Berani

Finished May 20

Berani by Michelle Kadarusman

This children's novel takes the reader to Indonesia, where young Malia has chosen a controversial topic for a school assignment, stop using palm oil to save the habitat of orangutans and other native animals. When she starts an online petition, she finds herself in real trouble, as the government education regulator suspends both her and her teacher. 

Malia is the child of an Indonesian father and Canadian mother, and goes to a private school. Recently Malia's father died and her mother plans to move back to Canada. So while she won't have long term effects from this, her teacher would. Malia looks to find a way to apologize while still being true to her feelings and values. 

Along with Malia's story is the story of Ari. He grew up in a small village where his family grew rice. His extended family saved for him to go live with an uncle and go to school. Ari works in his uncle's restaurant after school and weekends. He feels bad that his female cousin Suni isn't also given the educational opportunity as he feels that she is smarter than him. His uncle keeps an orangutan that he won in a card game in a cage in front of the restaurant. The orangutan, that they call Ginger Juice was treated like a loved pet when she was young, but put in the cage as she got older. His uncle also has a mynah bird called Elvis Presley that he keeps in cage as well. Both of them are considered 'attractions' by the uncle. Ari has connected with Ginger Juice and feels badly for her situation. When he attends a chess tournament and sees a flyer Malia created, he begins to wonder if he can change things, and save the orangutan. 

Besides the personal stories of these two young people, we also get to see how the orangutan feels. She reflects on her life with her mother before being captured, how she misses her life in the rainforest and her mother. She remembers the name her mother called her Berani, and thinks of herself as that. This aspect really shows the reader the intelligence in this animals and the cruelty of keeping them in this situation. 

This is a book that opens children's minds to other ways of living, and of choices that can be made that might take courage to begin. A really interesting and engaging novel. 

Murder on the Intergalactic Railway

Finished May 20

Murder on the Intergalactic Railway by Kate MacLeod

This sci-fi mystery is the first in a series featuring two military cadets at a remote training school. This novel is set on the railway journey to the school. 

Murdina Ritchie is a young woman who dreamed of being a diplomat for the Union of the Free Worlds, and has tried to get in to the training program for years. She had almost given up hoping, but has finally been accepted. One of the reasons that she's had so much trouble is the disgrace involving her father Gustav Ritchie, a diplomat. Before the disgrace, she had led a happy life in an upscale area of one of the worlds. Shackleton Fitz IV has been kicked out of numerous military academies for his behaviour, and this school is his last chance. He knows that he has to take this seriously and change his attitude. He and Ritchie grew up as best friends, until the change for her family led her and her mother to move away, and they lost touch. He knows he should have tried to reach out to her before, but he also knows things that have led to his choice to let her slip out of his life. 

When they realize that they are two of four cadets on this train, escorted by Colonel Hansen who is also travelling there. As they travel from the Intergalactic Transport Depot Delta-Gamma-Delta to the Oymayakon Foreign Service Academy they begin to renew their friendship after a frosty stary, and find themselves teaming up to solve what they believe to be a murder case. They also want to stay in the good graces of Colonel Hansen, after both getting off to bad starts. The other cadets, Moreau and Weld seem pleasant enough. Ritchie hasn't travelled much and is fascinated by the details of the train and the views from it. The train trip will take at least twenty-four hours, arriving on the world the following afternoon and then moving towards their destination. The train goes into what it is called jump space to travel long distances. The world they are going to, Oymayakon, has no space ports due to the perpetual storms that surround it. The navigator will look for the calmest patch to drop through the atmosphere and then the train will continue the journey anchored to the ground by guidance pods. 

At dinner that evening, they see some of the other passengers. One is Lady Marie-Claire Fabron, a woman previously on probation for attempts to colonize another world. She is accompanied by her assistant Mr. Rose and a pet Felzkinder, a species that has recently been declared sentient. It strikes Ritchie as looking like a cross between a charming toddler and a sweet puppy. But like a toddler, it occasionally has a tantrum. Another passenger is Captain Berger, who they meet at lunch the following day, a man who hunts avidly. 

