Really liked this story about Daphne who gets a note about how long the relationship will last, every time she meets someone new. She‘s so real, never a false note in her conversations with guys, friends, her family. In fact, a conversation she has with her dad near the end of the book made me cry. It‘s a book about the power of love and friendship and living the one life you‘ve been given.

1. Been living with pain in a tooth for 6(!) months and finally had it pulled and grafted for an implant.
2. Picked up new Amor Towles and Tommy Orange books at the library.
3. So excited for the family to get together on Mothers Day.
4. Stopped using a nebulizer twice a day after one year, a real milestone.
5. Son in Seattle sent me 5 new jigsaw puzzles and started the mystery one, no picture.

#5JoysFriday @DebinHawaii

This one‘s a page turner! Our narrator, Evie, is caught between her past and her future, doing jobs for a “Mr. Smith” while trying to stay alive herself. If she‘s going to get through this, she‘ll have to figure out his identity and work out a plan to come out on top. I was rooting for her every step of the way and you will too.

A beautifully written book about a house where two people were murdered and the new family who moves in. The parents and their daughter each narrate the story along with one of the murderers and some kind of observing ghost. Terrific character development and plot lines, well worth reading.

1. Finally finished The Three Body Problem and can get back to reading all the books I had frozen at my library.
2. Started a new 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle.
3. Picked up a box of See‘s Candy bridge mix, my special treat.
4. Having lunch and walking in the botanical garden today with my two best friends.
5. Getting together tonite with a couple I‘ve been friends with for over 40 years.
#5JoysFriday. @DebinHawaii

Finally got around to this little gem of a Japanese mystery written in 1962. Lots of neurotic old ladies living in the K Apartments for Ladies in post-war Japan, many with secrets. Really interesting twists at the end that I didn‘t see coming. A little hard to keep all the names straight as they all sound similar!

Death‘s End, book 3 of the Three-Body Problem trilogy.

#weekendreads. @rachelsbrittain

1. Walked on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico every morning
2. Had amazing mango bbq grilled shrimp overlooking a marina with lots of Jetskiers
3. Not to mention a delicious coconut Bavarian bun from a bakery called OfKors
4. Loved all the bright umbrellas on the beach and the exercise groups moving around to 60s music
5. Planned a trip to see the Chicago Bears play in London next fall

#5JoysFriday. @DebinHawaii

OK! Two books down of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, with one to go. Really liked where this one went, sci fi to the max. Super interesting characters and story lines that I didn‘t see coming. Not sure these three books are the right read for a beach vacation though! The possible end of civilization is pretty heavy.

Just reread this first book of the trilogy and starting book 2. For sci-if fans, this one is great reading. On Kindle it‘s easy to flip back to the list of characters as it‘s a little tricky keeping all the Chinese names straight. Can‘t wait to find out if the alien civilization gets to earth!! Highly recommend the Netflix series!

1. Hubby is also a tax accountant so I love April 15th
2. Waking up every morning to sunrise on the beach in Siesta Key Florida
3. Best mangoes ever
4. Finished book 1 of the Three Body Problem trilogy and started book 2
5. Lunch on the beach of Anna Maria Island, coconut shrimp salad
#5JoysFriday

Warren and Sarah were college lovers and they reconnect decades later. She‘s divorced but he‘s still married, unhappily but with a strong moral fiber. What are these star-crossed lovers to do? Up until the last six pages I loved this book, making it a soft pick. Hours later I‘m still shaking my head at the ending.

Really liked this short book about a couple who take in an elderly, lonely and wealthy woman, seemingly to get her money. They‘ve done this before and the pages kept turning quickly as I wanted to find out how this would shake out. Then a surprise ending!

This is one interesting story about a robot who is bought by a guy to be his lover and do nothing but try to please him. However, she‘s one smart robot and eventually not too happy with her situation. Really liked where this book went with the added plus of a great ending. Very thought provoking as I found myself rooting for Annie Bot to find herself, whoever herself may be.

I really struggled to get through the first three quarters of this book. A woman drops dead in her kitchen out of the blue, leaving four young children, a husband and a best friend. The book deals with the year after her death, how the husband, oldest child and best friend deal with these new circumstances. The characters seemed very cardboard to me, and I couldn‘t get a grip on them. But it all came together in a very satisfying way.

This one‘s a page turner! College age Nina goes missing and all signs point to her long time boyfriend. Lots of narrators: Nina, her mom, her dad, her sister, the boyfriend and both his parents, and of course the detective. I liked all the different perspectives, as I could really feel what they were feeling, as the days went by. Highly recommend.

