The Help

Goodreads Summary:
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends - view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

My Review:
This book is about what it was like living in Mississippi in the 1960's from the perspective of two black maid's and a young white female college graduate who pushed social boundaries by both wanting a writing career and not wanting to follow the segregation laws.

The book is written alternating the points of view of these three women, and it shows how they are much more the same than different.

This is the author's first book, but her writing is more like that of a seasoned writer. This is undoubtably one of the top ten books I've ever read. It begs so many questions about segregation, what it means to be human, and whether we are really different at all. It made me think of something I really have never given much thought to: because of segregation it wasn't just blacks who couldn't associate with whites but vice versa. A white person couldn't have a black friend in the 1960's because of segregation. This book incites so many profound questions, greatest of all being what does it mean to be human? It also makes one wonder if equality really exists and if not, will it ever?
5/5 stars

Ethan Frome

Goodreads Summary:
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.(l

My Review:
This is an excellent novella. It being so short, by it's nature, I think it's a book everyone should read. It implicitly asks the questions: What does it mean to be married? To be in love? and What obligations do we really have to our spouse? Sometimes a person has to live with the choices that he/she has made and oftentimes we must put the feelings and needs of another in front of our own.

It is about Ethan Frome, a man who came to great hardship while chasing after a fantasy of another life, a happy life. It is about his relationship with his wife and the complications that her cousin brings to their household.
4/5 stars

Dexter is Delicious

Goodreads Summary:
Dexter Morgan's happy homicidal life is undergoing some major changes. He's always live by a single golden rule - he kills only people who deserve it. But the Miami blood-spatter analyst has recently become a daddy - to an eight-pound curiosity named Lily Anne - and strangely, Dex's dark urges seem to have left him. Is he ready to become an overprotective father? To pick up soft teddy bears instead of his trusty knife, duct tape, and fishing wire? What's a serial killer to do?

Then Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl who seems to have been abducted by a bizarre group...who just may be vampires...and - possibly - cannibals. Nothing like the familiar hum of his day job to get Dexter's creative dark juices flowing again. Assisting his bull-in-a-china-shop detective sister, Deborah, Dex wades into an investigation that gets more disturbing by the moment. And to compound the complication of Dexter's ever-more-complicated life, a person from his past suddenly reappears...moving dangerously close to his home turf and threatening to destroy the one thing tat has maintained Dexter's pretend human cover and kept him out of the electric chair: his new family.

From an uncharacteristically racy encounter in the Florida Everglades to the most bizarre fringe nightclub in the anything-goes Miami scene, Dexter Is Delicious is an ingenious journey through the dark recesses of Dexter's lovably cold soul. Jeff Lindsay is once again at the top of his game, with this new novel that will thrill fans of his bestselling series.

My Review:
Wow, this is probably the one I liked the least in the series. Dexter's character changed a lot and he was mostly about being a good person, which is a drastic change from his feelingless self. I would still read it as it's still a good story, just not nearly as good as the others.

It is gruesome at points, but unfortunately, not at his hand. It's about vampires and cannibals and a mad dash to save a young girl's life before it's too late and she's taken by both.
3/5 stars

Worst Case

Goodreads Summary:
Best case: survival
The son of one of New York's wealthiest families is snatched off the street and held hostage. His parents can't save him, because this kidnapper isn't demanding money. Instead, he quizzes his prisoner on the price others pay for his life of luxury. In this exam, wrong answers are fatal.

Worst case: death
Detective Michael Bennett leads the investigation. With ten kids of his own, he can't begin to understand what could lead someone to target anyone's children. As another student disappears, one powerful family after another uses their leverage and connections to turn the heat up on the mayor, the press--anyone who will listen--to stop this killer. Their reach extends all the way to the FBI, who send their top Abduction Specialist, Agent Emily Parker. Bennett's life--and love life--suddenly get even more complicated.

This case: Detective Michael Bennett is on it
Before Bennett has a chance to protest the FBI's intrusion on his case, the mastermind changes his routine. His plan leads up to the most devastating demonstration yet--one that could bring cataclysmic devastation to every inch of New York. From the shocking first page to the last exhilarating scene, Worst Case is a non-stop thriller from "America's #1 storyteller"

My Review:
This was #3 of the Michael Bennett series and I want to first say that I didn't read the first two (and after reading this one I found that it's not necessary).