As Ritchie and Fitz investigate, I enjoyed seeing their ideas work together and how they supported each other. The plot was interesting and I found the mystery plot engaging as well. A good read, and I plan to read more in this cross-genre series.

Mercy Snow

Finished May 19

Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker

This story takes place in the mid-1990s in a small town in the mountains of New Hampshire called Titan Falls. A great many of the men in the town work at the local paper mill, run for generations by the McAllister family. There is another family that has owned land for generations as well, further along the Androscoggin river, the Snow family. The town thought that Gert Snow, the last of the them had died after going missing in the 1950s, until a distant relative named Pruitt showed up in the 1970s to claim it. When  siblings Mercy, Zeke, and Hannah roll into town in their old RV and pull it onto the family property they've come looking for Pruitt their father after their mother Arlene died. But Pruitt is dead as well, and so the three settle in. They've lived a nomad life, travelling around the country with their mother, Arlene until she died recently. As they discover the death of their father, they settle in, but find that the community feeling is against them from the beginning. Zeke has trouble finding work but Mercy finds a job assisting Hazel Bell at her sheep farm. 

When a teenage outing by bus results in an accident that has one girl dead and the bus driver, Hazel's husband Fergus in bad condition in hospital, the Snow family is soon drawn into the drama, and Mercy's efforts to work against that bring unexpected stirrings of other emotions to the town. 

The McAllisters are also involved as June brings her own feelings along with her husband's plans to work on the Snow family. 

This book reminds me of the books of John Irving, and would be a great read-alike for those that love his stories. The setting is a big part of the story, but the characters are also deftly drawn and have deep backstories. A great read. 

We Are All Equally Far From Love

Finished May 19

We Are All Equally Far From Love by Adania Shibli, translated by Paul Starkey

This collection of stories, loosely connected to each other, feels curiously dispassionate for stories that are about love. Most of the characters are referred to without names, so as a reader, I wasn't always sure if the characters were the same in different stories. There is a woman who writes letters to a man, gradually developing feelings for him, and then the letters stop coming. 

There is a young girl, removed from school by her father and placed in the post office, where one of her tasks is to read letters for political reasons, but she finds a particular collection of letters interesting and useful for a different reason. There is a woman who finds herself falling for a man who is performing a service for her. There is a man who dreams of a woman and then sees her sitting on a bench and debates whether or not to talk to her. There is a man who drives away after being told a relationship is finished, not sure how he will move forward. There is woman who worries about a man who she ended a relationship with, and whether he will take actions against her. There is a daughter who overhears her father talking tenderly to a woman who isn't her mother, which results in a variety of actions she takes from self-love to familial love to love with a stranger. The final story reads almost like thoughts of the writer about her own stories. An unusual collection. 

The Garden of Evening Mists

Finished May 18

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

This literary novel is a slow-paced read, which I took my time over. In Malaya in 1951, the central character Yun Ling Teoh went to the Cameron Highlands area of Malaya to follow her sister's dream. She and her sister Yun Hong had been in a Japanese internment camp for three years, a remote camp that the prisoners didn't know the location of. Yun Ling was the only survivor of the camp, and she and her sister had kept their spirits up by talking about the Japanese gardens that they'd seen and what her sister wanted to create in her garden. Since the war ended, Yun Ling had worked for a few months as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal before getting a law degree at Cambridge. She returned to Malaya and became a deputy public prosecutor, but her unhappiness at the way the English-controlled government had dealt with the Japanese war crimes drove her feelings to become too vocal for her superiors. 

She is staying with a family friend, Magnus Pretorius and his wife Emily at their tea plantation, Majuba. She plans to visit out their neighbour, Aritomo, a Japanese man who had once been a gardener for the Japanese emperor and has been building his own garden, Yugiri, since coming to Malaya. She has asked him to design a garden for her sister, but he won't decide until they meet. 

