Wrecker by Carl Hiaasen

 Valdez Jones VIII calls himself "Wrecker" because his ancestors worked as wreckers, salvaging shipwrecks in the Florida Keys. Wrecker has inherited his ancestor's love of the sea and spends his free time fishing in his own little skiff in the bay.  One day he comes across a fancy speed boat that has become stranded on a sandbar.  The boat belongs to smugglers, and Wrecker unwittingly gets caught up in their nefarious deeds. He has also recently become reacquainted with a girl from his school, Willi, who is dealing with her own issues, but is willing to help Wrecker in his attempts to free himself from his entanglement with the smugglers. Meanwhile, Wrecker's step sister, Suzanna, is leading a campaign to prevent cruise ships from returning to Key West after they stopped during the pandemic. It will take all Wreckers courage and sea smarts to help his step-sister, win the trust and friendship of Willi, and keep himself from being killed by cold hearted crooks. 

Hiaasen does a good job with his middle grade environmental novels. I have enjoyed his earlier ones like "Hoot" and "Scat" and I enjoyed this one.  All the main characters of this story are complex and interesting.  Valdez is smart, but also acts like a real teenager and both he and Willi have authentic teen voices. Hiaasen adds interesting messages about history and environmentalism, but they are not so heavy handed that they overpower the plot and characters. This is a good choice for kids who like action and adventure, but enjoy realistic fiction instead of fantasy. (2023, 336 p.) 

A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales

 Beatrice Steel lives in Swampshire where the rules of etiquette are all important.  Beatrice, however, has a guilty secret; she loves to read about unsolved murders in the newspaper.  When her sister's prospective fiancée drops dead at a ball, Beatrice can't help but jump in and try help a broody investigator solve the crime. As a plethora of unsavory clues start to come to the surface, it begins to be clear that the high society of Swampshire is not nearly as proper as they appear. Can Beatrice and the inspector solve the case before anyone else dies?

One of my patrons recommended this one to me, and it was a delight. It pokes fun at all the proper regency romances and their emphasis on etiquette. I saw the play, "Clue" this week at the Hale Center Theater in Sandy, and this book has a similar vibe--silly, fun, but also suspenseful. Even the character's names are funny.  The murder victim is called, "Mr. Croaksworth" and the unwanted suitor is "Mr. Grub" and his coat of arms features a cockroach. There are a lot of good one-liners, and funny physical humor. There are some really random elements, like the glowing frogs, the very "emo" young sister that is alarmingly hairy, and the mud holes that swallow people. It kept me chucking all the way through. I need to make sure my library has a physical copy of this because I am going to be recommending it to a bunch of people I know. (2023, 352 p)

Mixed Up by Gordon Korman

 Reef is an orphan who was taken in by his mother's best friend.  Although she has welcomed Reef into the home, her children have not.  One, in particular, is fairly abusive.  Theo still has both his parents, but he seems to constantly disappoint his father.  Theo's dad had "ruled the school" when he was a kid, but Theo would rather tend his garden than take karate lessons. Then, one day, memories start showing up in Theo's mind, memories of things that happened to someone else.  The same thing starts happening to Reef.  The two middle school boys figure out that they are experiencing each other's memories, and once a memory goes to the other boy, it is gone from the original owner's mind. It gets so bad that both boys are finding it hard to function in daily life. They have to find a way to stop the "phenomenon" before both boys sink into a confused stupor. 

Gordon Korman is a good writer and has really figured out an authentic tween voice.  He also recognizes that 12-year-olds can have deep, poignant and complex emotions. As a result, I enjoyed listening to this book.  That said, the premise and plot are kind of weak. It was just too improbable for me.  It felt like a realistic fiction that wasn't at all realistic.  It made me wonder if the author, who is 60, is starting to have occasional memory loss, and that prompted the premise.  Or maybe his parents are struggling with dementia and he is dealing with that.  Kids that are Korman fans will probably like the book, but I thought ReStart, which is also by Korman and deals with memory loss, had a much stronger plot and premise. (256, 2023)

The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom

 A glittering party on a luxury yacht ends in tragedy when the boat explodes.  All hands are presumed dead, but a few survive by crowding on a life raft. After drifting for a few days a new passenger joins the raft, a man who claims to be "The Lord".  He asserts that as soon as everyone on the life raft believes he is who he says he is, they will be saved. As days stretch into weeks on the raft tragedies happen, but so do miracles.  Some of the passengers come to believe in "The Lord" while others remain very skeptical. A year later, a police investigator is led to a life raft of the yacht, and finds, in a waterproof pouch, a journal of one of the initial survivors on the raft.  As the inspector tries to piece together what happened on the raft, he comes to understand his own grief better.

