Dig

 by John Preston

A movie of this name recently came out.  The book is pretty much the same story as the movie/.

The story takes place just as WW II is starting. The story about a woman in England who finds a man with archeological site excavation experience to come to her property and excavate some of the ancient mounds there.  They don't make much progress initially but eventually find an ancient ship and extensive gold and other artifacts.  One of the best finds ever of an English site.  The site is called Sutton Hoo.  The artifacts are incredible and are now at the British Museum.

As soon as officials find out about the potential value of the site the local museum and the British Museum start to 'fight' over who has the right/responsibility to continue on with the dig.  They try to push the original digger out of the picture but the owner fights to keep him involved.

Apparently this man did not get any credit initially for his work but eventually he was acknowledged by the British Museum.

It was an interesting story but not much different from the book.

Town Called Solace

 by Mary Lawson

I read Crow Lake by this author a few years ago and really enjoyed it.

This book certainly did not disappoint.  It was a touching book with very interesting characters.

The story features three main characters, a young girl Clara, her elderly neighbour Mrs. Orchard and a 30 something recent divorcee named Liam Kane.

Clara is very upset, her older sister has run away from home.  She is also worried about her neighbour Mrs. Orchard.  Clara has been going into Mrs. Orchard's house to feed her reclusive cat.  Clara is upset when she sees a young man enter the house and start packing some of Mrs.Orchard's things.  Mrs. Orchard has died but her parents don't tell her this.  Liam and she become friends but Liam tells her she can only be in the living room so her parents can see her through the window, so they don't suspect him of anything.

The stories develop through the course of the book, some of the chapters are about Mrs. Orchard who is dying in the hospital, some about Clara and her family and some about Liam.  We find out that Liam has recently divorced and quit his job.  Mrs. Orchard had looked after him as a young boy and loved him so much she tried to kidnap him from his parents.  As she is dying Mrs. O. finally takes responsibility for what she did and the people she hurt, including her husband.

Liam has come to the town preparing to get the house fixed up and put on the market.  He soon meets a local repair man who puts him to work in return for doing repairs on the house and later starts to pay him. He starts what he thinks is a temporary relationship with the local librarian.

Clara's sister is eventually found in Toronto, a victim of traffickers.  The sister is devastated by the experience.

It sounds like a simple story but she did a great job of portraying the characters and very gradually giving us glimpses of their lives.  I am looking forward to reading some of her other works.

 

Memory Collectors

 by Kim Neville

This is a book by a BC author.  It is an unusual book, but unlike Peaces, I enjoyed it.

The story starts with a young girl who likes to help her father collect old furniture and restore it.  Then we find out that the girl and her sister became orphans.  The girl, Ev, now dumpster dives to find things with good feelings about them.  She has a sensitivity to the energy/stories contained in objects.  She seeks and sells the good feeling ones because she knows they will appeal to people.  We learn that she and her sister were raised in foster homes and now are estranged.

Ev has a friend, an artist, Owen, who also dumpster dives to seek objects for his art projects.  He befriends Ev.  One day they discover some potentially interesting boxes in an alley but are chased away from them by a woman, Harriet.  The boxes are hers.  She had them in the hallway of her apartment building and one of her neighbours has thrown them out on her.  Owen offers to take them back to her apartment and finds she is a serious hoarder.  Harriet senses that Ev is special and wants to make contact with her.  

Harriet has received an eviction notice and in deciding what to to do decides to buy an abandoned building and make a museum of happy objects.  She wants Ev's help but Ev is reluctant at first because some of Harriet's objects have very evil or unhappy feelings and these really upset Ev.  She finally agrees to help when Harriet agrees she can decide what doesn't get kept.

Ev's sister, Noemi shows up, she keeps bugging Ev for what she knows about their parent's murder suicide.  Ev claims she doesn't remember.  

As the story progresses we find that Harriet has stored boxes of the girl's family possession in her old family home.  The girls eventually break into the house to retrieve what they consider their property.  Noemi eventually leaves with the boxes in her car.  By this time Ev has told her she had nothing to do with the murder and actually saved her little sister from the father.  They find that Noemi also has some of Ev's powers but she is more selfish and self serving so we do not know how she will use them.  ONe nice thing she did for her sister was get her sailing lessons.

Harriet eventually sets fire to her house, Ev develops a company going to houses to cleanse them.  She has learned that she can take the evil out of things.  Owen takes Ev to live with him.