Instead, Yun Ling becomes his apprentice, learning the craft of this type of garden by doing the work herself. She is the one who passes his instructions to the local workers, but she also works just as hard as they do. 

Thirty-six years after that first visit, Yun Ling returns to Yugiri after resigning from her position as a judge for the Supreme Court. She will be meeting with a Japanese historian specializing in wood block printing about using Aritomo's blocks in a book. She also meets her old friend Frederik, the nephew of Magnus, who now runs Majuba. Aritomo had bequeathed Yugiri and the copyright for all his writing and art to Yun Ling, but she hasn't visited in years and finds the house and garden both needing much work. 

The novel moves back and forth in time. In the early 1950s, Malaya was still ruled by the British, and there were communist rebels fighting in the jungle, killing the foreign estate owners, and causing unease across the country. In 1987, the country of Malaysia is independent, calm, and a tourist destination. 

We see how the relationship between Yun Ling and Aritomo grew as they worked together on the garden and how she dealt with her hatred of the Japanese through this growth of her abilities and outlook. There are still unanswered questions that Yun Ling must decide whether to pursue. And she must make plans herself, both for her own story, and that of Yugiri. 

This book is wonderful and eye-opening. The characters are complex and the story is as well. The writing brings the setting to life, not only the garden, but the Cameron highlands themselves. You can see the jungle, the forest mists, and the way that both Majuba and Yugiri have put their own visions on their land. This book made me reflect on many things as I read it. With themes of memory and forgiveness the book is one I will think of often. 

Safe House

Finished May 18

Safe House by Jo Jakeman

This suspense novel follows Steffi Finn as she starts a new life under the name Charlie Miller. Charlie for a girl in school who always seemed to have it together, and Miller for her mother's maiden name. The plot moves back and forth in time, but every chapter is dated and titled with the character it focuses on. 

After Steffi's boyfriend Conor started work in London, their long-distance relationship didn't work as well, and they split up. Shortly after that she met Lee Fisher, a charming and handsome man who swept her off her feet. He soon moved in with her, although he had frequent absences as he worked as a pharmaceutical salesman and had a lot of travel as part of his job. He asked her to stop drinking alcohol and he agreed to give up smoking in return. She stuck to that until a leaving party for a co-worker, where she drank a few and he got angry when she came home. She went to bed and he went for a drive to cool off, but it is only a couple of weeks later when she is approached by police about that evening and whether he was with her all night. After talking with him, when he told her he was only gone for a short while and slept in the spare room, she gave him an alibi, and the missing young woman is found dead shortly after. 

When she showed up to a conference he was attending to surprise him, both of them are surprised, him at her presence, and her at his absence from the hotel and his condition when he reappeared. When she hears later about another woman found dead after a similar situation she retracts her alibi and tells the police after his latest trip and what she saw. When he is arrested, he tries unsuccessfully to blame her, but she is charged with giving a false alibi, and serves time in jail. Many people are mad that another woman died because of her earlier alibi, and a lot of them think she must have known of her partner's crimes. When the courts decide she doesn't need protection after her release, she takes matters into her own hands. 

Conor helps her find a new home, one that is dilapidated and needs a lot of work, which she is willing to do, and she takes her new name of Charlie Miller. She finds herself making friends quickly, taken under the wings of a group of women that regularly meet for a book club and other outings. She also meets a older neighbour and finds herself making another unexpected friend. But she has enemies too, one that already knows where she is, and one that is determined to find her. 

Her new home and community may not be as safe as she had hoped. 

I really enjoyed this book, finding myself reading it all in one sitting. I just had to know what happened. The character of Steffi/Charlie was interesting and complex, and truly sorry for what she'd done. The plot was also well done, and left me guessing until the end. You got a real sense of Charlie's fears as well as the things that brought her some moments of content. A great read. 

