August 2.0

Thirteen (Eddie Flyn #4) by Steve Cavanaugh
Mystery. Legal Thriller. Police Procudural. Page Turner. Yup, my new favorite series! How has America not thoroughly discovered and embraced Irish writer Steve Cavanaugh?? His Eddie Flynn series (quite popular in the UK) is highly entertaining. Flynn is a conman turned lawyer, whose personal life is a hot mess, who has an intriguing collection of friends, who only defends the innocent, and who will literally do anything, legal and otherwise, to get his client free (in this case, a famous movie star entangled with a serial killer). Cavanaugh wraps his story in intelligent, thoughtful prose with a snappy sense of humor thrown in just when it is needed. Both my husband and I are obsessed with Eddie Flynn and are waiting breathlessly for Book #5. Seriously, get this entire series.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Okay, so I never read the hugely popular Eat, Pray, Love by Gilbert - it's that whole lemmings thing, and not wanting to follow the crowd + it just sounded too "New Age-y" for me:) I was talked into reading this one and wow, wow, wow, I am glad I picked it up and did not put it down (I was tempted). The story begins with young Vivian Morris, a Vassar drop out, who goes to live with her aunt in NYC. Aunt runs a theater company with the most wonderfully eclectic group of characters, and the aunt herself is a hoot (I think I'd like to be her - living life on my own terms, never giving two sh#$s about what others think). Now Vivian, well, she drove me insane for the first 100 pages. Selfish, self-absorbed, vain, shallow...yet midway through the book, my brain clicked in and said "yep, that's the point." This book is really about what society tells us, women, to be and what life can be like when we turn off those voices and just LIVE. Loved this one!

Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short by William D. Cohan
Admittedly, this was like reading a really good, really well-researched People magazine article -but there's a reason that mag is so popular:) The author attended the very privileged, very old, very WASPy east coast boarding school of Andover. Four of his classmates died freaky, tragic, early deaths so Cohan researches and writes about these four friends: one is the child of Holocaust survivors, one is Harry Truman's grandson, one is the scion of a hugely wealthy Chicago family, and one is President Kennedy's youngest child. Their lives both at the boarding school and afterward are strangely fascinating, and yes, their deaths came at young ages and were varied in their causes. As I listened to this one, I had quite a few "you've got to be kidding me" moments. It is an entertaining book.

Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok
Chosen by Today host Jenna Hager for a book club read, I found this story to be a fascinating look into the expectations placed on children, and the fallout of these parental dreams. The focus is on two sisters: Amy, the shy and retiring youngest child of Chinese immigrants, born and raised in Brooklyn, now terribly worried about her older sister Sylvie; and Sylvie herself, the child left behind in the Netherlands when her parents left for America, not returned to the family home until age nine, married, Ivy league education, successful...or is she? Sylvie has disappeared and Amy flies to the Netherlands to try and track down what happened to her beloved sister. I found this story to be quite intriguing, perhaps because I have been in Amsterdam and this author really nails the directness of the Dutch, the beauty of this bike-riding community, as well as the push and tug of immigrants and expectations.

Homes: A Refugee Story by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah
Named one of Canada's top books last year, this one has been on my radar for awhile. Haunted by images from Syria over the last six years, I realized I knew very little about this tragic war. Rabeeah is a young boy who comes to Canada as a refugee and tells his story to his ELL teacher; that story becomes this book. He tells of how the war begins, the bombings, the soldiers, the massacres, the family moving from city to city trying to find a safe place, the process for becoming a refugee, how they search for a country to take them in, and provide them REFUGE. He makes the most horrifying images normal, as seen through a boy's eyes when the life of war is normalized. This book would be a fantastic memoir to use in a school setting, either middle school or high school, as it is such an authentic voice of a young boy just trying to find a home.

The Binding by Bridget Collins
If you like fantasy and magic intertwined with history, you might like this book. In this conception of old English history though, a new type of person is present, a bookbinder. As in a person who can bind one's painful memories into a book, and removing them from a person's mind. Hmmm...not bad if it is a tragic event. But don't those tragedies make us who we are? And what if a parent wants to stop their child from loving a particular person? Just have them bound and it takes care of all the problems...or does it? This is a surreal story, wrapped up with friendship and forbidden love. A bit too long, quite honestly, but a unique and intriguing concept.

Stone Cold Heart (Cat Kinsella, #2) by Caz Frear
I loved Frear's first book Sweet Little Lies; her London-based detective Cat Kinsella is an intriguing woman with lots of skeletons in her closet. In the latest installment in this series, she and her partner are investigating a murder of a young Australian woman, with all the evidence pointing to the guy that runs the coffee shop she frequented. More of Cat's own issues with her family's past rears its ugly head as well as she tries to track down the murderer. It's a fine mystery, but I did not find it as tense as the first one so it's a 'meh' for me.