Each Little Bird That Sings/Deborah Wiles

Also a Young Adult title this story was at times exciting, sweet and wise.

















Publisher's Description:
Ten-year-old Comfort Snowberger has attended 247 funerals. But that's not surprising, considering that her family runs the town funeral home. And even though Great-uncle Edisto keeled over with a heart attack and Great-great-aunt Florentine dropped dead--just like that--six months later, Comfort knows how to deal with loss, or so she thinks. She's more concerned with avoiding her crazy cousin Peach and trying to figure out why her best friend, Declaration, suddenly won't talk to her. Life is full of surprises. And the biggest one of all is learning what it takes to handle them.

A Step From Heaven/An Na

From time to time I find myself choosing titles shelved in the Young Adult section. Here is one of many I encourage you not to miss.

A Step From Heaven/An Na
Publisher's Description:

The story of a Korean family that immigrates to California in search of a better life, only to find that the American Dream is harder to achieve than they thought. Told through the eyes of Young Ju, who is a preschooler when the book begins and a young woman heading off to college by the time it ends, A Step from Heaven is a moving and sometimes painful tale about cultural differences, family dynamics, and the struggle to survive.

As little Young Ju's plane leaves Korea and climbs high into the sky, she thinks she is headed for heaven. In a way, so do her parents, who believe that America will offer them big opportunities and a more heavenly lifestyle. But life is much harder than they anticipate, and both of Young Ju's parents must work multiple jobs just to make ends meet while they share a house with relatives. Disillusioned and ashamed, Young Ju's father tries to drown the harsh realities of his life in liquor, eventually descending into a pit of alcoholism that turns him emotionally and physically abusive.

Though the family as a unit doesn't adapt well, Young Ju adjusts quickly and soon excels in school. But the shame of her family's poverty and her father's worsening alcoholism leads to several lies and cover-ups that prevent her from ever fully embracing her new life. Caught between two cultures and increasingly isolated by the growing tension within her family, Young Ju eventually finds herself at a crossroads, forced to make a decision that will likely tear her family apart.

Some Things that Stay/Sarah Willis

I stumbled across this one by chance at the library which prompted me to seek out the author’s other titles. “Some Things that Stay” is an accurate portrayal of family life. The narrator, Tamara, is a highly likeable character who tells her story with wit and sensitivity and without sentimentality.

Publisher’s Description:

Tamara Anderson's father is a landscape artist who quickly tires of the scenery, so every year her family seeks out new locations for his inspiration. When the Andersons move to a farmhouse in Sherman, New York, in the spring of 1954, fifteen-year-old Tamara and her mother want to settle down and make it home. Sherman begins to work a strange magic on Tamara and her siblings: there's the proselytizing family in the tar-paper house across the street; the dairy cow that becomes a beloved pet; the dead boy who used to live in Tamara's bedroom; her friend Brenda, who teaches her to swear; and Brenda's big brother, Rusty, an irresistible freckle-faced redhead. While Tamara experiences her first real year of happiness, her mother is diagnosed with tuberculosis, forcing her into a sanatorium. Tamara struggles with her desire to stay in Sherman, her fear of losing her mother, and her anger at being left in charge of two younger siblings while her father escapes into the world of his art.

The Sound of Us/Sarah Willis

Though Alice has struggles like everyone else the story is more uplifting than “A Good Distance” also by Sarah Willis. The story has adventure, touches the heart and is true to life.

From the Publisher:

Alice Marlowe accepts her life the way it is. She is single, in her late forties, lives with a cat named Sampson, and has imaginary conversations with her dead twin brother. As a sign-language interpreter for the deaf, she is used to standing between people, facilitating their conversations with each other. But then a late-night phone call brings a beautiful, scared six-year-old girl into her life.

Author Biography: Sarah Willis, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, is also the author of A Good Distance, The Rehearsal and the New York Times Notable Book Some Things That Stay, which won the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction.