Deep Freeze

Finished May 13

Deep Freeze by Anne Louise O'Connell

This is the second book in the Deep Mystery series and a great read, set in an interesting place. The main character, Susan Morris is living in Dubai with her husband Mitch, a pilot for EmAir, and they've been there a couple of years. Susan is trained as a nurse but isn't working now. One of her friends Pat is another woman who followed her husband Barry when he signed on as a surgeon at the American Hospital in Dubai. The couple is planning a ski vacation to Austria at the Christmas holidays, but Pat hasn't skied before. Susan offered to take her to Ski Dubai to teach her. 

Just after their first run, a chair lift collapses and Barry is one of the men injured. Pat is distraught and Susan finds herself helping out. When they discover Pat and Barry's house has been ransacked and their Sri Lankan maid Anu is missing, they begin to wonder whether it was really an accident. 

As Susan finds herself investigating the issues that cause her, Barry, and Pat to be suspicious, Susan is drawn into a situation that may involve hospital and government employees and jeopardize her stay in the country. 

The situation with the missing maids, as Anu is not the only one who has disappeared, is related to the religious attitude of the government, the imbalance of power between servants and their employers,  someone who longs to be recognized for their intelligence, and sheer greed. 

Susan also finds herself reexamining her marriage and whether Mitch is the man she thought he was. 

I really enjoyed Susan, a woman who is forthright, empathetic, and loyal. She sees all people as individuals, no matter their role or status, and that leaves her open to new ideas, new friendships, and new possibilities. The plot was also engaging, and captured my interest. I also found the setting refreshing, one that I am not familiar with and that has rules as customs quite different from the ones I live with. 

I also liked how the ending promises more for Susan perhaps in many different countries, something I look forward to. 

How to Hide in Plain Sight

Finished May 12

How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes

This novel is outstanding. The main character, twenty-one-year old Eliot Beck hasn't seen in family in three years since she left for New York City. She is the youngest child in a large family, and loves her siblings and their partners. She fled because of a secret that she feels is devastating, and she uses routine and work to distract herself from her obsessive-compulsive thoughts. 

Eliot has agreed to attend her brother Taz's wedding celebration at the family island, Cradle Island,  located in Canada near Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron. Eliot grew up in Chicago, in her family's large home there, with summers on the family island. The island has numerous cabins located on a sheltered cove and connected by a boardwalk. It is a place close to the heart for the family, special to them all. 

The summer that Eliot was ten, her brother Henry, less than a year older than her, stayed behind in Illinois for summer school, but died in an accident. Eliot's obsessive-compulsive disorder began then, although she didn't have a term for it and thought of it as her worries. When she started school that fall, she became attached to a new boy in school. Manuel is from Colombia and his parents travel a lot for work, leaving him to be raised by his nanny. At first, Eliot natters to him endlessley, without a response. She picks up where she left off the last time she saw him. 

Eliot's oldest brothers, Caleb and Clarence, are from an earlier wife of her father's. Then came Karma, Taz, Henry, and Eliot. There was a fairly large gap between Taz and Henry, and Henry was the way that quieter Eliot connected to her older siblings. Since losing him, she's felt that she doesn't fit in, and struggles with what to say at family dinners. 

The book moves between the present, over a four-day wedding celebration that integrates family traditions and new connections, and Eliot and her family's past, beginning with the loss of Henry. We see her mother's withdrawal followed by a new purpose-filled existence, and her father's collapse and resolve. We see Karma's obsession with baking leading to a new career, and details of the social changes the family goes through. 

We also see clearly one example of obsessive compulsive disorder, an example of intrusive thoughts that drive Eliot to confide in Manuel, and then ask her parents to let her go to a therapist. Despite the professional help, the disorder affects Eliot in a large way, and she struggles to hold onto what she can of a normal life as she tries to hide the reality of her mental health. 

This book had me laughing and crying as I saw the reality of Eliot's struggles and her relationship with her friend and close-knit family. 

An amazing read that also opens a window into a complicated mental health condition. 

