Breed

Breed by Chase Novak (pseudonym for Scott Spencer) starts out with the reader meeting Alex and Leslie Twisden, a wealthy Manhattan couple, madly in a very Happily Ever After, devil-may-care kind of love.  They live on the Upper East Side, in a beautiful town house that has been in Alex's family for generations.  Alex is a well-known, highly successful lawyer, and Leslie has a respected position as an editor of children's books.  Their life together is perfect, except for one thing:  they want a child.  They want a child badly, especially Alex; he is a bit older than Leslie and considers adoption a very last resort, if it's to be an option at all.  He's old-fashioned and wants a proper heir; he wants to continue the Twisden line, and that means leaving a genetic legacy.  Money is no object, but while it can purchase every known treatment at every possible clinic with every fertility specialist they can find, no amount can guarantee that Leslie will conceive.  

Just when they're about ready to give up on trying to get pregnant, they hear about a doctor in Slovenia who has nearly a 100% success rate with his fertility treatment.  They've never heard of this man before, and they know nothing about what the actual treatment entails, but they are desperate.  When they get to the doctor's office, the place is questionable and the doctor himself seems like a madman, but they go through with the painful procedure anyway, and sure enough, it works.  It works so well, in fact, that Leslie becomes pregnant with twins.

Ten years later, the side effects of the treatment have taken a tremendous toll on both Alex and Leslie, and they've closed themselves off from the outside world, for the most part.  They take turns walking the children to and from school each day, but beyond that, life is spent in secret.  So secret, in fact, that much of what goes on in their once-luxurious home is a mystery even to the twins.  Adam and Alice are smart, though, and have long since realized that there is something very "off" about the way they live and the way their parents behave.  For one thing, they don't quite understand why they need to be locked in their rooms at night.

Adam's been spying on his parents, though, by listening to them at night through their old baby monitor, and what he hears makes him more and more uneasy.  Slowly, he begins to fear for both his and his sister's lives, and one night, they run away.  Finally out in the world, the twins begin to learn the very terrifying answers to both the questions they've asked and those they've been afraid to ask.  Their situation, they find, is worse than they could ever have imagined, and the most horrifying truth of all is that there may not be anything they can do to escape it.

Austenland

In Austenland, by Shannon Hale, we meet Jane Hayes:  30-something graphic designer living in New York.  Jane's had thirteen boyfriends in her life, and none of them ever quite match up to her idea of what a man should be.  And what's her ideal man like?  Mr. Darcy.  Yes, Jane has more than just a slight Austen obsession.  She's so obsessed with Jane Austen's novels and with Mr. Darcy in particular, that she goes so far as to hide her copy of the BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series (ladies, you know the one...Colin Firth).  

During a visit from her mother and wealthy great-aunt Carolyn, the old woman notices the DVDs and knows immediately what is going through Jane's head.  Great-aunt Carolyn surprises Jane by booking a vacation for her at Pembrook Park, a sort of Regency reenactment resort in the English countryside, where guests and a staff of actors remain in period dress and manner for three weeks.  The clientele consists of Austen-obsessed women, who pay the exorbitant fee to be fake-courted by gentlemen like Austen's male characters.  

Jane isn't sure what to make of her great-aunt's strange gift, but the tickets and reservation are nonrefundable, and the prospect of being in the company of handsome men in breeches has piqued her interest.  Once she checks in, however, and the fantasy begins, the total immersion is a little more than she thinks she can really handle.  Will it help her kick her Darcy fixation, or will she just get even more sucked in than before?  

Moonburn

Moonburn by Alisa Sheckley is the sequel to The Better To Hold You; Abra's gotten pretty used to her new lycanthropic lifestyle by now, and is sort-of-happily living with Red, the shapeshifting ginger redneck.  Still living in the house nearby are her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Hunter, and Magda - the Romanian researcher of Unwolves he left her for, who, incidentally, is also the one responsible for Hunter (and so, in turn, Abra) with the lycanthropy virus.  Abra doesn't really seem to mind being a werewolf so much, though, and enjoys working at a small veterinary practice with her former instructor, Malachy.

There are obvious downsides to being a werewolf, though; normally, Abra is just sensitive to the phases of the moon, which she keeps careful track of.  Lately, though, she has been finding it more difficult to control the change, which seems to be trying to happen well before the moon is even full.  That isn't the extent of the strangeness, though - everyone seems to know things about her condition that she isn't aware of, and Red appears to be deliberately keeping information from her.  This is not at all helpful, because she is currently finding it extremely difficult to retain some sense of control over her purely animal instincts, and has become an object of lust for every man and dog that crosses her path, which doesn't exactly help with the strain in her relationship with Red.