The only puzzling part of the story was Harriet went to the library to find out about Ev and her backstory.  However, if she had bought all their stuff at the estate sale why wouldn't she already know the history of the family?

It was an interesting read, nice to see peculiar people treated with kindness and acceptance.

Peaces

 by Helen Oyeyemi

This book has been getting a lot of buzz and the reviews have been good.  That is why I bought it.  However, I felt the book was unusual but not interesting or engaging.

The story is about two gay men who are given a free "honeymoon" trip on a mysterious train by the aunt of one of the men.

The young man, relative of the aunt, was bounced around from one set of relatives to another as a youth as he was an orphan.  His aunt is the only one who seemed to care about him.  On one of the trips when he was travelling from one relative to another he is alone in a train car.  A man and his young daughter join him.  The young boy is attracted to the girl.  Later a woman joins them and attacks the man, if I remember because of some past history.  The man's daughter ends up killing the woman.

Back to the "present" the two young men board the train, destination unknown, with their pet mongoose.  While they are travelling they are upset to learn that the former boyfriend of one of them seems to have dropped in to visit the aunt.  They are suspicious of his motives.  While on the train a clown? gets on and the men get him tossed off

They are told they should make no effort to meet the owner of the train, a recluse.  They do meet her, find out that she plays the thermin and also has a mongoose.

As they tour the train they also run into a woman who is the girl who killed the woman on the train when the one man was a boy.  As the story progresses they learn that the recluse is isolating on the train because of a will she is close to inheriting.  If she can stay sane for a few more days she will inherit the wealth.  The man who is on the verge of leaving her the money had an adopted son (was he the clown) but decided to leave him nothing and leave the money to her.  The woman had come to the man's house to play the thermin during the night to comfort the son.

As the story ends it appears the woman has reached her deadline to inherit and the other people on the train can no longer see the young men....

Weird, no idea what the point of this story was.  I like unusual stories but this one didn't grab me at all.

 

 

 

Dark Tide Rising

 by Anne Perry

This is a mystery about William Monk a former police inspector who was dismissed and later became a Commander with the Thames River Police.

The wife of a wealthy London man has been kidnapped, the kidnappers want the ransom delivered to an unsavory part of the London waterfront.  The man asks some of the Thames River Police to accompany him on the drop.  Monk chooses a number of his best men but someone their presence was expected and they get beat up, the money is taken and the man's wife is found brutally murdered.

Monk feels one of his men may have betrayed them and spends a lot of time worrying and trying to figure out who it might be.  There is a low level criminal who is suddenly spending a lot of money.  Monk thinks he might have had some involvement with the kidnapping and murder but before they can get him to interrogate him, the man is found murdered.

In order to raise the money for the ransom the husband has had to get the trustee of his wife's pending inheritance (she would inherit in a couple years), to agree to release the funds for the ransom.

One of Monk's key staff becomes romantically interested in the cousin of the dead woman.  This is a conflict of interest.  Monk really feels for the man because the woman who is now his wife was once kidnapped.  So he thinks he knows how the man feels.

A young woman comes forward to say she has evidence of some financial irregularities by the bank that held the man's accounts and his wife's trust account.  Before she can deliver proof to Monk she is found dead.

Eventually the husband is arrested for murder.  Monk is trying his best to prove the husband innocent but in the end it is discovered that the man did indeed arrange the kidnapping to get at his wife's money, he may have felt she would leave him.  We never find out who actually did the brutal killing.

Monk realizes that he let his emotions over-rule his judgement in this case.

I enjoyed this book, it kept you interested and guessing.

The Good German

 by Dennis Bock

Harv read this book before I did.  He said he liked it.  I did not.

The book is an alternate history following WWII but I don't think it really did much to carry through on the idea.

The book starts with a young German man who prepares a bomb that kills Hitler.  He thinks that this will stop the war but instead Goring takes over and carries out pretty much what Hitler did.  The man tries to escape but is caught at the border to Switzerland.  He is interrogated and tortured.  Eventually he is sent to a prison camp.  He manages to escape from there and makes his way to England on a ship.  However, the ship is captured and he is taken by German soldiers in control of England and made to do clean up in London following a nuclear bomb or bombs having been dropped on London.  

