THE GIRL SHE USED TO BE (DAVID CRISTOFANO)

Story Description: 

When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed a brutal act of violence – and then were lured into the Witness Protection Program.  And so Melody lost her identity, her home, her family, and ultimately her innocence.  She’s been May Adams, Karen Smith, and countless others.  But the one person she has always longed to be is Melody Grace McCartney. 

Now, twenty years later and still on the run, she’s stunned when a man calls her by her real name.  Jonathan Bovaro, the Mafioso sent to find her, knows her, the real her.  It’s a thrill Melody can’t resist, and she goes with him willingly, defying the feds.  To the Justice Department, she’s just a pawn in their war against the Bovaro family.  But as dangerous as Jonathan is, he gives Melody the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to embrace her past and present, and choose a future all her own. 

My Review: 

Although 253 pages, I read this in one sitting, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pages.  Twenty-six-year-old Melody Grace McCartney was only six-years-old when she and her family were placed into the Witness Protection Program after they witnessed a horrendous murder committed by someone in the notorious Bovaro family.  Melody has had many aliases over the past 20 years and is currently known as, Sandra Clarke.  

Sandra is a high school math teacher living a comfortable life but decides one afternoon that she’s tired and bored of being Sandra and wants yet another move.  She phones her Protection Agent, one Randall Farquar, and tells him she received a phone call from someone with a New York accent who said:  “Sing me a song, Melody.”  Of course this never really happened but Sandra wanted another new life. 

When she arrives at the Federal building she is disappointed to learn that Randall is retiring and won’t be handling her case any longer and introduces her to Marshal Sean Douglas, her new ‘protector/locator’.  After a long conversation and reading through her file, Marshal Douglas and Melody hit the road for another relocation.  While staying overnight in a motel, Melody awakens to a male voice saying: “Melody Grace McCartney!” with a knife pressed to her throat.  Who is this man and what does he want?  She finally realizes the man is none other than Jonathan Bovaro, the Mafioso sent to find her.  Melody is actually thrilled and she just can’t resist and decides to go “willingly” with Jonathan because she’s tired of running and never being who she was born to be.  As dangerous as Jonathan is, he gives Melody a once in a lifetime chance – the chance to embrace her past and present, and then choose her very own future. 

The writing was flawless in the novel and the story just flowed like a river.  I absolutely fell in love with both Jonathan and Melody and really wanted them to become a couple, to be engaged and then to marry.  How crazy is that?  The man is a killer, his family killed her parents leaving her alone and with a lifetime of assumed names and occupations, but once you read this story, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.  Any woman would want the type of ‘relationship’ that Jonathan and Melody end up having. 

The concept of this story, that a “protected witness” would willingly go with a “killer” is almost beyond comprehension, but believe me, it works.  And who knows, in Melody’s   situation, with your feet in HER shoes all these years, you just might make the same choice.  This was definitely one book well worth reading!

THE OUTSIDER (ANN H. GABHART)

Story Description: 

She thought she was content – until a love from the outside world turned hers upside down. 

Gabrielle Hope and her mother joined the Harmony Hill Shaker community in 1807.  The community promised stability and devotion that Gabrielle wholeheartedly embraced.  But when a local doctor must be brought into Harmony Hill from the outside, he sets into motion a chain of events that will challenge Gabrielle’s loyalty to the Shakers. 

As she falls deeper into a forbidden love for this man of the world, Gabrielle must make a choice.  Can she experience true happiness in this simple and chaste community?  Or will she abandon her brothers and sisters for a life of the unknown? 

Soulful and filled with romance, The Outsider lets you live within a bygone time among a unique and peculiar people.  This tender and thought-provoking story will stay with you long after you finish the final chapter. 

My Review: 

Gabrielle Hope and her mother, Martha, entered the Harmony Hill Shaker community when Gabrielle was just 14-years-old.  Now it’s January of 1812 and Gabrielle is 19-years-old and has had five years to get used to being separated from her mother.  The Shakers do not believe in marriage and do not allow husbands/wives to stay together, nor can either keep their children near, they are housed and raised in a different area of the community and rarely seen. 

After a fire breaks out in the Harvest barn, Doctor Brice Scott, an outsider comes into the community to care for, Nathan, whose legs have been badly burnt.  While there each day checking on young Nathan, the Doc sees Gabrielle and almost instantly falls in love with her.  His distractions are causing a great deal of grief for Gabrielle from the head sister, Mercy, and after having been seen kissing him in the forest, she is punished by having to be shadowed 24-hours-a-day by the surly Sister Helen for five long months.  Sister Mercy wants to ensure Gabrielle keeps her mind on her prayers and tasks within the community and off of Doctor Brice Scott. 

When the Doc heads off to war with Nathan, his heart and thoughts are of Gabrielle and how he is going to rescue her from the Shaker community upon his return from war, if he makes it.  But will she give up what she’s known for the past five years and step out into the outside world, a world she no longer knows and fears?

