"While We Were Watching Downton Abbey" by Wendy Wax was great. In a tony Atlanta building, three women with very different backgrounds become friends while watching "Downton Abbey" together in the building's screening room. Samantha is wealthy, married to old Atlanta money, but doesn't feel like she deserves her amazing husband. She thinks Jonathan married her out of pity and is afraid to show him just how much she really loves him for fear he won't return her feelings. Brooke is still reeling from her divorce: after working two or three jobs to put her husband through medical school, he left her for a younger, thinner woman. Even worse, he moves his newly pregnant wife into the building with Brooke and their two daughters, so she has to see them all the time. And after years of struggling as a single mom, Claire has taken a year off and is determined to write her breakout novel. These three need each other more than they realize, and it was a touching and sweet book about adult female friendship.
I really, really wanted to like "Double Feature" by Owen King, SK's youngest son. I just didn't. It was an interesting story: in college, Sam borrows money and sells everything he owns to make his movie. He has a partner named Brooks, who is a bit off but Sam doesn't realize just how crazy Brooks is until he finishes the film and Brooks intersplices his own strange film into it, destroying the original and all the copies of it. Sam is devastated by the loss of his vision and ten years later is still reeling from it. He has no healthy relationships and lives with a hermit. He has a complicated relationship with his mostly absent father, a semi-famous actor named Booth Dolan. Like I said, I wanted to like it, but it just wasn't that interesting to me.
"The Space Between Before and After" by Jean Reyonlds Page was pretty good, although I felt at times the characters were a bit overly dramatic. Holli has been worrying about her son Conner for months, since he left school and moved to Texas with his young girlfriend Kilian. Conner and Kilian are living in a trailer behind her grandmother's house, and it seems like Grandma Raine is starting to slip a bit. Then Kilian gets sick and Holli learns she has Cystic Fibrosis and is also pregnant. Holli doesn't want Conner throwing his life away by marrying a woman with a death sentence hanging over her head and being stuck as a single father. She's also dealing with her own feelings of abandonment since her father remarried after her mother's death when she was young and her stepmother sent her to live with her grandmother so she wouldn't ruin their new family. It was a quick read about how life can get really complicated really fast sometimes.
"Death Angel" by Linda Fairstein is her latest Alex Cooper mystery. Coop and the gang are investigating a murder in Central Park. There was a lot of interesting history on the Park, which I admittedly know very little about (and have never even seen, since I've never been to New York). I'd like to read more about it when I have time (HAHAHAHAHA...) since it sounds pretty interesting. Anyway, I enjoyed this one, even though there was a lot going on and sometimes the way Coop and her friends talk to each other makes me squirm. They seem so *mean*. I guess maybe that's just how some people communicate with each other? I don't know. If my friends talked to me like that I think I'd break down in tears.
And finally, "Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile" by J. L. Bourne, the sequel to "Day by Day Armageddon", which I really loved. Our unnamed narrator has some sense of safety in Hotel 23, where he's holed up with some other survivors. There are some weird things going on out in the world, though, and he hooks up with some other military and goes on a doomed mission that leaves everyone in the helicopter dead except for him. Going hundreds of miles overland to get back "home", he meets another survivor and the two of them eventually make it back to Hotel 23. The book ends with their home being bombed and the survivors heading for a carrier ship out in the Gulf. The Admiral of the ship orders him to go on a mission to China to look for a rumored vaccine. Fun!
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