A Good Distance/Sarah Willis

Two difficult subjects are covered – the aftermath of a parent and husband’s death and Alzheimer’s disease – and both are handled well. The story switches voices between mother and daughter and the writing from the mother’s point of view seemed like an accurate portrayal of what it might feel like to be in the shoes of an Alzheimer’s patient. The daughter, Jennifer, is seemingly desperate in her search for redemption from her mother for past transgressions as she races to her goal before time runs out and her mother no longer comprehends what she wants to say. The story of each the mother’s and daughter’s pasts were quite engaging. However reading this immediately after “You’re Not You” was hard due to similarly serious subject matter. Each book was so absorbing I have needed to take a few days off from reading to shake the dark shroud of the weighty subject matters. I don’t recommend reading these titles back-to-back.

From the Publisher

“A Good Distance” is a heartrending story about mothers and daughters doing their best to negotiate the distance between freedom and love.

Jennifer's mother, Rose, belongs in a home. At least that's what everyone else thinks. But Jennifer has walked away from her mother too many times already, and this is one duty she intends to fulfill herself. So she takes a leave of absence from her job and invites Rose to live with her and her family. Jennifer's teenage daughter and new husband can hardly tolerate Rose and her short temper, but Jennifer is desperate to know about the memories drifting in and out of her mother's reach, sometimes comforting her, sometimes tormenting her. Jennifer longs to use these memories to help rebuild her mother's life—to remind herself, and her mother, what went wrong, so she can ask for forgiveness—or is it the other way around?

Author Biography: Sarah Willis, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, is also the author of The Rehearsal and the New York Times Notable Book Some Things That Stay, which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction.

You're Not You/Michelle Wildgen

Definitely a good read. The main characters Kate and Bec are so incredibly well drawn it was easy to stay with this story stopping only when necessary (at times life does intrude on my reading time.) It should be noted that this book deals quite frankly with the sexuality of both characters but it is handled gracefully and makes a valid point: those ill or disabled have desires like everybody else. A thought-provoking and satisfying novel.

From the Publisher

College student Bec is dangerously adrift. Self-conscious and increasingly uncertain about her long-term plans, she's studying a major that no longer interests her and is caught up in a bewildering affair with a married professor. In an impulsive attempt to redeem herself, she answers a want ad seeking a caregiver. What she finds is a wealthy, cultivated woman in her mid-thirties. Once an advertising executive, accomplished chef, and skilled decorator, Kate is now in the advanced stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). She and her husband, Evan, handle their situation with humor, careful planning, and a lot of determination. Yet while Bec perceives the couple as charmingly frank and good-humored, strains exist beneath the surface. Bec is soon a vital part of her employer's household, and their increasing closeness transforms both women's lives and their relationships. The more she acts on Kate's behalf, the further Bec strays from her stringent comfort zone. She performs every task, from the most administrative to the most intimate, and she translates Kate's speech for strangers, friends, and even family. Sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly, Bec advances further and further into Kate's world, surprised by her own increasing dedication and ease. But how closely can Bec intertwine her own life with Kate's? The two confront their obstacles unsentimentally, with dark humor and unflinching candor, as their relationship is slowly stripped of pretense. Honesty becomes their touchstone: They may find humor in the most devastating moments, but they won't pretend to believe in silver linings that don't exist. With crystal clarity, debut author Michelle Wildgen has crafted a deeply affecting novel about the singular relationship between two women, balancing humor and regret, sensuality and necessity, and testing the outer limits of friendship.

Little Beauties/Kim Addonizio

This has been featured pretty prominiently on the shelves at Target. It's a good one to take on a cross-country plane trip or a three-day weekend at the beach. Although it deals with weighty topics like obsessive compulsive disorder and teen-age pregnancy, I found it only mildly compelling.

From the Publisher

Diana McBride, a thirty-four-year-old former child pageant contender, now works in a baby store in Long Beach. Between dealing with a catastrophic haircut, the failure of her marriage, and phone calls from her alcoholic mother, Diana has gone off her OCD medication and is trying to cope via washing and cleaning rituals. When pregnant teenager Jamie Ramirez enters the store, Diana's already chaotic world is sent spinning.

