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)

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (2014)

I love Roz Chast, and this memoir of dealing with her parents' aging and eventual death is poignant, sad, truthful and surprisingly funny.  

She had a mixed relationship with her parents growing up, and dealing with her parents' eventual dependence on her is honestly and touchingly told.  

Very, very much enjoyed.  

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying by Carol Leifer (2014)

Subtitled: Lessons from a Life in Comedy, I'm totally considering this for my all-time favorite business books.  (Along with Good Boss, Bad Boss and Creating Magic.)

It's a bit of a mix--memoir, comedic essay and some good solid business sense mixed in. Fascinating look at her career, the challenges she's faced and her useful advice, including her great advice to always say hi to people and be kind to everyone.  Also, this quote really hit home for me personally:

"Still I wish I knew then what I know now, and I hope you'll benefit from knowing now what I didn't know then. Whatever workplace you're in, always aim to please the captain. It matters, even if the first mate is ecstatic with your performance, because it's the captain who ultimately decides who stays onboard. If, like I did, you sense that the one person in charge isn't thrilled with what you're doing [spoiler: it was Lorne Michaels], ask for feedback and figure out how to correct your course. Because flying under the radar is a passive tactic that will eventually get you tossed off the ship."

Cure for the Common Breakup by Beth Kendrick (2014)

I am always so proud of myself when I read a book that was actually published in the current calendar year. You'd think being in a library almost every day would give me a leg up on the new releases, but I tend to be a bit behind the times.  I blame the excess of amazingly readable books I see every day (and my constantly expanding GoodReads To-Read list--current count: 298).

Anyhoo, this is a delightful chick littish novel about an airline attendant who gets in a plane crash and her pilot bf (who was about to propose), breaks up with her while she's still in the hospital.  So she takes her settlement and her injuries and goes to Black Dog Bay, a town whose entire tourism industry is dedicated to healing people who are getting through break-ups.

The surprisingly delightful part of this novel is that Summer, the stewardess, is hilarious and full of the devil.  No neurotic, shy, insecure chick lit heroine here.  She's funny and full of sassafras and turns the town upside down, in a good way.  A host of wonderful little details (like the Rebound Salon and local bar the Whinery) and great, rich characters, as well as a very dashing romantic lead, make this great fun.

Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge (2007)

It’s Halloween night and every teen boy in town has been locked up for five days.  Tonight they are released, ready to do battle with a legend come to life: The October Boy—born in a cornfield and made of candy, vines and a pumpkin head.  The boy who succeeds in killing him gets to leave town and the competition is fierce, but who are they truly fighting?  

Partridge creates a suspenseful, chilling novel and beautifully evokes the feeling of autumn and Halloween, while telling a truly original story with well-drawn characters.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo (2013)

You MUST read this book.

I hear about books from a lot of sources.  Blogs, friends, reviews, whatever.  And then there's the books that I just run across in the library catalog while looking for something else.  Which is to say, I have NO idea how I found this book.  But I'm so glad I did!

Set in colonial Mayala, among the Chinese who reside there, the story is about Li Lin, a young woman of marriageable age who lives with her opium-addicted father and her beloved Amah.  Despite the loss of her mother at a young age, all is pretty much satisfactory until she receives a marriage proposal from Lim Tian Ching, the son of an influential neighbor.  A promising engagement with one small detail: Lim Tian Ching is dead and the proposal is for Li Lin to be his ghost bride.

Lim Tian Ching begins to haunt Li Lin in her dreams, and she is quickly drawn into a dark world of murder, hungry ghosts and restless spirits.  She also falls in love with Tian Bai, the new (live) heir to the family.  Li Lin ventures into the Chinese afterlife, travelling to the Plains of the Dead on an errand for the mysterious Er Lang, a man who may not be what he seems.

Choo creates a marvelously rich and detailed world of the dead:  paper funeral offerings and hell money, afterworld bureaucracy and the shifting corporeal nature of ghosts.  This novel is utterly original and impossible to slot in a particular genre.  It's historical fiction with elements of fantasy, wonderfully suspenseful and spooky with more than a touch of romance.  It's also just beautifully, vividly and cinematically written.  Much of the book's world is based on Chinese folklore, and Choo's notes section outlines the original stories as well as her own creations.  CRIPES, this is a good book.