Book #29: Jane Austen Goes to Hollywood by Abby McDonald

I read about this book on someone's book blog and since it got a pretty good review, I thought I'd pick it up at the library. It's a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility, except this time Elinor, the sensible one, is the younger sister and Marianne, the crazy dramatic one, is the older one. The book opens with their father's funeral, after which they get kicked out of their home and end up moving to Beverly Hills to live in a family member's home. Both girls have romantic relationships, things go crazy, and they both end up happy ever after. (If you know the story of Sense and Sensibility it really goes just like that one.) It was a really fun, cute read that only took a few hours today.

Book #28: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

This is the third book I've read by Kate Morton (the others being The Forgotten Garden and The Secret Keeper), and I think this was my favorite. Morton has a similar style and theme to each of her books--mainly, someone in the present trying to unravel a mystery from her family's past, using whatever documents and memories she  (it's usually a woman) can find to help her figure it out. In this book, Edie's mother gets a 50-year-old letter delivered in the mail, which had been lost thanks to a mailman's laziness. Thanks to that letter, Edie finds out that her mother was evacuated from London during the Blitz in WWII and that she lived in Milderhurst castle at that time, something her mother had never told her about. Her mother was so secretive about it that Edie determined she had to find out whatever she could--and managed to make her way to Milderhurst castle to talk to the women living inside.

I love how Morton always manages to make the ending a surprise--how there are just layers upon layers of story, where at first you believe something at the beginning and then you later find out more and more information that makes you believe something else. My perception of the situation changed several times throughout the book, and I loved how it ended up. At first you think that the old ladies living in the castle are just nice old ladies, then you start to think there's other, more negative forces at play in their relationship, and then you find out that there's much more to the story. I loved that. Morton definitely is a very skilled writer with a gift for writing a fascinating and not-too-revealing plot.

I felt like The Distant Hours was possibly the most believable of the mysteries because of the methods in which Edie tried to figure out the mystery--it was mostly just through talking to the people who lived through it (because, conveniently, they were all mostly still alive--it just was a matter of getting them to want to talk about it). Whereas in The Forgotten Garden especially, I felt like it was kind of cheating in how so many things just "happened" to fall into place and so many random things turned up to help the main character with her research, this book didn't have that kind of feel. I did get a bit confused by the timeline sometimes--it was set in 1992, but then it was talking about events that happened during WWII in 1941. But the characters' actions didn't seem to match their ages at times. The women in the castle would have been nearly 90 but they didn't seem to act like it, and I could never figure out how old Edie's mother was at different times.

Book #27: Anti Cancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

I feel like my mom told me about reading this book, so when I saw it as an audiobook at the library, it seemed to ring a bell, so I picked it up. I was looking for something to listen to while I exercised, and this seemed like as good an option as any. Unfortunately, I don't think this was an ideal audiobook--it would have been much better to instead of to listen to. There were too many tables and discussions of which specific foods are healthier and blah blah blah that would have been much easier to read and skim as needed. I think I would have been much more interested (and I would have finished it in about 1/5 of the time!) if I had picked up a paper copy.

But anyway--Servan-Schreiber is a psychiatrist who has become interested in cancer after having it himself. He and his colleagues were using an scanning machine to do MRIs on people and study their brains, and he volunteered to let them do a scan of him, and they found out that he had a brain tumor. He had an operation, everything seemed to work, and then he relapsed, and he decided to do all the research he could to find out about how we can change our lifestyles to avoid cancer. There were many suggestions, and stories to back up their potential usefulness: eat anti-cancer foods (like green tea, dark chocolate--avoid a typical Western diet as much as possible), eat foods with Omega-3s to balance out the excess of Omega-6s, eat organic (avoid pesticides), clean up your home from environmental toxins, find calm and avoid stress, etc. I think these are really simple and useful suggestions that definitely could help someone motivated enough to follow them. If nothing else, even if they don't help prevent cancer in your body, these suggestions will most likely only make you feel better in general anyways. I'm not quite invested enough to sacrifice our decent-but-not-crazy eating habits and we can't afford organic right now anyways, so we're not going to be immediately adopting all of these suggestions, but I thought they were pretty interesting anyways. And now I think I'll feel good every time I make a smoothie with berries and flaxseed, because both of those are anti-cancer foods!

Book #26: Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear

The tenth Maisie Dobbs has finally arrived! It came out a few months ago, but I had to wait for this whole time for the hold at the library to come through because there was such a long waiting list. Definitely worth the wait. I read somewhere that each of the Maisie Dobbs novels has a theme to it, where Winspear is trying to make a statement or a point about it  (like mental illness or treatment of vets or drug addictions or something like that), and this book seemed kind of to be about racism (although it wasn't as didactic as some of the other books' themes might have been). Maisie is investigating the death of an Indian woman who was shot in London, and as usual several of Maisie's cases merge for her to solve this one. There's not much else to say about the case itself without giving too much away! Of course, Maisie is the most open-minded and charitable (and least racist) person of everyone in the book (as she always seems to be), which makes her seem much more twenty-first century than early twentieth.