Jamie can't stand being pregnant. She can't wait to get on with her normal life and give the baby up for adoption. But her yet-to-be-born daughter, Stella, has a fierce will and a destiny to fulfill. And as the magical plot of Little Beauties unfolds, these three characters' lives become linked in ever more surprising ways.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter/Kim Edwards

This had me on edge the whole way through. Though I am not a reader who flips to the end just to get to the resolution, the idea did flash through my mind. The writing is simple and straight-forward so it's easy to get through quickly.

From the Publisher

Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted family drama that explores every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you?

On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down's syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by David Henry's fateful decision that long-ago winter night.

A rich and deeply moving page-turner, The Memory Keeper's Daughter captures the way life takes unexpected turns and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan/Lisa See and Ties That Bind, Ties That Break/Lensey Namioka

Captivating. You'll want to savor the writing but the story is so gripping you'll race to the end then want to go back and read it again.

Publisher's description:

Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

Another interesting story that deals with the issue of foot-binding is the Young Adult title "Ties That Bind, Ties That Break" by Lensey Namioka.

The third sister in the Tao family, Ailin is not quite five years old in 1911, a time of transformation in China, when Western philosophies are creating a wave of revolutions and the empire is crumbling. More spirited than her older sisters, Ailin rebels against the torturous age-old tradition of binding girls' feet. When the family of her intended husband breaks the marriage agreement because her feet are not bound, Ailin feels no remorse. But as she enters adolescence, her family is no longer willing to support her. She realizes for the first time just how powerless a girl of good family with no prospect of marriage is in Chinese society.

Ailin has no intention of following that society's traditions. Not only can she read and write Chinese, but she also learns English and seeks a way to make her own living. When she is offered an opportunity that shocks her already estranged family, Ailin faces a decision that may further alienate her from her familial duty and from her country.

Lensey Namioka has written an unforgettable saga of a girl who defies the ancient traditions of her class and heritage, emerging at last as a young woman with an indomitable spirit.

A Brief Lunacy/Cynthia Thayer

This book was fascinating. It explored many interesting elements including mental illness and World War II Nazi Germany. It was so compelling I completed it in one day. The publisher's synopsis follows:

A haunting edge-of-the-seat thriller that begins with a simple act of kindness and ends in a scene of escalating violence in a secluded Maine cabin.

The stranger arrived on a cool October evening. Jessie and Carl invited the stranded young man into their cabin, fed him supper, and let him spend the night. The next morning he repays their kindness by taking them prisoner in their own home.

Who is this man who calls himself Jonah? Why does he seem to know everything about them? What is his connection to their troubled, missing daughter, Sylvie? As Jonah's behavior grows increasingly erratic and frightening, Jessie and Carl are trapped in a single day of brutality and shattering revelations that will test the limits of their sanity and their will to survive.

Other books by Thayer that I've enjoyed include "A Certain Slant of Light" and "Strong for Potatoes."

Tilt/Elizabeth Burns

The things that happen to Bridget Fox in this debut novel could make Job weep, but Bridget is funny on every page, and equally poignant. The overwhelming fact of Bridget's life is that her five-year-old daughter, Maeve, is autistic. Bridget describes what it's like to love a child when "she can't let you know she loves you back." Maeve wears a weighted vest to calm her and alternately giggles and moans to herself. She throws herself against a window and cracks it. This child would be too much for anyone, but Bridget has also suffered grievous losses: she divorced her philandering first husband and weathered the death of her beloved cousin. She and her current husband, Pierce, recently left their longtime home in Manhattan for Minneapolis, where Pierce, an internationally known sculptor, has a teaching job. Bridget has virtually no support system. Her father dies of cancer, her mother is chilly (she tells the desperate Bridget that she needs to find a good rinse for her graying hair). Pierce is soon diagnosed as manic-depressive. It's no wonder that Bridget tilts toward mental breakdown, but it is a wonder that she can be so engaging while coming unhinged-and that Burns manages to stave off melodrama with her dry wit and down-to-earth narration. Burns is a poet whose prose is lyrical, energetic and original. "We have crossed over into some world that I used to imagine was inhabited only by saints and martyrs, by mothers who grow patience like lizards grow tails." This hip and witty novel doesn't mince words about sex, mental illness or the exhaustion of child-rearing.

