the D'Arles family that used to live in the castle. Nefarious happenings were going on back then as well. There are also various archeological digs going on, and then it turns out two girls went missing in the 1960's.

Aside from having to keep track of three time periods, and way too many murders to be believable, this was still a quick read.  It all comes together, again, not too believably, in the end.

Kindred by Octavia Butler
I checked this out of the library upon reading about it on Modern Mrs Darcy.com. It was one of her top reads of 2019, but it was written in 1979. I was intrigued because there is time travel in this book, and I love me some good time travel!

Dana is a young black woman living in California who somehow is repeatedly transported back to a pre-Civil War plantation in Maryland. Each time she has to save slave-owning Rufus's life, and ensure that he ends up with Alice, a slave, because they are Dana's ancestors. On one trip, Dana's husband Kevin, who is white, is transported back with her.

This book is basically a slavery narrative from a 20th century point of view - what Dana has to endure to survive and to return to her own time. I liked that it was a Jeopardy question one night when I was reading it.😉

The River by Peter Heller
As noted above, I read this book in three days. This is the story of two college friends, Jack and Wynn, on a wilderness canoe trip in Canada. They are very experienced outdoorsmen, but chose to forego bringing a satellite phone. Ugh, if only they had that phone.
While canoeing through dense fog, the boys hear a couple arguing on an island. When they smell the smoke of an encroaching forest fire, they decide to turn back and warn the couple. At that point, almost everything that could possibly go wrong, does.

The descriptions of the landscapes are vivid - made me want to be outdoors (but not in a situation like this). It is not a happy book, but it is a gripping page turner.

Thanks for reading!