Bob

Bob by Wendy Mass & Rebecca Stead, 199 pages

“Visiting her grandmother in Australia, Livy, ten, is reminded of the promise she made five years before to Bob, a strange, green creature who cannot recall who or what he is.” I loved this book.  It’s a perfect story for grade school kids who like fairy tales and fantasy.

The Treatment

TheTreatment by Suzanne Young, 344 pages

“How do you stop an epidemic? Sloane and James are on the run after barely surviving the suicide epidemic and The Program. But they're not out of danger. Huge pieces of their memories are still missing, and although Sloane and James have found their way back to each other, The Program isn't ready to let them go. Escaping with a group of troubled rebels, Sloane and James will have to figure out who they can trust, and how to take down The Program. But for as far as they've come, there's still a lot Sloane and James can't remember. The key to unlocking their past lies with the Treatment--a pill that can bring back forgotten memories, but at a high cost. And there's only one dose. Ultimately when the stakes are at their highest, can Sloane and James survive the many lies and secrets surrounding them, or will The Program claim them in the end?” This was a good sequel.  It’s been a while since I read the first book but I remembered enough of the story that I had no issues jumping straight into this book.  This is for teens who like dystopian fiction.

Restart

Restart by Gordon Korman, 243 pages

When Chase falls off the roof, he loses his memory.  He doesn’t remember what he, or any of his family members look like.  He doesn’t remember anything from his old life.    But when school starts and he meets his old friends again, and gets to know his classmates, he starts to realize that he may have been a pretty awful person before his fall.  Chase gets to know some of the kids that he used to bully and finds that he really likes them.  He doesn’t like his two former best friends nearly as well.  Can Chase find a way to reconcile who he used to be with the person he wants to be now?  This book, which is told from the point of view of Chase and, in alternating chapters, a few of the kids in his class, is an excellent story.  I would give this to older elementary kids who like realistic fiction.

The Forgetting Spell

The Forgetting Spell by Lauren Myracle, 344 pages

“The Forgetting Spell is beloved and bestselling author Lauren Myracle's second book in the unforgettable Wishing Day series, perfect for fans of Kate DiCamillo and Ingrid Law. Most people in Willow Hill think Darya is the prickliest of the Blok sisters. What they don't realize is that on the inside, Darya is soft and gooey from feeling everything, all the time. When Darya turns thirteen, the goo gets stickier--and as Darya's Wishing Day approaches, all she wants is to forget the silly tradition ever existed.” I keep choosing books to read, not realizing that they are the second book in a series.  However, that really didn’t matter with this book at all.  I’m planning to go back and read the first book because this was so good, but I didn’t need to read it to follow this story at all.  I would definitely give it to grade school kids who like stories about magic and fantasy.

The Year of Fog

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond     432 pages

When I go on vacation, I like to read books that place in that locale. This year my destination was San Francisco, and I happened upon this wonderful novel about memory, obsession, and one woman’s search for a missing child.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear about a child who has gone missing without a single trace, I shake my head, say a quick prayer, and tell others that I cannot imagine what the parents are feeling. Michelle Richmond did an amazing job in keep the character in one place yet moving forward at the same time, all the while letting readers be voyeurs of this horrific happening.

Freelance photographer Abby Mason is the step-mother-to-be to six-year-old Emma. Abby loves her new role as fiancée and as friend and mom. Abby and Emma go to the foggy Ocean Beach almost every day. Today it may be summer, but it’s almost always cold and foggy at this remote beach. Emma twists her tiny hand from Abby’s and runs ahead. Momentarily distracted by a dead seal pup, when Abby turns back to Emma, she has disappeared in the fog. Literally, she is gone.

Readers will get a behind-the-scenes look at a search for a missing child. The police and volunteers who comb the area, the flyers, the reward posting, the sleepless nights, the inability to choke down more than a few morsels of food, the fear that grips Abby and Jake, Emma’s father.

Police at first believe she has drowned. Then they look at the Jake and Abby as possible suspects. Jake goes on national television to plead with anyone who may have seen Emma, especially her mother, Lisbeth, who abandoned Jake and Emma three years earlier.

As the minutes turn to hours to days to weeks to months, the police give up as new, more solvable cases capture their attention. After months, Jake wants to hold a memorial service and move on with life. But not Abby, she refuses to believe that Emma cannot be found.

