The Next Book On My List

Black Iris by Leah Raeder                 Laney Keating has been called many things: a slut, a queer, a fag, a dyke, a bitch. She has been laughed at humiliated, manipulated and set up. She is our unreliable narrator. And Laney makes it very clear from the beginning that this isn’t the story about how she changed. There will be no forgiveness. She’s been hurt and she plans on hurting those people that have hurt her. This is a love story. This a revenge story.                 This is really freaking complicated and intense. Oh, Laney. How dark and twisted you are. How corrupt, headstrong and bent on getting what you want. How damn well written and believably deranged. Raeder has done it again. Black Iris introduces yet another anti-hero that you want to root for because you understand that some wounds never heal. Sometime infli...

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins                 I hate falling into books with a lot of hype. It can be such a bitter disappointment after hearing great reviews if I don’t like the book. I didn’t have this problem at all with The Girl on the Train even though halfway through the book I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it. This novel is told in alternating narratives between our lead characters. Rachel Wilson is a lonely alcoholic who gazes out of the window of the train as she heads into work every day and has fixated her imagination on what she believes to be the perfect couple. When the woman in the perfect couple, Megan, goes missing she is convinced that she has information that could help solve the case. But between her alcoholic stupor and her extreme insecurity she ends up being largely ignored. What are you supposed to do in that situation when someone’s life may be on the line? Well, i...

Still Alice by Lisa Genova                 There are some things you just never want to imagine. One of those things is losing all of your memories and your sense of self because of Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t know how Genova was able to create this novel that so beautifully detailed a realistic look at that struggle but I have to take my hat off to her because Still Alice was amazing. It was heartbreaking in its simple writing style and matter of fact tone. Every moment that seemed to show a little hope was crushed under the staggering reality that this disease, Alzheimer’s, would continue to progress and get worse. The mind would continue to deteriorate and then the world would cease to have true meaning.                 Alice Howland is a 50 year old psychology professor at Harvard who thought she was having simple memor...

Black Cross by Greg Iles                 I usually can’t get enough of Greg Iles. He is an author that I have been familiar with for quite some time. When I realized that he had written a historical fiction account of a secret mission during World War Two in Germany, I knew eventually I would have to read it. This novel is the story of Mark McConnell, a doctor who was working at Oxford University during WW2. He was working to find a way to protect the Allies from possible chemical warfare when he finds himself part of a mission to capture a sample of Soman from a concentration camp. The concentration camp is Totenhausen outside the city of Dornow in Germany. It is being used as a test facility for Soman and Sarin gas. Jonas Stern, a Jewish fighter originally from Dornow, has also been recruited for the mission. The two men must learn not only to trust each other but to also trust Brigadier Duff Smith wh...

I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash in the Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives by Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci                 I was familiar with the story of the Uruguayan Rugby team that crashed in the Andes after watching the movie Alive years ago. I remember thinking after the movie ended how one could possibly go on living any semblance of a normal life after being in such a horrendous situation for over two months. Watching your friends die, having to eat their bodies to survive and the constant fear. It would take an unimaginable amount of strength to survive and then even more to continue to live. When I first ran across this title I was intrigued and ultimately overjoyed. Here was proof that someone could survive and not only continue living but use that strength to help others survive. I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash in the Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives is well writt...

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Feminist Black Radical by Sherie M. Randolph                 I love reading a biography that does more than just educate, instead it enlightens, broadens perspectives and changes the way certain segments of history are viewed. This biography of Florynce Kennedy is a great example of this type of biography. It is well written, narrated and honest about the life of a black feminist radical. Her story takes readers through many different pivotal moments throughout history and readers are exposed to the many injustices imposed on women, the Black community and both fights for equality.                 A simple narrative worked beautifully for this biography because Florynce Kennedy lived such a long and complex life. Her grandparents on both sides had been enslaved and at a young age, Kennedy s...

In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson                 Imagine the year is 1933 and you have just been sent to Berlin as America’s Ambassador to Germany. You have brought your wife and two grown children. You have loved Germany since attending school there years prior and have looked forward to returning. You’ve heard rumors of Hitler’s regime and how they are dealing with the Jewish problem, but you don’t have any reason to believe that this is more than hearsay. You arrive and see the pomp and circumstance that surrounds Hitler and his followers. You grow to realize that everything is not as it seems. American civilians are being attacked and the German soldiers involved are not being punished. Other things also catch your attention like the incident your daughter witnessed where a woman was stripped of her clothing, beaten, and paraded in the s...