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN (KAMALA NAIR)

Story Description:

When Rakhee Singh is just ten years old, her world is shaken irrevocably when her beautiful yet troubled mother spirits her away from her father and their Minnesota home to visit her ancestral estate in an Indian village untouched by the centuries.  It is there that Rakhee meets her enigmatic relatives for the first time, seeks adventure with her three cousins, and learns the devastating truth about why her mother fled the childhood home she loved.  During the course of that scorching summer, Rakhee will discover, in the mysterious jungle behind the house, a walled-up garden holding a terrifying secret.   It is a secret that will expose long-hidden family skeletons and forever influence her beliefs about fidelity and love. 

My Review: 

Rakhee Singh is about to graduate with a master’s degree from Yale School of Architecture and then begin what she hopes will be a promising career at a design firm in New York.  She is also engaged to be married, but this night she is on an airplane back to India.  She left her boyfriend the diamond engagement ring and the written story of why she was leaving without saying a word to him.  Rakhee, in her note that was attached to story, said she couldn’t marry him until she unbound “…the demons that were under her bed” and that she could not marry him until she had “banished them.”  She signed the note, left her address in India and hoped he would understand. 

You see, Rakhee had pretty much led him to believe that she’d only ever been in Plainfield, Minnesota where she grew up.  He had no idea whatsoever that Rakhee had spent an entire summer when she was 10 years old in Kerala-Malanad, India.  Malanad was a rural village in Kerala, located at the southernmost tip of India.  What occurred that summer kept me bound to the pages like a duck on water until I was done.  Even though my copy is the large print version, I read all 477 pages in one sitting with only short breaks for tea! 

The story that emerged the summer Rakhee was 10 will stay with me forever!  I adored Rakhee, such a caring, intelligent and extremely caring and understanding girl for her age.  I loved the other characters just as much, especially Tulasi and Krishna.  This story reminded me so much of Rohinton Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance’, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. 

The writing in “The Girl In The Garden” was brilliant, intelligent, fluid and flowed beautifully like a stone being tossed upon the water and watching the concentric circles of water teaming out one after the other.  “The Girl In The Garden” could be a best book of 2011 and in my opinion, ranks right up there with ‘The Help’ and ‘The Kitchen House’.  This is an unbelievable accomplishment for a "debut" novel!  Kamala Nair writes with the passion and talent of a well-seasoned author.

Thank you Kamala Nair for one of the most beautiful and entertaining stories I’ve read this year!!

MISTIK LAKE (MARTHA BROOKS)

Story Description: 

Sixteen-year-old Sally is the only survivor when a car full of teenagers plunges through the ice to the bottom of Mistik Lake.  Many years later, Sally’s daughter Odella is left wondering whether the accident is to blame for her mother’s life as a sad alcoholic who eventually abandons her family and flees to Iceland with another man.  Odella, her father and two younger sisters are almost overwhelmed with grief and confusion until three people provide help and healing in unexpected ways:  Jimmy Tomasson, with whom Odella embarks on a passionate and tender love affair; Odella’s great-aunt Gloria, the keeper of family secrets; and an eccentric middle-aged butcher named Gerald. 

This stunning new novel from Governor General’s Award winner Martha Brooks explores what happens when you don’t have the courage to follow your own heart, and what can happen when you do. 

My Review: 

After reading Mistik Lake, which won the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Award, I now understand why it shocked the pants off a Grade 8 teacher who had wanted to use the book as a Literacy Circle Book.  I personally enjoyed the book thoroughly, loved its characters and their development in the story, but the book does deal with some mature themes that may make some people a tad uncomfortable. 

We have an alcoholic Mom who abandons her family and has children from 3 different men; Aunt Gloria who is a lesbian; a young boy with a schizophrenic Mom; and a family full of grief and confusion.  For a Literacy Circle Book, this would just be too many “major” themes to deal with for some kids all at once.  Considering children develop and mature at different rates, what one child may be ready to deal with at a certain age, another may not.  Also, I personally think, having had children of my own go through the school system, that some of the parents I knew would take issue with some of these themes being taught in a novel in the classroom.   

I still highly recommend this book for any adult and any young adult age 16 and over.  Martha Brooks is a good Canadian author who has written some other great books for kids.  This was very, very well done and at only 206 pages, it was a quick enjoyable read.

ESCAPE (BARBARA DELINSKY)

Story Description : 

Emily Aulenbach is thirty-two, a lawyer married to a lawyer, living and working in Manhattan.  An idealist, she had once dreamed of representing victims of corporate abuse.  Now she spends her days in a cubicle talking on the phone with victims of tainted bottled water – and she is on the bottler’s side. 