The Secret Life of Bees/Sue Monk Kidd

Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh, unyielding father, Lily Owens has shaped her entire life around one devastating, blurred memory - the afternoon her mother was killed, when Lily was four. Since then, her only real companion has been the fierce-hearted, and sometimes just fierce, black woman Rosaleen, who acts as her "stand-in mother."

When Rosaleen insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily knows it's time to spring them both free. They take off in the only direction Lily can think of, toward a town called Tiburon, South Carolina - a name she found on the back of a picture amid the few possessions left by her mother.

There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters named May, June, and August. Lily thinks of them as the calendar sisters and enters their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey, and of the Black Madonna who presides over this household of strong, wise women. Maternal loss and betrayal, guilt and forgiveness entwine in a story that leads Lily to the single thing her heart longs for most.

Breathing Water/T. Greenwood

Effie Greer watches the final days of summer play out from her grandparents' home in Lake Gormlaith, Vermont, with her boyfriend, Max. Despite the idyllic setting, Effie is hiding a secret. With a heated temper and shattered past, Max is heading toward self-destruction and Effie, unwilling to let go, is close behind. Slowly, Effie begins to gain the strength necessary to leave the suffocating relationship. But on the evening she decides to go, Max's violence results in a tragic boating accident and the death of a child. Unable to deal with her role in that terrible August night, Effie drifts aimlessly from city to city. Only when she learns that Max has died of a heroin overdose does she find the strength to return to Lake Gormlaith to face the demons that have kept her away. No longer a naive young girl, Effie is now a woman desperately seeking absolution. She ultimately finds her chance in the most unlikely of people.

We Are All Welcome Here/Elizabeth Berg

I have loved everything Elizabeth Berg has published and strongly recommend each of them. Her latest novel is equally satisfying. It features three women, each struggling against overwhelming odds for her own kind of freedom.

It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis's birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently-and violently-across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit-with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.

Diana is trying in her own fashion to live a normal life. As a fourteen-year-old, she wants to make money for clothes and magazines, to slough off the authority of her mother and Peacie, to figure out the puzzle that is boys, and to escape the oppressiveness she sees everywhere in her small town. What she can never escape, however, is the way her life is markedly different from others'. Nor can she escape her ongoing responsibility to assist in caring for her mother. Paige Dunn is attractive, charming, intelligent, and lively, but her needs are great-and relentless.

As the summer unfolds, hate and adversity will visit this modest home. Despite the difficulties thrust upon them, each of the women will find her own path to independence, understanding, and peace. And Diana's mother, so mightily compromised,will end up giving her daughter an extraordinary gift few parents could match.

More Than You Know/Beth Gutcheon

More Than You Know is a haunting novel that bridges two centuries, two mother-daughter relationships, and two tragic love stories. In a small town called Dundee on the coast of Maine, an old woman named Hannah Gray begins her story by saying "Somebody said 'true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen.' I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse."

Hannah has a passionate and painful story of true love and loss: the story of a ghost that appeared in her life, and in the life of Conary Crocker, the wild and appealing boy who loved her.

Interwoven with their love story is a story of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier. As the parallels and differences between the two families are revealed, the reader comes to understand that someone in the nineteenth-century story has become the very unquiet soul haunting the twentieth. But not until the end do we learn (as Hannah never can) what force of mischance and personality has led to so much damage, and no one knows if such damage is ever at an end.