As for Maisie's personal life, she is actually making plans to leave to go on a trip to India herself. I just want to smack her about her ambivalence about James and their relationship--although she's really NOT ambivalent; she loves him very much and just doesn't feel confident enough in herself to commit to marriage. So I DO understand that. I think Winspear actually does a good job of explaining her feelings in this book (or maybe it's that Maisie is finally understanding herself and her reluctance for the first time). She worries that she'll lose some part of herself (like her work, which has sustained her through her traumatic war injuries and loss of self) once she gets married, but I just want her to get married and keep working like she's always been doing. Come on, Maisie! What are you waiting for?! Gahhh. But oh well, I think there were some good signs in this book that she will finally commit while she's on her journey in India, which she embarked on at the end of the book (by herself!).

Book #25: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Louisa Clark is twenty-seven and has lived her whole life in the same tiny little English town, has worked at the same small cafe for six years, and has been dating her boyfriend for seven years, and is living with her parents. And she doesn't really have any plans to change anything up--she's happy with how things are. But she loses her job and finally finds a new one working as a caretaker for a quadripalegic, a young man who was injured in a motorcycle accident. She finds out that he has no desire to live and wants to kill himself, and she decides to try and show him what he has to live for and how he can still have a great life--and ends up being changed herself in the process.

I definitely enjoyed this book. I didn't really like the whole plot, I guess--it seems almost a little calculated to tug at your heartstrings, writing about someone unfairly consigned to a wheelchair after a full and vigorous life before his accident and the terrible emotions that he goes through. (But of course, that is real life too, so I guess it's fair.) But I really liked Louisa as a character, and her family. Louisa was so different a character from what you normally read in romances like this, I guess--she wasn't super ambitious, she hadn't gone to college, she dressed really weirdly, she lived a really boring life. And she didn't care or even notice, I guess, which made it awesome. That alone really kind of endeared her to me, that she wasn't this secretly person-just-like-me. I liked Will too, and how he was very human as well.

Although I didn't really like the plot necessarily, I think it does bring up important ethical and social questions about assisted suicide (not to mention how to treat disabled people), and it definitely humanized the whole thing. Considering it all, I really liked how the book ended.

Book #24: Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers by Linda Perlstein

This might seem like a random book for someone my age to be reading, because I think it's more aimed at parents with middle-school-aged children. But I was listening to a podcast (Stuff You Should Know) about middle schoolers and they mentioned this book and I thought it sounded interesting enough to take a look at. I was kind of disappointed when I first started reading it to see that it was published in 2003 (so it is definitely not up to date on the latest things middle schoolers are doing, like with social media and smartphones and all that), but that actually means that the kids she was interviewing and writing about are my own age--I was in middle school myself the same year she was writing this book. Perlstein does all of her research/writing in the school year of 2001-2002, the year of September 11, when I was in eighth grade (the same age as several of her subjects).

Perlstein follows five specific middle school students and closely watches their lives and interviews them and their parents, incorporating current research and information about this age of kids and the social, physical, and mental changes that are going on. It was fascinating to see these kids and their insecurities and the things they hooked onto and what were their interests, but it was also incredibly TERRIFYING. I honestly must have been so sheltered in middle school, because I had no idea that things like sex and drugs went on (or if I did, I must have blocked it out because I don't remember it at all). Not that all the kids do that kind of stuff, but it is definitely there, even on school grounds. It is totally terrifying to imagine having a kid this age. I liked how Perlstein included some of the parents' perspectives as well, how they are utterly bewildered by their children's changes and don't know how to relate to them or help them and how it's not that they are angry at them or anything.

Book #23: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is our book club book for the month of May. It was kind of funny because someone in our group was saying how she just didn't want to read another YA dystopian apocolyptic novel, and that's exactly what we somehow ended up picking. I kind of felt the same way, but I still picked this up from the library and ended up reading it all last night in one evening while Tommy was working.

The basic premise of the book is that the world stops revolving at the same reliable rate--it starts slowing down, which everyone on earth then refers to as "the slowing." This means that the days end up getting longer and longer and longer--each day having several minutes added to it at a time. The narrator is an eleven-year-old girl named Julia, and the whole novel is basically her coming-of-age story in the middle of this catastrophe.

I didn't love this book. I liked the idea of the "slowing," and I thought it was an interesting twist on the whole world-ending thing that is so popular right now in fiction--but the author never goes on to explain WHY the slowing happens. She just has all her characters say over and over again that nobody knows why it happened. It seemed like she was too lazy to do any physics research to back up her whole plot. The book is basically how everyone reacted to the change (like, even though the days are longer than 24 hours now, everyone decides to stick to the 24-hour clock, etc.) and what things happen on earth as a result of the change (all the whales get beached and the birds start to die, also for semi-mysterious reasons that are kind of hinted at but mostly people still "didn't know").

I also didn't really feel like Julia was old enough for me to take her seriously as a narrator. I mean, eleven? I have a recently-turned-twelve-year-old brother who is incredibly smart but of course does NOT write/talk like Julia does. She also doesn't have any friends because her best friend has left her and she's lonely at school--but having been that age and being lonely, I don't think Julia seems that affected by having no friends. There's also a love story between her and another kid and again, really? He leaves at the end of the book and she says (as an adult looking back) that she still dreams about Seth coming back to her--this kid she had a crush on when she was eleven! I mean, come on. That really bothered me. I also couldn't tell whether the narrator was supposed to be eleven-year-old Julia or adult Julia looking back on that time period, because it definitely seemed to be both.

However, I did like the style of Walker's writing--there were some beautiful and poetic lines that I liked. It was definitely a decent book, but not my favorite.