"All You Could Ask For" by Mike Greenberg was really touching and I cried at the end. So nicely written! Three women who don't know each other are brought together by breast cancer. Brooke is a mom with a wonderful, loving husband who is scared of how her life might change if she tells him she has cancer. Katherine is a hard working, successful Wall Street executive who has spent 20 years of her life hating the man she thought ruined it but has now finally let go and is ready to embark on a new and exciting adventure when she gets her diagnosis. And Samantha is a young newly divorced, athletic woman who will do anything it takes to improve her odds of survival. It was really amazing.
"The Demon" by Hubert Selby Jr. was disturbing. Interesting, but disturbing. Harry White is a bit of a jerk. He likes to hit on and sleep with married women, and then not see them again. He's bright and his work wants him to move up, but he's lazy and not committed. Harry bites the bullet and marries a wonderful woman and starts putting in the effort at work to move up the chain of command. The more successful Harry gets, the more awful he becomes. He starts stealing, and finally murdering.
"Smile, Southern California, You're the Center of the Universe" by James Flanigan wasn't nearly as interesting as I'd hoped it would be. He mostly just talked about contributions immigrants have made to the region without anything else, so it was a bit one sided.
"Paper Valentine" by Brenna Yaranoff was a creepy YA novel about a town being held hostage by a serial killer preying on young girls. Parents are in a state of panic and no one feels safe. Hannah is being haunted by the ghost of her best friend, Lillian, who died from anorexia related causes six months earlier. Lillian is convinced Hannah can catch the killer and end the nightmares, but Hannah isn't sure she can figure it out.
I finally finished reading Jodi Picoult's "The Storyteller". I started it months ago, got nearly to the end, and then had to return it because there were holds at my library. I went back on the waiting list and finished it. It was pretty good: Sage still blames herself for the auto accident that killed her mom and scarred her face several years earlier. She works at night at a bakery and is sleeping with a married man in order to avoid having a real relationship. She becomes friendly with an elderly man who visits the bakery where she works, and he asks her to help him die. Sage is startled by this until she finds out why: Josef was a Nazi and wants her forgiveness, since Sage was born into the Jewish faith. Sage is horrified by his confession and contacts the authorities, who start building a case against him. Sage's own grandmother is a Holocaust survivor, and her story, along with the fiction tale she was writing as a girl before being hauled off to the camps, is interwoven in the story. There was a *lot* going on in this book, and it was pretty predictable (once you've read one Jodi Picoult you kind of know how it's going to go) but it was still good.
"Midwinter Blood" by Marcus Sedgwick was a forgettable YA novel about an island where two souls keep living, over and over, reincarnated as different people but they always manage to find each other. Eh.
And finally, two Advanced Reader books I read back in March that were published last month. The first is "He's Gone" by Deb Caletti. I really enjoyed this one, it reminded me of "Gone Girl". Dani wakes up one morning, slightly hungover, and realizes her husband is missing. She doesn't think much of it at first, until the day wears on and he doesn't return and there's no word from him. We learn how Ian and Dani met and cheated on their spouses, how Dani's worried perhaps that she did something to Ian that she doesn't remember because she was drinking the night before. The police and Ian's kids from his first marriage all blame her for his disappearance and think she's hiding something. Caletti writes it so you're not sure if you believe Dani or not. Excellently done.
"Golden" by Jessi Kirby was a YA book about Parker, who has spent her high school years working towards the goal of getting a scholarship and going to Stanford to be a doctor. Unfortunately, as graduation approaches, Parker realizes it's more her Mom's dream for her than her own and she's not sure what *she* wants to do. After finding the journal of a girl who died ten years earlier on the eve of her graduation, Parker decides she needs to live her own life and take some chances before it's too late. It was a little sappy but I liked it.
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