Out of the Valley of Horses

Finished May 10

Out of the Valley of Horses by Wendy Orr

This children's novel is set in a near future where a family decides to leave the city during a difficult time. There has been a spreading illness, and societal unrest as a result. The main character, Honey, is a young child, and her grandfather used to drive an ice cream truck. After he retired, he and her grandmother converted the truck into a small camper van equipped with solar panels. Honey's parents and her grandmother took her and her younger brother and went into the countryside looking for a place to camp and live for a while. They came to a place where a bridge took them into a mountain valley where there were a number of extraordinary horses. 

This all happened seven years earlier. Honey and her family discovered that they could no longer find their way out of the valley soon after they arrived. Since then, they've lived off the land and the supplies that they brought with them. They are generally content there, but miss their extended family. 

They have grown close to the horses. Each family member has been chosen by a horse who will let them ride it and whom they have a close relationship with. Honey's horse is Moongold, a name she knows belongs to it. The horses do dances together and sometimes make communal noises that sound like a song to the family. 

The story is interspersed with texts from the family looking for them, and hoping they are well, unsure what happened to them. Each of the adults in the family has phones, but they aren't connecting with the outside world. 

When Honey's father starts feeling unwell, they try harder to find a way out, but nothing they try seems to work, all trails leading back to their valley. They are reminded of a story of their great-grandfather's when he took a ride out of the city on his horse and found a valley. He stayed there for seven years, in a cabin he built himself, and then was able to leave and come out to the rest of the world. 

Honey's upcoming eleventh birthday will be exactly seven years since the family entered the valley. She can't help but wonder if this will be the chance they have to leave the valley they love to save her father, even if it means leaving the valley forever. 

I really enjoyed this tale of magic and resilience. The family has used their skills and resources well, growing some food, and finding others in their environment. The adults teach the kids, and share stories as part of a routine. Honey is at the age where she is adult enough to notice changes in the situation and look for ways to help. A great story. 

Summer in the City

Finished May 7

Summer in the City by Alex Aster

This novel is centered on 27-year-old Elle, a screenwriter with a contract for a big-budget movie that has leased several locations in New York City. Elle used to live there, but left for Los Angeles several years ago for work. Just before she left she had a bad encounter with a man and she fed off that anger for a while in terms of creativity. She has had writers block for a while, and while she had hoped to avoid going to New York with a screenplay set there and due at the end of the summer she really should. 

She agreed to housesit an apartment that is undergoing renovations and oversee the renovations, while living there. It is a beautiful large apartment that has only her bedroom and bathroom finished, and only her bedroom furnished. She will end up spending a lot of time on the living room floor planning out her script. It also has amazing views of the city, and there are only two apartments on that floor. 

Elle likes to work in coffee shops, and soon finds a great coffee shop with the right vibe, great coffee, and luscious pastries. But then she discovers that her new neighbour is "Billionaire Bachelor" Parker Warren, the man who incited first lust and then hate after assumptions he made when they met two years earlier. He's been her muse ever since. 

This new encounter and subsequent meetings break her writer's block and she is inspired again. 

When he makes a deal with her to take her to every location her screenplay requires, with her being his fake date for the summer for events he has to attend, things begin to change. He provides appropriate clothing for the fancy events she attends, and soon gets her out running in the mornings with him. 

Elle's career is a secret as she writes her screenplays anonymously and we only discover why late in the novel. She was raised by her mother to be independent and not to be beholden to any man who might want to control her. Her mother died when she was in college and she misses her a lot. The only person that knows her identity as a screenwriter is her best friend and roommate Penelope, who also knows her history and about her previous encounter with Parker. 

As Elle finds herself deviating from her usual reclusive behaviour when she writes, she finds herself making new friends in the city. She also finds that she and Parker keep surprising each other with details about their lives, personalities, habits, and actions. 

This is a story of second chances, but also a story of control and reaction to that control. Neither Elle nor Parker is perfect and we see issues with both of them arise here. Elle has always wanted to be in control of her own life, not beholden to favours from anyone, and this has led to some of her problematic issues. I found it very interesting to see her come out of her shell.