But it isn’t only work.  It’s her sisters, her friends, even her husband, James, with whom she doesn’t connect in the way she once did.  She doesn’t connect too much in her life, period. 

Acting on impulse, Emily leaves work early one day, goes home, packs her bag, and takes off.  Groping toward the future and following her gut rather than her mind, she heads north toward a New Hampshire town nestled in the mountains.  She knows this town.  During her college years she spent a watershed summer here.  If she were to map out the turns she’s taken in life, this would be the spot where she had first gone wrong.  Painful as returning feels, she knows that if she is to right her life, she has to start here. 

My Review: 

Thirty-two-year-old Emily Aulenbach was a lawyer living in Gramercy Park, New York with her husband, James, who is also a lawyer.  They don’t have pets or kids because they’re trying to work to put in their hours now so they can eventually take things a bit easier later.  Emily was tired of her job and tired of her life so she ups and leaves work one morning within an hour of arriving.  Once home, she packs a bag, hops in the car and begins driving.  She has no idea where she is headed as long as it is away from New York and the busyness that is her life there. 

Emily spent a couple of nights in some small town motels and tried to think “where” she wanted/needed to go and then it struck her.  If she wanted to figure out who she was, then she needed to “… go back to the place that had set me on this course” and it wasn’t New York.  It was “Bell Valley”, nestled in a valley in the state of New Hampshire.  It had been ten years since Emily had been there and her last memory of the place was “…breaking up with Jude,” her first love.  As Emily thought of Jude, she began to cry and wondered if she was crazy for coming? 

Everyone is worried:  James, her boss, her Mom, her Dad, friends, co-workers and anyone else who has also known the same-routine Emily.  This was totally out-of-character for her, but she really needs to find out who she is and what it is that she really wants.  

Just prior to her arrival in Bell Valley, Emily received a letter from Jude telling her that he is returning to Bell Valley as well.  Will Emily be able to resist her first deep love, will she return to James or divorce him, and what about her well-paid lawyers’ job? 

As painful as it feels to be back in Bell Valley, Emily knows that if she is ever to make her life work, then she has no choice but to start here where it all began.

HANDLE WITH CARE (JODI PICOULT)

Story Description:

Things break all the time. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Promises break. Hearts break. Every expectant parent will tell you that they don't want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they'd been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of "luckier" parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it's all worth it because Willow is, well, funny as it seems, perfect. She's smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health. Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte should have known earlier of Willow's illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life? Emotionally riveting and profoundly moving, Handle with Care brings us into the heart of a family bound by an incredible burden, a desperate will to keep their ties from breaking, and, ultimately, a powerful capacity for love. Written with the grace and wisdom she's become famous for, beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult offers us an unforgettable novel about the fragility of life and the lengths we will go to protect it. 

My Review: 

I’ve only read one other Jodi Picoult novel and hated it.  It’s been years since that first book so I thought I’d try reading her work a second time.  I think I hated it more this second time round and definitely won’t be reading any future Picoult books.  Not only was the story terrible, the ending horrific, but it was too long and drawn out at almost 500 pages!  Sorry, this gets 2 thumbs down from me.

STARS COLLIDE (JANICE THOMPSON) BOOK ONE IN THE "BACKSTAGE PASS SERIES"

Story Description:

Kat Jennings and Scott Murphy don't just play two people who are secretly in love on a television sitcom--they are also head over heels for each other in real life. When the lines between reality and TV land blur, they hope they can keep their relationship under wraps. But when Kat's grandmother, an aging Hollywood starlet with a penchant for wearing elaborate evening gowns from Golden Age movies, mistakes their on-screen wedding proposal for the real deal, things begin to spiral out of their control. Will their secret be front-page news in the tabloids tomorrow? And can their budding romance survive the onslaught of paparazzi, wedding preparations, and misinformed in-laws? From the sound stage to a Beverly Hills mansion to the gleaming Pacific Ocean, Stars Collide takes readers on a roller-coaster tour of Tinseltown, packing both comedic punch and tender emotion. 

My Review:

Twenty-seven-year-old Kat Jennings is a Hollywood actress and star of the t.v. sitcom “Stars Collide.”  Her character, Angie, has fallen in love with her co-star, Jack, played by Scott Murphy.  However, in real life, Kat has also fallen head over heels for Scott Murphy. 

Lenora Worth is Kat’s hilarious Grandma, a former Hollywood actress herself who loves to dress up in garb from her illustrious past.  With her mind sliding toward Alzheimer’s, she lives in the past most of the time and has Kat stop the car during outings so she can wave to “her fans.”  But, Lenora also thinks Jack’s marriage proposal to Angie on the t.v. show is real and spills the beans to the press! 

Not only is ‘Stars Collide a hilarious book, it also touches on some other more serious issues.  I can’t wait for Book 2 in this series to hit the store shelves. 

“Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.  Available at your favourite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.”