The Year of Fog: A Novel

by Michelle Richmond

In one instant, your life can change forever. One foggy morning, professional photographer Abby Mason is walking along the beach in San Francisco, taking a few pictures. Emma, Abby's fiance Jake's six year old daughter, runs ahead to look for sand dollars and then a moment later, she is gone. Abby and Jake are completely devastated, consumed by their tireless search for Emma. Police aren't sure if she drowned in the unpredictable water or if she was kidnapped. Feeling enormous guilt, Abby becomes obsessed with finding the little girl, continuing her desperate search even after detectives close the case and Jake holds a memorial service in order to get some kind of closure. Abby is haunted by the idea that there are important clues buried deep in her memory of that fateful morning.

This novel is suspenseful and well written, with an unexpected and satisfying conclusion. Richmond includes lots of interesting facts and observations about both memory and photography, including this passage:

"We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility... We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselves preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know that we lived."

An interesting book about a family coming together and then being ripped apart, about losing the ones you love most and about not giving up no matter what. Recommended.

The Last Summer (of You & Me)

by Ann Brashares

I was a bit hesitant to pick this book up since Brashares is so well known for her cute YA series, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. However, her first novel for adults turned out to be a pretty good book. The story centers on the lives of two sisters, Riley and Alice, who despite their vastly different personalities, have an extremely close relationship. Riley, the older sister, is an adventurous, confident tomboy who loves the outdoors while Alice is beautiful, quiet and smart. Their family spends every summer on the idyllic beaches of a small town called Waterbury on Fire Island where they also meet up with Paul, the girls' best friend. This summer, they are all finished with college, their threesome finally reunited after a couple of years without Paul, who'd moved out to California.

While Paul's friendship with Riley is stronger than ever, he and Alice discover that they can no longer deny their strong attraction to each other and find themselves falling in love, a secret they keep from Riley in order to protect her. One night while Alice and Paul meet in secret, Riley is rushed to the hospital and soon discovers that she has a very bad heart condition. She demands that Alice keep her illness a secret from Paul until she is ready to tell him herself. The secrets and guilt weigh heavily on gentle Alice and she is forced to make a choice between her beloved Riley and her soul mate Paul.

Brashares paints a vivid backdrop of innocent summers at the beach and her characters are well drawn and likeable. The complexities of the relationship between sisters can be hard to capture but this one feels true and completely believable. Despite my inital reservations, Brashares has written a great story about loyalty, friendship and love, a perfect book for the beach or vacation.

The Double Bind: A Novel

by Chris Bohjalian

Six years ago, Laurel Estabrook was brutally attacked as she rode her bicycle on a deserted dirt road near her college campus in Vermont. Now, she works at a Burlington homeless shelter, assisting people with finding food and low rent housing. After Bobbie Crocker, one of her elderly clients, dies of a stroke, Laurel becomes obsessed with a box of old photographs found in his possession. Could this homeless man have been a talented photographer once upon a time? A beginning photographer herself, Laurel is soon devoting every minute to researching Bobbie and his photos, his family and his friends, trying to prove that Bobbie was the son of Daisy Buchanan from Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsy. I was enjoying the fast paced plot and the twists and turns of the story as Laurel comes closer and closer to solving this puzzle but the twist ending left me very disappointed. It did answer many of the story's questions but I still felt slightly cheated.

The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth About It)

by Patty Dann

A very short and mostly sad account of the author's life with her son Jake and her husband Willem after learning that Willem has an uncurable form of brain cancer. As Patty watches her husband slowly lose his ability to speak and to think, she remembers happier times and tries to figure out how she and Jake will ever recover from this loss. This memoir consists of a series of mostly one or two page vignettes, ranging from joyful to bittersweet to heartbreakingly sad. It tackles some important topics, like why Americans have such a difficult time dealing with death and how to help children deal with grief and loss. Painfully honest and realistic, not a light read for the beach.

The God of Animals: A Novel

by Aryn Kyle

"Wow!" is all I can say about this wonderful debut by Aryn Kyle. This breathtaking book, the kind you cannot put down, is narrated by Alice Winston, a lonely, poor, twelve year old girl living on a Colorado horse farm. Her father is rugged, handsome like a marlboro man, and tireless in his efforts to turn their floundering farm into a lucrative business that trains, breeds, boards, and shows beautiful horses. Alice's mother has been very depressed since Alice's birth and rarely leaves her bedroom. Her beautiful older sister Nona has just runaway to marry a rodeo cowboy even though she's only seventeen, devastating her entire family and creating a huge scandal. Alice misses her sister desperately; Nona was her best and only real friend. An extremely talented equestrian, Nona was her father's favorite and his only hope for saving their farm. Alice's life begins to change after a classmate drowns in a nearby canal and her father is forced to give riding lessons and boarding other people's horses to make ends meet. New people begin to show up at the farm and each one affects Alice in some unexpected way.

Two of Kyle's greatest strengths are her expertly drawn characters and the ways their lives all intersect. The author brings you right back to the miserableness of adolescence and creates a unforgettable setting in dusty Desert Valley with her vivid descriptions. The momentum of the story builds slowly to an amazing ending as all the interwoven plotlines reach a climax in the final scenes. Kyle's brutal honesty shattered all my preconceived romantic notions about life on a horse farm, just like most of her characters end up shattered in one way or another by the end of this book. A wonderful story about families, horses and lost love; one of my favorite books ever.*****

Helpless: A Novel

by Barbara Gowdy

Publishers Weekly summed it up best when they called Helpless "...chilling but not always believable." Celia is a young single mother working two jobs to make ends meet. Her nine year old daughter Rachel is smart, mature for her age, and strikingly beautiful with mocha skin and light hair. Ron is a lonely, demented, small appliance repairman who spots Rachel in the schoolyard one day. He quickly becomes obsessed with the little girl and soon begins to renovate a room in his basement from storage for his old vacuum cleaner collection into a perfect bedroom for a little girl, complete with big screen tv, dolls, videos, and an enormous dollhouse. One night, Ron snatches Rachel from her home during a blackout.

The narration of the story shifts among each of the main characters and as the story progresses we learn about the point of view and past of each person. One of the main problems is that Ron is super creepy and I didn't care about his troubled past or his strange thought processes. Rachel is very mature at the beginning of the book but a few days later, the reader is supposed to believe that she really thinks Ron is protecting her from slave drivers roaming the streets of Toronto in search of little girls to send back to Africa. Suspenseful at times but just not believable to me.