The Vanderbeekers and the HIdden Garden by Karina Yan Glaser

This is the second adventure of the Vanderbeekers who are members of a biracial family who live in Harlem, NY. In this story, their elderly friend, Mr. Jeet, has a stroke, and the kids decide to create a garden so that Mr. and Mrs. Jeet will have a nice place to visit when Mr. Jeet gets out of the hospital.  They choose an empty lot next to their church, and make their improvements without really getting permission from their pastor.  As the project grows, they have little trials that they overcome through persistence and a well intended disregard for rules.

I really enjoyed the first book in this series, and I enjoyed this one as well.  The children's personalities and interactions are charming and funny. Even more appealing is the sense of community Glaser creates for her characters and that we all wish we enjoyed. This book really does feel like an urban version of the Penderwicks. This is a great choice as a read aloud for families with mixed age children or as a book on CD to listen to on your next family road trip. (327 p. 2018)

An Uncommon Courtship by Kristi Ann Hunter

Lady Adelaide Bell is the second daughter of an scheming social-climbing mother.  Lord Trenton Hawthorne is a happy-go-lucky second son of a duke.  When they get trapped in an old ruin overnight, social custom require that they get married or their unchaperoned night will destroy both of their reputations.  So they go through the ceremony, but a marriage in name is not a marriage indeed.  Trent hardly knows his new wife, but he wants his  marriage to be a happy one.  How can he help both of them come together and have the kind of meaningful union he has always hoped for?

This is kind of an upside-down period romance.  Most books in this genre start with the couple falling in love and end with the couple deciding to get married, but this one starts with them getting married, and ends with them finally falling in love with each other.  It is really sweet and has some deliciously awkward and funny moments.  Both the main characters are likeable and the reader is cheering for their success.  Like the other book I have read in this series, An Inconvenient Beauty, this is a Christian period romance, so the author adds a religous element.  As in the other book, I thought it felt a little contrived, but it wasn't really a problem for the story.  I am pretty sure I will read the other two in this series. (346 p, 2017)

Chasing Helicity by Ginger Zee

Helicity was named after a natural phenomenon when the air swirls into a funnel, like when there is a tornado.  Helicity is fascinated by weather, so when she rides away from a party one day on her horse, she is fixated by a quickly developing storm cloud on the horizon.  Instead of hurrying back home, she photographs and records the event until her phone battery runs down.  Too late she realizes that the storm has turned into a tornado, and by the time she returns home, there is no home to return to.  Her family is alive, but not unscathed, and the event has lasting consequences, both for her and for those she loves.

This book got a lot of good reviews when it came out last year. It is written by a meteorologist, and the accounts of the tornado and its aftermath are really authentic. Helicity is a sympathetic character, and her brother's growing dependence on pain meds is realistic.  What the book lacks is resolution.  The author doesn't resolve the question about how Helicity's love of extreme weather and her friend's reckless behavior keeps endangering those around her.  She doesn't resolve the brother's addiction either.  She just ends the story without really resolving anything.  Still this is a good book for giving the reader a realistic look at what a victim of a tornado might experience. (204p. 2018)

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

This is a sweeping epic account of two families that were split apart and molded together by divorce and remarriage over two generations. It all starts when Bert Cousins shows up, uninvited, at a christening party for the daughter of Fix and Beverly Keating.  Beverly is stunningly beautiful, and tired of her life with Fix.  Bert is bored with his life with his wife, Teresa, and their 3 3/4 children.  The party is the beginning of an affair between Bert and Beverly that ends in divorces in both families so the two can marry.  Their 6 (combined) children spend summers together and build a odd kind of bond, even after one of the boys dies in a tragic accident.  The book ends with the initial couples in advanced age, looking back at their lives.

I didn't love this book, but I didn't hate it either. The time line of the book is fluid.  Point of view bounces erratically from the children's childhoods, to the middle years when they were young adults, and to their later years when kids are pretty much settled with families of their own.  I have never been good at keeping track of character's names, so I was often disoriented. The thing that kept me from disliking the book was the message that tragedies soften over time, and people really do end up settling down into a kind of peaceful resolution in the end.  Still, after reading this and Educated back to back, I am ready for a much lighter novel next. (2016, 322 p.)

Warning: this book has a lot of language.  Don't read it if the 'f' word bothers you.

Educated by Tara Westover

Tara was raised in a fundamentalist/ survivalist Mormon home.  Her paranoid father mistrusted anything having to do with the government so his children didn't attend school, go to the doctor or even have birth certificates.  Their education as children mostly consisted of long religious rants by their father.  As the children grew up, one of the brothers became increasingly abusive, while another decided to escape the family homestead and pursue an education.  Tara had to decide which path she would take, but leaving her mountain home, as caustic as it was, took a huge emotional toll on her.  Only when she got a fellowship at Cambridge and began to study the great philosophers of history did she begin to be able to separate her self-image from the unworthy way her family had treated her.

This is an incredibly heartrending and honest memoir that has been the top most requested e-book at my library for four months running.  The amazing thing about it is how the author is able to look back on the way her mind bent and twisted to try to justify and live with what was happening to her. The writing is masterful, but there is a hint that it is even yet hard for her to fully understand her earlier life objectively.  Part of her is still the abused, brainwashed teen on the mountain.  I think it is the vulnerability the author embraces that has made this a best seller.

Warning: this is adult literature.  It contains some really graphic and gritty scenes of violence and emotional abuse. (2018, 334 p)

The Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

In the 1400's a priest finds a hunchback boy and takes him in.  He calls him Boy and the child becomes the sheep herder for a manner house.  One day a pilgrim comes by asking for directions to a local monastery that has a relic of St Peter. He hires Boy to carry his pack and together they start on an adventure that will lead them across Europe and eventually to Rome.  As they travel they both discover that they are more than they appear to be and their quest has eternal consequences.

This book is certainly of the same flavor as Gidwitz' The Inquisitor's Tale.  I think I actually liked it better.  The Inquisitor's Tale had more laugh-out-loud moments, but I thought that the ending was too abrupt.  I thought the pacing for this one was better and that the slow development of the relationship between the Boy and the Pilgrim was wonderful. I also liked its message of redemption. Was the pilgrim saved because he completed his quest, or because he came to love and care about Boy?  I think it fully deserved the Newbery honor it won last year. (2018, 288 p)