A well educated madman is snatching teens off of the street and Michael Bennett and his FBI counterpart, Emily Parker, are on a mad dash through New York city trying to save the kids before it's too late.

This was a good book, but not great. The biggest problem I had was with Bennett who didn't seem realistic. He did things and said things I can't imagine a cop doing and saying. This is a far cry from the Alex Cross books, however, it was still much better than other Patterson books that have been released in the last few years.
3/5 stars

Night Duty

Goodreads Summary:
Melitta Breznik's first novel opens in an operating room as a young female physician performs an autopsy on a man who had liver disease. This stark and clinical scene sets the stage for another kind of autopsy as the young pathologist reexamines her own life and the lives of her troubled family: her brothers, her dead mother, and her trying father now dying in a nearby hospital ward for alcoholics. Her reflections come to the reader as a stream-of-consciousness outpouring -- an "uncovering of one piece of memory after the other" -- that is at once dreamlike and yet utterly real, and all accomplished with a surgical care for detail and nuance. "This unerringly hushed narration, with its chillingly precise psychological gesture", wrote the Swiss news magazine Facts, "shows how liberating an insistent language can be when functioning as an engine of memory, when, both struggling against and accepting every last bit of pain, someone dares to plumb the all too familiar abyss of family relations".

My Review:
The only way I can describe this novel is as a type of formal stream of consciousness in the first person. It alternates between stream of consciousness and first person narration, which makes it unique and personal.

It's about a daughter who although her father was an alcoholic who was oftentimes absent, she has a love for him that is part need and part duty. Through her autopsies of others she is reminded and immersed into her past and autopsies her own life through both analysis and memories.

The writing flows nicely and the story is well developed. You get to know the protagonist, the daughter, as her work and family history defines her.

3/5 Stars

The Dead Man: Face of Evil by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin

Goodreads Summary:
Matthew Cahill is an ordinary man leading a simple life...until a shocking accident changes everything. Now he can see a nightmarish netherworld of unspeakable evil and horrific violence that nobody else does...

For Cahill, each day is a journey into a dark world he knows nothing about...a quest for the answers to who he is and what he has become...and a fight to save us, and his soul, from the clutches of pure evil.

My Review:
This was a hold your breath, fly by the seat of your pants, page-turner. And every time I turned the page there was a new surprise. Very much in the style of Stephen King: the natural and supernatural exist in the same realm.

It's the story of a man, Matthew Cahill, who after going through a life changing experience returns only to discover that he is attuned in a special way, and is very much in sync with, those who are about to die. He has special powers that he does not yet understand and as the plot unfolds for the reader, it also unfolds for the protagonist, Matthew.

I would highly recommended reading this book. I read it in one sitting and even though I had a very tempting TBR pile, I never faltered from this book and simply couldn't put it down.

4/5 stars

Sister Carrie

Amazon Summary:
This epic of urban life tells of small- town heroine Carrie Meeber, adrift in an indifferent Chicago. Setting out, she has nothing but a few dollars and an unspoiled beauty. Hers is a story of struggle- from sweatshop to stage success-and of the love she inspires in an older, married man whose obsession with her threatens to destroy him.

My Review:
I was immediately hooked with this book. I can't believe a classic I knew so little about grabbed me so quickly. For me this book really wasn't depressing, but a realistic representation of the ways of the world when money is the center. Whether rich or poor every character in this book was focused on money and driven by little else.

I just loved this novel and the foreshadowing throughout sort of paralled the underbelly of the city. The protagonist, Carrie, steps off the train at the beginning of the novel as this naive country girl and in a very short time she figures out what her womanly wiles can win her, assuming she wants to live the life of luxury for free (don't we all)? But is there not always a price? Carrie subconsciously battles this question throughout the novel and the other characters take the ride with her. All the reader can do is brace himself or herself and try not to get hurt in the process.
4/5 stars