The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen (2013)

Aw, I adore Sarah Dessen. Although the plots are fairly conventional, her relationships and characters are so wonderfully complex.

This one is about a girl recently graduated from high school, working her butt off at her family's realty company in her coastal tourist town, and her relationships with her longtime boyfriend, an attractive new guy in town who is the assistant on a documentary about a reclusive artist AND her relationship with her semi-estranged father and her new half-brother. Whew! 

 But all you need to know is this: Great characters, even the most minor characters and realistic, well drawn relationships. Just lovely. Oh, and funny. Not laugh out loud funny, but gently, dryly funny.

Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott (2008)

"Alice" was kidnapped by Ray when she was about 10 and has been living with (and abused by him) ever since. She barely remembers her former life, and her only hope for escaping him is to find her replacement and she thinks she's found her at a local park.

 Chilling, genuinely upsetting, but well and simply told.

The Girl From the Well by Rin Chupeco (2014)

This young adult horror novel is narrated by Okiku, a 300-year old ghost who avenges murdered children by killing their murderers and freeing their spirits.

Some excellent imagery--very much as if you were reading a novelization of The Ring (but well done) and quite interesting back story and info on Japanese ghost stories. I love the imagery of the ghosts of the murdered children clinging to the murderers, as well as the occasional people who can see Okiku and other spirits.

Quite a well-done and original young adult horror novel.

Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain (2013)

After watching Tombstone (in a spate of Michael Biehn movie binge-watching), I wanted to read more about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Biehn's character, Johnny Ringo.  In one of those serendipitous coincidences, St. Germain's book popped up in my catalog searches. 

St. Germain lived in (or just outside) of Tombstone with his mother and brother with a succession of his mother's boyfriends.  When he is just 20, his mother is shot to death, likely by her current husband (her fifth).  

In this book, St. Germain chronicles his attempts to make sense of his mother's death as he tries to answer the unanswered questions of her death.  

He wanders back and forth in time as he recalls his own troubled childhood with his mother, and along the way, the story of his hometown and the famous shootouts that took place there.  Simply and sparely written, St. Germain weaves together all of these elements beautifully in a very emotional, suspenseful and touching book.  A good pairing with After Visiting Friends by Michael Hanley.

Breathing Room by Marsha Hayle (2012)

Set in 1940, this is a children's novel about a young girl suffering from tuberculosis who is sent to Loon Lake Sanatorium to recover.  

Based on similar historical events and illustrated with marvelous images of medical devices and sanatoriums, this Minnesota-set historical fiction is filled with great characters, poignant situations and a fascinating slice of history.

Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin (2014)

Subtitled: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.  Angwin is an investigative journalist who explores the many ways we are being watched and recorded and what we can do about it.  

Short answer?  Not much.  

Angwin looks at how our private lives are under watch and how our private data is being collected by the bushelful, then goes deeply into security and hacker circles in order to figure out how to evade being tracked.  Fascinating and eye-opening.  

A good companion to Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom.  Also, Angwin's sources are marvelously documented in full detail.

The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1926)

As a longtime lover of the Anne of Green Gables stories, I can't believe I had never heard of this novel.  I finally read about it in the lovely booklovers' catalog Bas Bleu and immediately requested it from the library (sorry, lovely catalog--I promise to buy it soon!).

Montgomery's only novel for adults (though at my library, it's cataloged as YA), The Blue Castle is about Valancy, a 29-year-old mousy spinster living with her overbearing, unkind family and dreaming of life in her beautiful, imaginary Blue Castle.  When Valancy learns that she has a fatal illness, she decides to stand up for herself with her family and do what she wants to do--including getting a job, asking a man to marry her and finding her Blue Castle in real life.  

I utterly loved this novel, and would put it right up there with my favorite romances of the early 20th century, such as Daddy Long-Legs and I Capture the Castle.

I always love a quote about houses: 

"Would you like a house like that, Moonight?" Barney asked … "No," said Valency, who had once dreamed of a mountain castle ten times the size of the rich man's 'cottage' and now pitied the poor inhabitants of palaces.  "No.  It's too elegant.  I would have to carry it with me everywhere I went.  On my back like a snail.  It would own me -- possess me, body and soul.  I like a house I can love and cuddle and boss."

Me too!

Pride and Pyramids by Amanda Grange and Jacqueline Webb (2012)

How can you not love a Pride and Prejudice retelling which is essentially P&P combined with The Mummy? 

Pride and Pyramids finds Elizabeth and Darcy married with five (six?) children and in search of a bit of adventure.  Their cousin proposes a family trip to Egypt to join him on an expedition to Egypt to find an abandoned tomb. There's also a story about a restless Egyptian spirit and a little mystical element. 

Nice depiction of well-loved characters, a setting that is original, and lots of good characters. Quite fun!

Sad Monsters by Frank Lesser (2011)

Loved, loved, loved, loved this adorable collection of short, humorous pieces on monsters subtitled: Growling on the Outside, Crying on the Inside.  

I especially loved it because I had just skimmed John Moe's awful book: Dear Luke, We Need to Talk, which is every bit as unfunny as his work on the radio show Wits. Sad Monsters, however, is everything that book wanted to be.  

This collection is filled with short vignettes that perfectly live up to their titles and premises, such as Missed Possessions (Missed Connections for succubi), His Fangs Just Aren't That Into You, Giant Ape Class-Action Lawsuit, and The Passive-Aggressive Monster in the Closet.  

SO so so clever and funny, and presented in a charming variety of different forms, from diaries to letters to court transcriptions, accompanied by adorable illustrations by Willie Real. Oh, and I can't forget the notes from The Roommate of Dorian Gray.  Fabulous!  So many funny funny lines.  LOVE.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub (2014)

Started reading this in a digital ARC, but it didn't grab me immediately.  It did in book form, though.  I really liked her book Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures and it stayed with me quite a bit.  This one will as well.  Although when I started it, I was like, ooh white people problems, it did draw me in.  

The characters:  a couple whose husband just cheated on his wife and got fired from his job, her best friend and his husband, their grown son and his girlfriend, and their daughter who is off to college in the fall.  They all stay in a house on Mallorca.  Marvelous character and relationship writing; I loved the depictions of both Franny (the cheated-upon wife) and Sylvia (the daughter, who has her first crush and is crushed).  Just spot-on.

And a quote I loved: 

"Yes, it was true that Franny had gotten thicker in the last decade, but that was what happened unless you were a high-functioning psychotic, and she had other things to think about."  (p. 29)