It‘s 1918 and we‘re on the maternity ward of a hospital in Ireland, right in the middle of the flu epidemic. We spend three days with Nurse Julia Powell, Dr Kathleen Lynn, and Bridie, an orphan who comes to volunteer. Nurse Powell narrates a very detailed story of births and deaths, hope and despair. I love nurses as much as the next person, but I might be a little tired of them after the nurses in The Women.

If you liked Elizabeth Zott in Lessons in Chemistry, you‘ll like India Allwood. Everything about her is interesting…her past, her mother, her boyfriends, her kids, her acting career, even her agent! Really liked this book about making the hard decisions for oneself, and living with the consequences. At heart, it‘s a book about all the unique families that are out there. Don‘t miss the author‘s note at the end.

Poor Allie is kidnapped from a playground, leaving her child in the sandbox. Soon after, Grace, who works at a mid level job at the FDA, comes across a photo of Allie in a hospital bed with some sort of odd port inserted in her body. That starts this mystery of who exactly is Allie and how did this port come to be embedded in her body. I found this to be a far fetched story about harvesting time from unsuspecting patients.

Not usually that crazy about demons, but couldn‘t put this one down. Alison and her brother Ben were abused by their mother as kids, and now that their mom is dying, she has moved in with Alison and her family. What‘s that demon up to? The last fifty pages were page turners with a smash ending.

Jane and her sister Esme have always had a difficult relationship. When Esme calls Jane to pick her up in a blinding rainstorm, she either goes to pick her up or she doesn‘t, told in alternating chapters. This leads to two different stories of what happens. Throw in the abusive father, the mother with dementia, the high school boyfriend and the soon to be ex husband and well…not much interesting actually happens!

A woman has murdered her three children and the husband hires Mademoiselle Susane to defend her. She feels like he‘s someone from her childhood, but can‘t quite recall the memory. Concurrently we learn about her housekeeper, her parents, and her ex boyfriend and his child. Lots to unpack here with some interesting characters, but each one is a little too undefined and an unresolved ending drops this out of the pick range.

This book just did not speak to me. It‘s 1966 and 22 year old Frankie McGrath decides to go to Vietnam and use her nursing degree. As someone who lived through that war, I really did not know much about it. When the film “Coming Home” came out in 1978, I felt compelled to see it 15 days in a row. That‘s how shocked I was about the truth of that war. Maybe I just wasn‘t interested in this material so many years later.

This one‘s a gripper. We feel every moment along with Susan, mom of a missing kid. We feel every moment with the detective in charge of the case. And we feel thankful that our kids are grown up and we don‘t have to worry about them going missing. The ending brought tears to my eyes.

So…Coral, author of a hit dystopian novel, finds her brother dead by suicide. After the police come and he‘s taken away, she takes his cell and starts replying to messages as if she is her brother. Interspersed with this story, we read sections of her book which seems to become entangled in her real life. Didn‘t love the story, or the grieving main character. But her novel looked good!

0nly 168 pages fortunately. Poor Amanda is possessed by a demon, and slowly over time she becomes something else. Not wasting any more words on this one. Avoid at all cost.

This book isn‘t for everyone but I really liked it. It‘s 1925 in a small town in Pennsylvania and the blacks and the Jews uneasily support each other and struggle together to survive their impoverished state. It‘s a story of love and hate and kindness and compassion and the characters come to life in many ways as they come together to try to keep one child safe. Don‘t miss the acknowledgments at the end as they‘re incredibly inspiring.

Is the convicted serial killer actually the killer? Are his multiple personalities enough to keep him from death row? Dr. Sharon Stevenson will stop at nothing to get the answers to these questions, even endangering her own reputation in the process. It‘s a pretty dry read, although I kept at it to see what happened at the end…a surprise but not a big surprise.

Couldn‘t put this one down. The main character, Pey, exists on the fifth level of hell, where everyone is in “sales”. That means signing up souls by trading something they want now for an afterlife in hell. Concurrently, there‘s a story that takes place in real life about a family who Pey is tracking to try to get another soul. Hopefully this doesn‘t sound as complicated as it seems writing it down! It‘s a page turner with lots of twists.

Really liked this book about two sisters and assorted other characters whose lives are connected by magic. As the secrets came out, I found myself rooting for the girls to discover who they really were. Well drawn characters and a good story add to the enchantment of this book.

This book is about the intersecting lives of several young Irish adults and a professor and his wife. The young Irish adults are so tiresome, but believable in a way because we‘ve all been there. We‘ve all been 20 something and trying to figure out who we are. This is the second book in a row I‘ve read that got better, the further into the story. Plus a good ending!

I really loved the other two books written by this author: Fresh Water for Flowers and Three. Recommended them to everyone. This book just didn‘t grab me…until a huge twist in the middle! And then I couldn‘t put it down. Our narrator works in a nursing home where she writes down the stories told to her by the residents. One story is the gist of the book while the narrator‘s story is a parallel one. Two terrific stories for the price of one.

