Afterlife

Finished April 25
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

This novel follows Antonia Vega, a retired college professor as she still mourns the loss of her husband Sam a year after his death, and is drawn into the immigration issues and love life of the illegal Mexican farmhand working for her neighbour. Antonia is still feeling at loose ends without her husband, and although her three sisters, Mona, Izzy, and Tilly, contact her regularly, and she values their close relationship, she doesn't feel like getting involved in new things. Antonia and her sisters immigrated to the United States with their parents when they were young children, and because she speaks Spanish she gets drawn into the issues next door.
She has volunteered with the immigrant community in the past, but has really pulled into a more solitary existence since the death of her husband, and is only gradually drawn out as the situation lands on her doorstep of the young farmhand's pregnant girlfriend.
To add to the upheaval in her life, Izzy, her oldest sister, always a bit flighty, has seemed to become more impulsive lately and goes missing enroute to a sisterly meetup. As the sisters try to track her down, and deal with what they might find at the end of their search, Antonia finds that there are still things in life that need her attention despite her grief.

Salt Lane

Finished July 20
Salt Lane by William Shaw

This mystery features Detective Sergeant Alex Cupidi, a middle-aged woman with a teenage daughter, who recently moved from London to the nearby fens. She's has a younger woman for her partner, and the first case they come across is that of a body of a woman found naked in a drain. A drain is a drainage ditch in the fenland, and there are a lot of those around, many connected with each other. They don't know if the woman died near where she was found or not. They aren't even sure how she died, but they know she was dead before she went in the water. It doesn't take too long to identify her, but when they contact her next of kin, a son, they find that he was visited the night before by a woman claiming to be his mother. Since his aunt and uncle had taken him in as a child, and he was told by them his mother had died, he is at a complete loss, and isn't sure which woman may really be his mother, if either. And his wife isn't too happy about his interest in the woman who visited them.
When another body appears, this time of a seemingly foreign migrant, Cupidi and her partner aren't sure if the two deaths are connected or not, but they are determined to dig to find out.
Cupidi is also worried about her daughter, Zoe, who doesn't seem to have any friends. Zoe spends most of her time wandering the countryside, watching birds and walking. She doesn't usually take her phone, and Cupidi isn't sure how to help her.
With Cupidi's past coming into the story, with her mom, and former lover, things get more complex, but this is a story of connections, of families, of belonging. I was fascinated.

Audio Fiction

Finished July 6
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See, read by Janet Song
This book follows two sisters from Shanghai, Pearl and May. When the book begins in 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, with a large international community and busy nightlife. Pearl and May work as "beautiful girls" modelling for advertisements of all kinds. This world begins to fall apart when their father reveals his financial problems have caused him to sell the two sisters as wives to "golden mountain men". The sisters fight against this at first, but when they realize the full story of their family situation, the city is already under attack by the Japanese. They must fight just to survive.
As the girls make their way out of Shanghai and to Los Angeles, they undergo a great deal, and these events seal their fate. In Los Angeles they struggle to begin new lives with men they don't know. But their strong bond as sisters carries them through.
From 1937 to the late 1950s, the sisters lives change enormously. See really makes the reader feel the reality of living as a visible minority in the U.S. at this time. It is a great story, and also a revealing one about the unsavory past of North American immigration.
Back in my undergrad days I took a course that looked at immigration to Canada from China and Japan from the beginnings until the early twentieth century and while their are differences, there are a lot of similarities as well. It is an interesting subject and this is a good book for a taste of it.

Interesting Novel

Finished June 29
The Voyage Home by Jane Rogers
This novel follows Anne Harrington. Anne has traveled to Nigeria after her father's death there and has decided to travel home by ship. Along the way, distracted by her grief and what she reads in her father's diary, she becomes isolated. She is forced to interact with others when a stowaway begs for his assistance for his ailing pregnant wife. Anne is not able to cope well with the situation, and finds herself involved in a shadowy world of manipulation, lies, and murder.
Once home, Anne sinks into depression, finding it increasingly difficult to cope with her guilt and grief.
We see Anne again four years later as she must again make a choice about the future, this time a deeply intimate one.
Rogers really gets you into Anne's head in this novel, so you feel just as confused and at sea as she is, and the complex feelings involved feel real. It took me a while to get into this book, but once I did I was drawn in completely and found myself struggling with Anne's actions and feelings.

Latest in a series

Finished July 18
I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming
This is the latest in the series featuring Clare Fergusson, an Episcopalian minister (and ex-army helicopter pilot) and Russ Van Alstyne, police chief in Millers Kill, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks.The two have been drawn together, but the attraction has just resulted in frustration and Russ is married. Now however his wife is dead, but Russ is extremely depressed about it, and Clare feels guilty because he was with her rather than his wife when she died. Clare is still struggling against some more conservative members of her parish and her bishop has convinced her to join the National Guard to explore her true feelings regarding her purpose. Recently Clare has become involved with a program run by a Roman Catholic nun to assist Mexican migrant workers with various needs from transportation to assistance dealing with the government. Russ's sister and her husband have hired some Mexican workers to assist with their dairy farm.
When Latino bodies start showing up in the area, both Russ and Clare become involved in trying to find out what is going on and whether there is a tie to the Mexican workers.
The two also get thrown together again on a personal level and have to assess their true feelings regarding each other.
This one also involves a new police woman, an interesting new character with her own issues

Third in Series

Finished May 20
The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri
Inspector Salvo Montalbano attempts to avoid getting drawn into a case involving a Tunisian killed on a fishing boat, and instead focuses on a case of a man found stabbed to death in the elevator of his apartment building. The elderly man is found quite soon after he has been stabbed, and his wife has an alibi, having left early that morning to visit her sister. It becomes apparent that the dead man had a mistress who he met in his office on a regular basis, and as they track down the mistress, they discover that there may have been more going on in the office than it appeared. When the mistress and her young son disappear, Montalbano attempts to find them.
Livia, Montalbano's girlfriend has a larger role in this book, and becomes more than just a surface character. Food continues to play an important role and I recommend making reservations in an Italian restaurant for after your reading!

Another mystery

Finished July 23
The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham
This mystery asked me to suspend belief a little too much. Alisha Barba, ex-competitive runner and a policewoman about to return to work after a bad injury gets a message from a friend who dropped her years earlier. Cate is 8 months pregnant and asking for Alisha's help. On the night they arrange to meet, Cate and her husband are run down by a taxi. Is it really an accident? What does Cate's old tormenter Donovan have to do with it. Why does a young man from Afghanistan have Alisha's name on him? Alisha traces the mysteries with the help of Ruiz, a retired detective, and Dave, a current policeman enamored of Alisha. She seems to get away with a lot, and have a lot of luck as well. The story was okay, but not great.