Readers go with her on her travels through the Bay area, shoving flyers into strangers’ hands, practically begging for help. Readers go with Abby on her quest to locate any memory of their surroundings on the beach that day.

I don’t often have a need to peek at a novel’s ending, but the tension is so great that it was all I could do not to peep at the ending.

I give The Year of Fog 6 out of 5 stars.

Buried Giant

Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
317 Pages

"The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards--some strange and otherworldly--but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight--each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories. "


Not character driven  and somewhat rambling the book was a near miss for me.  While the concepts Ishiguro explored were interesting I didn't really enjoy the journey, both figuratively and literally.  

Find Me

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg
280 Pages

"Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy’s immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients—including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel.

As winter descends, the hospital’s fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself."

The description has very little resemblance to the novel itself.  While there is an epidemic, it quickly loses much importance to the plot as the novel wanders aimlessly.  The last half of the book is a mess of a road trip for Joy and makes very little sense overall. Not Recommended.

Memory Man

Memory Man by David Baldacci
405 Pages


 "Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice. The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with an improbable side effect--he can never forget anything. The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare--his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered. His family destroyed, their killer's identity as mysterious as the motive behind the crime, and unable to forget a single detail from that horrible night, Decker finds his world collapsing around him. He leaves the police force, loses his home, and winds up on the street, taking piecemeal jobs as a private investigator when he can. But over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and confesses to the murders. At the same time a horrific event nearly brings Burlington to its knees, and Decker is called back in to help with this investigation. Decker also seizes his chance to learn what really happened to his family that night. To uncover the stunning truth, he must use his remarkable gifts and confront the burdens that go along with them. He must endure the memories he would much rather forget. And he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice."

I have long enjoyed Baldacci and look forward to further books with this new flawed protagonist Amos Decker.   A fast paced, procedural this book will be popular with fans of Patterson, Coben, Grisham and Connelly.

A Little Life

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
720 Pages


"When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome--but that will define his life forever."


To hear the critics go on you'd think this was the greatest book ever written.  I think it was just okay for two reasons.  One,  two of the characters of the four friends are hardly part of the story at all, the third character is a little deeper but the book is mainly about Jude.   The second reason is that the author has created the damaged character of Jude who dwells in his pain about his past and lets it control his life.  Then the author has all these additional bad things happen to Jude over and over again.  It becomes a bit soap operaish. 

The Brief History of the Dead

by Kevin Brockmeier, 272 pages.

The end of the month really snuck up on me, so I'm going to write really brief reviews.

When people die, their souls go to a place called the City -- a world between life and death, and a world very similar to the land of the living.  Your non-living self exists in the City only as long as someone carries the memory of you back on Earth.  Once your memory is erased from the world of the living, that person disappears from the City, and goes into the unknown.

A mysterious plague covers the Earth, and as more and more of the living are killed, the City begins to expand and overflow with new inhabitants.  Despite being 'on the other side', the inhabitants of the City still yearn to know what is going on in the world of the living, and maintain strong connections with their lost loved ones on Earth.

Highly recommended!

 

Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman          181 pages

This has probably been one of my favorite books by Gaiman.  A man who has come back to his childhood neighborhood for a funeral finds himself at the home of a friend, Lettie Hempstock.  Lettie no longer lives there, but her family does and when he goes to the back of the house and sees the pond he remembers a fantastic but terrifying adventure that he and Lettie had when they were children.  This was an excellent story that was reminiscent of Stephen King’s style of books, although perhaps not quite as horrifying.  I would recommend it to fans of fantasy and horror.

White Space

White Space by Ilsa Bick                                551 pages

This is the first book in a new series by this author.  Emma has always had issues but her world is getting weirder by the minute.  She has always had fugue moments, that she calls blinks, when she is unaware of what’s going on in the real world and instead has glimpses into other worlds, specifically, the life of a little girl named Lizzie.  Lizzie’s dad is a writer but it seems that some of the characters and scenes from his books can become real.  Emma has just blinked back from one of these visions while she and a friend are driving when she realizes that they are lost.  She isn’t even sure they are in right state anymore.  Not long after, Emma’s nightmare begins.  I would call this a fantasy horror for teens.  This book reminded me a little of The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith.  It was really good and I can’t wait for the sequel.  I think that a lot of teens would enjoy this book.