Blood Drive

Blood Drive by Jeanne C. Stein is the second book in the Anna Strong Chronicles, and picks up two months after Anna's becoming a vampire.  She's still picking up the pieces of her life after that night and especially after the way things went down with Avery, she's determined to maintain as much as possible some semblance of her human life - something that is becoming increasingly more difficult all the time, in ways she hadn't predicted.

In Blood Drive, however, things get even more complicated when the last girlfriend of her late brother shows up after more than ten years, claiming to need her help.  Anna didn't like Carolyn when she was dating her brother, and she doesn't trust her now, but the help she needs is with her daughter, Trish - Anna's niece.  Anna isn't as easily persuaded as her parents that her brother is the girl's father, but she agrees to help find her.  When a friend of Trish's turns up dead, however, and Anna begins uncovering evidence of the things Trish has been involved in, her protective instincts start kicking into overdrive and leaves open some very difficult questions:  Who can she trust?  Will she be able to reign in her rage enough to contain her newly acquired thirst for blood,  or will she lose her grip on what's left of her humanity?

Fifty Shades of Grey

Twilight: Reimagined Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James is a book about an impossibly naïve, sexually oblivious soon-to-be college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and her toxic relationship with the unbelievably handsome and obscenely wealthy businessman, Christian Grey.  Ana's roommate, Kate, is supposed to interview Christian for the university newspaper, but is too sick to leave the apartment, so Ana fills in for her, even though she doesn't even work for the paper at all, and probably there were other students who are actually involved with the paper who were available and could have used the experience for their CVs or graduate school applications.  Anyway, so Ana meets Christian Grey and for the first time in her entire twenty-one years of life, she feels attracted to a man!  He is so incredibly good-looking that, already nervous anyway, she fumbles her way through the interview as best she can, then wants to die a little bit afterward, because she feels so foolish about some of the things she said.

On the way home, she is so flustered that she keeps talking about how pissed she is and how inconsiderate it was for Kate to have her do this interview without giving her some kind of briefing about this guy first.  ANA.  This is the age of the internet.  Even though she does not have her own computer, it would have been more than easy to look him up online.  And how she even made it through college - as a lit major, especially...you know she had papers and essays probably constantly - without her own computer is beyond me.  She must have spent a LOT of time at the library or in the school's writing lab.

It's fine, though, because she will never have to see that sinfully beautiful man again, right?  NOPE.  He shows up at her place of work, to purchase some harmless home hardware, to be used for some  mysterious and let's be honest, unimaginative purpose.  While helping Grey find these for-now-innocent items, some guy she knows shows up who asks her out every time he sees her.  As if in the good spirit of foreshadowing, Grey immediately becomes tense and suspicious.  If this were a wildlife documentary instead of whatever it is, Grey would be exhibiting some kind of visual and/or auditory behavior in an attempt to signal his claim on Ana as a potential mate.  This isn't a wildlife documentary, though, but nonetheless, he seems to be barely able to contain himself from an open display of competition for sexual resources.

Ana blows the lesser male off and is in total bliss over securing Grey's phone number and flatters herself with the notion that he came there just to see her.  Oh my, he must really like her or something, jeez!

So she calls him under the pretense of needing some photos to go with Kate's write-up of the interview, and they force their nature photographer friend, José, to broaden his occupational horizons and do his best to capture Grey's inhuman beauty on film or memory card.  The same kind of silent competitive exchange occurs between Grey and José, because José it turns out is also in love with Ana!  But heaven knows why, since she is so plain and clumsy, and it didn't matter because up until that fateful day of the interview, she was asexual anyway.  Not anymore, though!  Miracle of miracles, Grey the Grecian God has asked Ana to accompany him for a coffee.  And /SQUEE, he actually holds her hand! No one has ever done that before!  When they are leaving, clumsy little thing that she is, she almost gets run over by a cyclist in the street, but Grey, in his instinctive protective prowess, saves her!  She mentally begs him to kiss her, but as if he can read her mind, he says no.  And tells her that he is no good for her, and she would do best to stay away.

HOW CAN THIS BE? He HELD her HAND for goodness' sake!  So she pretends to have dignity and waits until rounding the corner out of sight before crumpling to the pavement to cry like an idiot.

(And it only gets more romantic from here, guys.  Get comfortable, because there is an awful lot to say about this book; I'm including a cut here, so the entire homepage doesn't get taken over with this)

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is a truly lovely debut novel from Jenny Wingfield.  We're in a small rural community in mid-1950s Arkansas; every year, the Moses family has their reunion at John and Calla's home.  It was tradition.  And every year, Samuel Lake would drop off his wife, Willadee Moses, and their three children.  He couldn't stay himself, because every year he had to attend a convention where all the Methodist ministers would find out where they would be preaching, and therefore, whether they would have to move.  The Lake family moved a lot, because Samuel had his own way of doing things that didn't quite meet eye-to-eye with the church and his congregations.

This summer, though, everything begins to change, and not always for the better.  Samuel has faith that God's plan is at work underneath all the apparent misfortune, but that doesn't make it any easier when things gradually start to go from bad to interesting, back to bad, and then about as bad as you might think it could possibly get.

A lot of the focus of the story is around Swan, the Samuel and Willadee's spunky 11-year-old daughter.  Her brothers, Noble and Bienville, are endearing in their own ways as well.  Noble is only 12, and still plays with his brother and sister in their extremely imaginative and enthusiastic games of make-believe, but he is also beginning to think about being a man.  Bienville is a reader with a scientific kind of curiosity.

I could go on and on about every character in the novel, to be honest (Just Plain Honest, not Moses Honest), because I really felt that I had a good sense of each one.  And those I didn't know as well, I wanted to.  I didn't feel that any of them where caricatures; they are all complex, which brings them to life in a way that makes them seem very real.  My favorites, though, would have to be Swan and her uncle, Toy Moses.  I probably fell a little bit in love with him, actually, which maybe is a little weird.  But so what.  As for Swan, I sincerely hope that if I ever have a daughter, she would be just like this little girl.  She's a good-hearted child with a lot of spirit.  She's just not enough of a handful to be what I would consider "naughty" or bratty, but she's enough of a handful that you know she will grow to be a strong, independent, confident woman one day.

Escape

Escape by Carolyn Jessop is the true account of one woman's life in the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), a radically conservative polygamist sect of the Mormon church - and the story of how she eventually escaped with her eight children. Carolyn relates what her life was like growing up in the FLDS, and through her experience we see how drastically the church changed once power shifted from prophet to prophet - and how it became unbearable under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. By this time, Carolyn had already been married and become a mother; when she was eighteen years old, she became the fourth wife of Merril Jessop - a man more than twice her own age.

We also learn about the dysfunctional family dynamic that she married into - while it is preached that all wives are to be treated equally, it is common for a man to have a favourite among them, and this causes a lot of tension in the household between all the "sister-wives," as well as among the children. Psychological and physical abuse is common within the sect, both against wives and sister-wives, as well as against children.