A Certain Slant of Light/Cynthia Thayer

A hermit opens his heart to love in Thayer's moving second novel (after Strong for Potatoes), which takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson. When a fire kills his wife, son and daughter, Peter MacQueen retreats to his coastal cabin in Maine, interacting with nobody except Dora, an old Passamaquoddy Indian, and his faithful pet, Dog. He also finds solace in his bagpipes, his few books and a mournful ritual involving his dead daughter's dollhouse, but a guilty secret relentlessly haunts him. A pregnant woman, Elaine, on the run from her cruel husband, shows up on his property, desperate for shelter from a winter storm; the two share a bittersweet healing. Initially irritated by Elaine's presence, Peter eventually opens a tentative crack in his emotional door. Elaine tells him about the miscarriage she suffered when she was a teenager and about the excruciating tensions of growing up with healthy hormones in a restrictive Jehovah's Witness environment. After Elaine's daughter is born and named Azelin--"Spared by Jehovah"-- Elaine must decide whether to stay or return to her husband. Thayer's tale is deeply poetic and quasi-Freudian, with the dollhouse in Peter's cabin serving as a potent symbol of the characters' unconscious desires. The other central motif is Elaine's pregnancy: ideas of renewal, fear and sacrifice in bringing forth new life come to the surface when it becomes clear that Azelin may need a blood transfusion, which Elaine's religion prohibits. If Thayer is heavy-handed with such themes, her characters are plainspoken and lucid as well as complex, and their progress toward emotional healing becomes an engrossing story with inspirational power.

Strong for Potatoes/Cynthia Thayer

Strong for Potatoes is the story of the difficult coming of age of Blue Willoughby, a remarkable girl growing up in eastern Maine. Blue's young life is defined by two events: an accident that left her with a glass eye and a scarred face, and the death of her twin sister, Berry, born without a brain and unable to survive beyond a few days after their birth. For Blue, faced with her mother's dreamy indifference and her photographer father's habit of hiding behind a camera, Berry's image serves as a mute, supportive presence Blue can call forth into her mind practically at will. But Blue's real, flesh-and-blood ally is her grandfather, a full-blooded Passamoquoddy Indian who teaches Blue the lessons that could save her when everything else fails: that the ways of nature can illuminate life; that family can be depended upon; that true passion is worth waiting for; and that grief can heal. Most important, he teaches her the ways of the Passamoquoddy, including the art of weaving baskets from ash and sweet grass - knowledge Blue will need to find a sense of herself to discover where she came from, and even to determine where she's headed.

Nearer Than the Sky/ T. Greenwood

Indie Brown is a woman haunted by a childhood she'd rather forget. As an adult, Indie has moved far away from her parents and created a new life with her longtime companion, Peter, a sensitive and steadfast partner. Together they have forged a simple and happy life in the backwoods of Maine. But one autumn evening, a late-night phone call from her younger sister sends Indie reeling back into the chaos of her troubled family, and she reluctantly returns home." "It is back in the mountains of Arizona that events from her past are suddenly and painfully illuminated. From her mother's disturbing relationship with her younger sister to the death of her brother, Indie is assaulted by the nightmares of her childhood. And after a sudden and unpredictable turn of events, she is ultimately forced to reevaluate her relationships with her mother, her sister, and with Peter." "Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the elusive and horrific mental disorder that causes afflicted mothers to make their own children ill, comes to life in this tragic yet beautiful story.

Undressing the Moon/T. Greenwood

Piper Kincaid is 30 years old and has already endured three years of treatment for breast cancer. As she considers life with metastatic breast disease, she also returns to the year she was 14, when her mother left and she came to understand how lives get broken. In Greenwood's third novel (after Breathing Water and Nearer Than the Sky), chapters alternate between Piper's story today and 16 years earlier. Her mother collected broken glass and created beautiful pieces of art, but she couldn't live with her husband's fears of losing her. She managed to get away, leaving Piper and her older brother, Quinn, with their father, who eventually found a new girlfriend and ostensibly moved out. How Piper grew up that year without either parent, how she and her best friend, Becca, discovered performing, and how she became aware of the neediness and cruelty of others intersects with Piper's cancer ordeal. Greenwood uses glass to represent both beauty and baseness, creation and destruction, and life and death.