What's more, this turns out to be a very inopportune time for these kinds of problems in her personal life.  The small, backwoods town she lives in, Northside, is a sort of paranormal hub where the veil between the physical and the liminal worlds is particularly thin.  A new housing development is being constructed at the mountain, right in the ancient roaming grounds of the manitou - powerful spirits that were recognized by the American Indians who were native to the area, but were forgotten for the most part, over time.  Well, now they are awake and kind of pissed.  Kind of REALLY pissed.  One in particular, taking the forms of a bear/Québécois lumberjack, has come to town to fuck up everybody's day.

First off, I rather enjoyed The Better To Hold You, and likewise, I also enjoyed Moonburn.  I think I enjoyed the former just a little bit better overall, though, if I had to pick one over the other.  Don't get me wrong, this one is certainly not lacking for action of any kind, but it was sometimes almost a little too much.  But I also have a tendency to gag myself and roll my eyes at any tale of The Beautiful Girl Who Doesn't Realize That She's Beautiful Even When Every Boy Wants Her And Is Embarrassingly Obvious About It.  I do like Abra, though. She's not typical as far as heroines of urban fantasy novels go - she doesn't really kick that much ass, and more often than not, she has a tendency to want to shy away.  That makes her feel more like a real person to me, since let's face it - not everyone is some leather-clad, ass-kicking dynamo who seems to live for the moments when danger dares to present itself to her.  Some of us will do what we have to, but would really rather be home in our pajamas doing a whole lot of nothing.  The latter is more Abra's style.  She is a pretty simple lady (you know, apart from the whole werewolf thing) and I can relate to that.

Tempest

Tempest by Julie Cross is the first book in what will be a trilogy about a young man, Jackson, who can time-travel.  It is an innate ability he has, and the only people who know about it - or so he thinks at first - are himself and his science-geek friend, Adam.  He and Adam do "experiments" to try and learn as much about the physics and the concept of time-travel as they can, and Adam encourages Jackson to keep a journal of notes about each "jump."  One thing they have noticed from these experiments is that nothing Jackson does when he goes into the past ever changes the future - their present.  But when two men burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, in her dorm room, everything changes.  They seem to know who he is and what he can do, and Holly is shot.

Jackson jumps, but something's different, because this time he can't get back.  All he can think about is trying to get back to 2009 to save Holly, but not knowing how, he is determined to learn all he can about his abilities.  What he ends up learning is that there is much more going on than he ever could have imagined - and much more is at stake than just Holly's life.

The Better To Hold You

The Better To Hold You by Alisa Sheckley is the first of Sheckley's books about Abra Barrow.  Abra is a veterinarian living in Manhattan, studying at the Animal Medical Institute, a teaching hospital.  Her husband just got back from spending the summer in Romania, researching the myth of Unwolves for an article he's writing, but Abra notices Hunter has changed since she last saw him.  He didn't write to her much while he was away, and he isn't very forthcoming about what happened to him there, but she understands enough to realize their marriage may be in trouble.  He wants to move into his family's old home in the small town of Northside, and Abra decides to make the move with him, to try and save their marriage.  But she soon finds out that life in this small town is going to be anything but quiet or simple, and when their closest neighbor turns out to be an intriguing stranger who showed up at the Institute one day, she discovers that her situation with her husband is much more complicated than what she ever could have imagined.

From the Ganges to the Hudson

From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrant Families in New York City by Johanna Lessinger is a part of the New Immigrants Series, and one of the books I had to read this past Spring for my Anthropology of Migration class. As with the other from the series that I've read, Changes and Conflicts, this book is rather short (only 159 pages), but also both interesting and informative. Through Lessinger, we can get an insight into the experience of immigrants to the U.S. (specifically, of course, to New York City) from India - both the first generation immigrants (those who were born in India and immigrated as adults) and the 1.5 and second generation immigrants as well (respectively, those who were born in India but immigrated as children, and children who were born in the US to first generation immigrants). The communities they create here are rich with their native culture, and there is not so much a loss of native language as was widely the case with immigrants from Europe in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

Changes and Conflicts: Korean Immigrant Families in New York

Changes and Conflicts: Korean Immigrant Families in New York by Pyong Gap Min is one of the books I had to read for my Anthropology of Migration class this past semester. It is one of the books in the New Immigrant Series, and while we only had two of the books in the series assigned for class, I would definitely pick up any others I might come across, because they were both great books.

Changes and Conflicts focuses on the experience of immigrants from Korea to New York, and also discusses the experience of many second-generation immigrants (the American-born children of those people who came from Korea) - however, many of the challenges they face are also experienced by Korean immigrants to other parts of the United States, as well. In fact, it is interesting to note both the similarities and differences between immigrant groups when reading this book, because there are quite a bit of both.