This is by the same author as Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  It is a new-age Christian parable. It is a little heavy handed in its theological agenda, but I liked it anyway.  Albom is a good writer and his primary characters are fully formed and sympathetic. He is also pretty good a describing the physical experience of having 13 people crammed on a rubber life boat. Even though some horrendous things happen in the narrative, it is, over all, a "feel good" story that fed my soul.  It would be a good book club title because it is short, well written, and suggests a lot of philosophical questions. (249 p. 2021)

Portrait of Lies by Clair M Poulson

Trey Shotwell's parents were both world famous artists, but all his life Trey wanted to be a police officer.  The desire is only strengthened when his mother is killed during an art robbery and the teenage Trey vows to eventually find his mother's killer. Years later he is a police detective in Australia when he and his father go on a cruise where some of his father's paintings are going to be auctioned.  On board he meets a woman, Ariah, who enchants him, and also finds a painting he is pretty sure is one that was stolen the night his mother was killed.   As Trey investigates the stolen artwork, things heat up and more crimes occur.  Soon both his, his father's and Ariah's lives are threatened. Trey must decide how much she wants to pursue finding his mother's killer when doing so risks the safety of the woman he is growing to love. 

This is my second or third Clair Poulson novel. It isn't great writing, and it draggs at places, but in the end had a decent mystery plot.  It is interesting to me how not PC the book is.  The love interest, Ariah, and her mother primarily exist in the story to give moral support to the main character, and cook him good meals. They also play the role of damsel in distress several times.  Poulson is a Latter-Day Saint author and there is a very unsubtle subplot of him sharing his religion with Ariah and their other friend, Hans.  The characters are two dimensional, the writing is stilted, the pacing is less than perfect, and I still enjoyed it. Clair Poulson is not a bad go-to author while I am waiting for other holds to come in. (2015, 272 p)

Great Courses: The Italians before Italy by Kenneth Bartlett

 In this Great Courses series, Dr. Bartlett focuses on the history of Italy from the 11th century until the unification of Italy in the 1800's, with extra focus on the Italian renaissance.  There are 24, 1/2 hour lectures.  In the first few he does an overview of what happened to Italy after the fall of Rome, and the major political and economic forces that held sway in the different city states. Then he dedicates one or two lectures to each of the major city states, highlighting their history, economy and cultural contribution and introducing influential figures. He spends a couple of chapters talking about the papacy, and more than two chapters of Florence. 

I checked out this series because I hope to travel to Italy this year.  I had studied a lot about Rome and Italy in college because I was a Humanities major with a classics emphasis. In my humanities classes I got a pretty thorough introduction to the Italian Renaissance, focusing on the great masters and their patrons. I gained some new insights into this period by listening to this series.  I hadn't ever connected the reign of the Medici Popes with Martin Luther and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation before, but they were contemporary. I also hadn't realized that all the city states were allied with either the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor and the two factions were the main cause of strife in the regions.  I also hadn't realized how long the Medici dynasty ruled in Florence. I was interested to see that the lecturer had a distinct measurement of the success or greatness of a particular ruler:  If they patronized the arts, Dr Bartlett thought they were great.  If they didn't, he was much less complimentary.  He only mentioned tangentially whether any leader helped their subjects in humanitarian ways.  It reminded me of an observation I had as a student...it is usually decadent and corrupt rulers that create great monuments of art or architecture. Even though I enjoyed the series, I must admit it was pretty dry and I don't think that it would have a wide popular appeal. (12 hrs, 2007)

Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston

 Amari's brother, Quinton disappeared after he started working for a mysterious secret agency after graduating from college.  Since his disappearance, Amari has had trouble controlling her temper at the private school where she attends as a scholarship student.  Then Amari gets a mysterious invitation to go to the same "leadership summer camp" her brother attended when he was her age.  Both Amari and her mother are excited about this new opportunity, and Amari hopes at the camp she will discover more about her brother's disappearance. When she arrives at camp, she discovers that her brother had been part of a Bureau of Magic that moderates the interaction between magical beings and humans and that the summer camp is a training camp for future Bureau agents.  She also discovers the same kind of prejudice that she experienced at school.  As she looks for clues about her brother's disappearance, she has to fight hard to stay in the program while other students and teachers try to drive her away.

The temptation to write about a magic school is just too good to pass up for many middle grade authors.  That being said, this was a better than average magic school book.  The magic system is interesting, and the author does a good job with both plot and characterization. I admit I wasn't sure who the bad guy was until the very end. I put the second book on hold right away.  (2021, 416 p)

P.S. I was amused that the author used his initials.  Usually, a woman author uses her initials instead of her given name for a middle grade novel when the main character of her book is male. The assumption is that some boys won't read a book with a female author. The opposite happened here. The author is male but has a female main character.  It is less common, and it made me smile.