Falling Angels/Tracy Chevalier

A fashionable London cemetery, January 1901: Two graves stand side by side, one decorated with an oversize classical urn, the other with a sentimental marble angel. Two families, visiting their respective graves on the day after Queen Victoria's death, teeter on the brink of a new era. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are divided by social class as well as taste. They would certainly not have become acquainted had not their two girls, meeting behind the tombstones, become best friends. And, even more unsuitably, become involved with the gravedigger's muddy son.

As the girls grow up, as the new king changes social customs, as a new, forward-thinking era takes wing, the lives and fortunes of the two families become more and more closely intertwined-neighbors in life as well as death.

Against a gas-lit backdrop of social and political history, Tracy Chevalier explores the prejudices and flaws of a changing time.

The Virgin Blue/Tracy Chevalier

Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin -- two women born centuries apart, yet tied together by a haunting family legacy. When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start working on a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a strange series of events propels her on a quest to uncover her family's French ancestry. As the novel unfolds -- alternating between Ella's story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier -- a common thread emerges that pulls the lives of the two women together in a most mysterious way. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

From the Publisher:

With wry candor and tender humor, acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman has crafted a strikingly beautiful novel for our time, tackling the absurdities of modern life and reminding us why we love some people no matter what.

For Emilia Greenleaf, life is by turns a comedy of errors and an emotional minefield. Yes, she's a Harvard Law grad who married her soul mate. Yes, they live in elegant comfort on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But with her one-and-only, Jack, came a stepson--a know-it-all preschooler named William who has become her number one responsibility every Wednesday afternoon. With William, Emilia encounters a number of impossible pursuits--such as the pursuit of cab drivers who speed away when they see William's industrial-strength car seat and the pursuit of lactose-free, strawberry-flavored, patisserie-quality cupcakes, despite the fact that William's allergy is a figment of his over-protective mother's imagination.

As much as Emilia wants to find common ground with William, she becomes completely preoccupied when she loses her newborn daughter. After this, the sight of any child brings her to tears, and Wednesdays with William are almost impossible. When his unceasing questions turn to the baby's death, Emilia is at a total loss. Doesn't anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job? Ironically, it is only through her blundering attempts to bond with William that she finally heals herself and learns what family really means.

Cage of Stars

Jacquelyn Mitchard is one of my favorite authors. Her rise to fame after her first novel was featured as one of Oprah's early book club picks is almost as great a story as are each of the titles by her I've read. Another reason I like her is she is so down-to-earth. She seems like an ordinary person who hasn't allowed her fame to change her. I also feel an affinity because we were both once newspaper reporters.

Initially I wasn't excited about reading her latest book as it involved a gruesome murder, two in fact, as the main character's sisters are slain early in the story. It sounds corny I know but after visiting Mitchard's website and hearing the author talk about the book in her own voice I was compelled to check it out.

Mitchard is fantastic with character development and creating ambience. It's easy to get caught up in her stories because they are so well drawn. You feel like you're there.

This story isn't so much about the murders of two young girls as it is about the aftermath. I got to know and understand heroinne Ronnie Swan and I liked her. I could relate to her reaction to the killings and how she dealt with her grief.

Other Mitchard titles I enjoyed are:

• The Breakdown Lane
• Deep End of the Ocean
• The Most Wanted
• Christmas, Present and
• Rosalie, My Rosalie: The Tail of a Duckling which is a novella for children that I read with my 7-year-old. It was exciting sharing one of my favorite authors with him.

Mitchard also published a memoir on her battle with infertility and the subsequent adoptions of her children. I don't recall the name of the book and can't find it listed in my library's catalog or at Barnes & Noble's website.

The Myth of You & Me

I just finished this title by Leah Stewart. It's a quick yet satisfying read that examines the complexities of friendship.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Cameron was fifteen, she and Sonia were best friends -- so close it seemed nothing would ever come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.

Nearly a decade after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron receives an unexpected letter from her old friend. Despite Oliver's urging, she doesn't reply. But when he passes away, Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her.