I wasn‘t sure about this book. Lucy is in her 20s and nothing is going right for her. Then she makes a wish to get to “the good part” of her life, and she wakes up in her 40s. Now she has a family and a high-pressure job and of course high jinks ensue. Will she ever get to go back and does she even want to? It‘s a good question!

9 year old Ursa appears at the summer rental home of Jo, and claims to be an alien. Is she? She‘s very smart and does succeed in getting Jo together with her neighbor Gabe. It was all a little too hokey for me, although I read to the end to find out if Ursa really was an alien!

In less than 200 pages, we meet Cara who is telling her life story to a social worker in the required 12 sessions she must attend to renew her benefits. We meet her friends, her family, and the other tenants in her rent-controlled building. She‘s had a tough life, but is resilient beyond words. It‘s a good story with a few words in Spanish, but understandable.

What happens when you become a widow in your 30s? When you lose the love of your life, yet you have a toddler who needs you? Lucky for Kate she has the best support system around. I found her words just flowed, speaking as someone would actually speak in real life. The last page of this book brought tears to my eyes. I doubt I‘ll remember much about this book, but I enjoyed reading it.

I really liked her trilogy, the Imperial Radch novels. I thought they were great science fiction. This one…not so much. Three characters of indeterminate species come together to keep a treaty with some really bad guys in place and save the world. I couldn‘t even make sense of the story half the time. Lots of space adventure though!

This is a different book than the one by D.E. White. How do two books have the same title?? This book is about a female bartender who becomes a serial killer of men, so “they will just shut up!” She had my sympathy right away, and I constantly wondered if she would get away with this. A female detective is on the case of all these murders, and the two become friends. It‘s a bit creepy, but it kept my attention. Now I‘ll try the other book!

Every student in Mrs. Price‘s class wants to be her pet. Middle schoolers can be just as nasty as I remember them! But what‘s really going on with this teacher and who really is she? It‘s up to 12 year old Justine to figure this out and most definitely after her father falls for her. It‘s a thriller that will keep you guessing even after you‘ve finished the book.

An amazing love story between Emily and Lewis as he transitions to a shark. I know it sounds hokey, but it‘s a really good story and you will love it. This one is special.

It‘s not great literature or anything, but a good page turner about a couple spending a week in a remote cabin in the woods to try to save their marriage. Secrets come out slowly, and the story builds to its necessary conclusion. You could save it for the summer and have a good beach read!

Tommy was just eight years old when his father murdered his mother and two siblings on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Many years later, he‘s back for a visit and also to try to come to terms with his life. By the end of the book, we learn all the secrets as well as the histories of all the major characters. This book will stay with you.

Didn‘t love this one, although I really liked her earlier book, Unraveling Oliver. We follow the lives of brother and sister, Sally and Peter, beginning with a pedophile father, then two kidnapped very young girls, and finally who these two have become. Mostly I found the story to be icky and never really cared about any of the characters.

This is one tough book to read by the author of Sing, Unburied, Sing. We follow Annis, a teenage slave, on her journey from a rice plantation in the Carolinas to a sugar plantation in New Orleans. She can hear and see her ancestral spirits as they guide her and comfort her. I could only admire her strength and fortitude just trying to stay alive every day and eventually finding peace.

Really liked this book although it took me forever to finish it. We go back and forth with a group of six Irish teens, finding out who they were at 15 and who they are now. There are a lot of secrets in this small town, with the most important one being who murdered one of the six. By the end of the book, the characters are indelibly etched in your mind.

This just might be the worst book that I continued reading to the end. Someone invents a death watch, a watch that won‘t ever come off your wrist, and can go off at any time severing the arteries in your wrist. If that doesn‘t sound bad enough, the ending is horrible. The characters are interesting though, but not interesting enough to save this book.

Poor ten year old Martin Hill. He comes in second as the actor to play Harry Potter in all the movies. He‘s not only disappointed, he‘s devastated and it colors his whole life. Will he ever come to terms with this, in his own words, failure? An interesting premise, but nothing exciting. Here‘s a picture of my son, who many, many years ago, won the Harry Potter look-alike contest in the Chicago Sun Times.

Ten ordinary people are chosen to evade capture in a one month time period. The payoff? A cool three million bucks. It‘s a cat and mouse game between the ten contestants and one tech giant. Will anyone win? And at what cost? As the book winds down, it‘s a real race to the end. Great writing and character development and of course a desire to know if the good guys will win.

This is the story of Jack and Elizabeth, their lives growing up and their lives together. What‘s so great about this book, is the way each individual chapter is one incident in their lives, either in the past or the present. And all the incidents tie together in the end. A very good book about two very interesting people.