Many of the people who are given this job go blind from the exposure and the man and others are shipped to Canada to a hospital run by nuns.  In this story the person who is the U.S. President is sympathetic to Germany so the U.S. never enters the war.  And, for some reason never really explained Canada now seems to be run by Russia.  Russian officials with Geiger counters often visit the hospital to take readings,

The man had come to Canada with a young woman he met in Europe.  She has her baby in Canada but is devastated when the baby girl has deformed hands.  The woman kills herself and a young German woman from the town, who has been forced to serve as a helper at the hospital is made to be the wet nurse for the baby.  Eventually the man is given cataract surgery and is able to leave the hospital but he leaves his daughter behind afraid of what she will face because of her deformed hands

The book switches to more recent times when two brothers are being picked on because their mother (the wet nurse) was German.  They are bullied at school and once a year on the annual federal holiday locals set a fire in the front yard of their house.  The boy's mother has kept in contact with a Brother in Germany.  Eventually she decides it will be better if she returns to Germany, that this will take the pressure off her family.  The family is devastated and it doesn't change the abuse they face.  One anniversary evening the fire lit in their yard sets their house on fire.  The boys survive but their father doesn't.

The younger of the two brothers volunteers at the hospital and becomes friends with the young girl. News reports say that American Jews are going to be deported to Canada.  The boys think they might get praise and less bullying if they are able to help.  But they don't succeed.  The young girl introduces the young boy to a young Jewish girl she has found and taken to the hospital.

Eventually the boys, the girl, and the girls father set up a reverse underground railroad taking German Canadians to the U.S. and all of them eventually make their way to the west coast of the U.S.

I didn't find the book interesting. I think the author could have done more to explain why Canada was controlled by the Russians. I did'nt find the writing engaging nor the characters interesting.

Transcendent Kingdom

 by Yaa Gyasi

This book is getting a lot of acclaim these days.

It is the story of a young American woman, of Ghanian descent, who is trying to make her way in the academic community and try to understand all the tragedies that have occurred in her family, through her scientific pursuits.

The girls mother was very religious and the girl spends a lot of time in her youth attending church, praying to God and trying to figure out how to be a good person.  She sees contradictions around her, e.g. the Minister's daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock.  Part of the story, perhaps not written outright, is the conflict of praying to God for help and not getting the help you need.

Her parents moved from Ghana to America before she was born.  Her parents struggled to make survive financially in the U.S.  Her mother was a care giver for sick people, her father did odd jobs for not a lot of money.  Eventually the marriage broke down and the father returned to Ghana.  It took the kids a while to figure out he has never coming back.

The brother was a very successful basketball player and people thought he would have great success.  However, after an ankle injury he was prescribe oxy contin and became a drug addict, eventually dying from a heroine overdose.

After the brother died the girls mother retreated to her bed.  After a few months the girl was sent to Ghana to stay with an Aunt.  After her mother recovered somewhat the girl came back to live with her mother. But the mother's grief was still hanging around her.

The girl went on to university and was working on the study of addiction and avoiding negative stimuli by studying mice, including attaching electrodes to their brain.  She could see what parts of the brain were activated by different stimuli.  But did this tell her anything about why people do what they do and how to stop doing things that are bad for them?? It is obvious that she did this in a desperate attempt to try to figure out what was/had gone wrong with her family members.  I am not sure she found an answer.

While the girl is close to finishing her work at university her mother has another breakdown and comes to live with her.  The mother basically just lies in bed.  The girl doesn't know what to do but tries to provide food to her. 

I found the book hard to read at times because it was so sad.  Some people try to befriend the girl but she seems reluctant to take their friendship.  Her lab partner tries to be her friend. If people really believe in God, (the Mother)why can't they find the relief they need from their depression through him???  I think this just confirmed how irrational people can be, unable to do what is really best for them and avoid what is bad for them.

At one point the girl attends a funeral for one of her mother's patients.  The girl is shocked by all the nic things people say about her mother, about how caring she was etc.  This does not jive with the girl's impression of her mother.  Her mother was not a warm person, never gave hugs, was often critical of her and her brother.  How can a person be so different to strangers and to their own family.

I think the author did a great job of portraying a young person trying to figure out what life is all about and struggling with their identity and religion.

The book is called Transcendent Kingdom.... no idea why, not sure I saw any transcendence here. The ending is a bit surprising and I think weak.  After all the sadness, the book ends, in a few pages, with the character having married her lab partner and having a family.  Not that this is a bad thing but I think there could have been a bit of an explanation for why/how the character decided to take a chance on a normal life.  It almost seemed like the author didn't want the book to end on a sad note so she quickly came up with this ending.