Brush Back, by Sara Paretsky

Brush Back by Sara Paretsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Live long enough, you're bound to have a person or two from the past you'd rather keep there. In Sara Paretsky's latest V.I. Warshawski mystery, Brush Back, that person is the difficult Stella Guzzo, a woman who spent twenty-five years in prison for the murder of her daughter, Annie.

When Frank Guzzo arrives at V.I.'s office with a favor to ask, Vic almost turns him down. Frank wants Vic's help in exonerating his mother, an angry woman who hated Vic's beloved parents - especially her mother, Gabriella - and who has recently gotten out of prison for the murder of her daughter. Against her better judgement, V.I. agrees to go back to the old neighborhood to ask questions.

Meanwhile, Vic also has company - Bernie, the daughter of one of her late cousin Boom-Boom's team mates, a likable and high-spirited teen who occasionally tags along while Vic checks out a few leads from Frank and Stella's past.

Before long, the questioning has Vic in trouble with several of the local corrupt politicos, some with ties to the Russian mob, as well as several of Chicago's gangs. The run-ins nearly cost Vic her life, as well as getting Bernie injured.

Will Vic get Stella exonerated? Will she manage to get Bernie back to her parents alive? How does Vic escape more gang and mob violence with her life? Will her latest love-interest, Jake, stick around? All these, and more, make this one of the best books in Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski series - all of which are well-written nail-biting page-turners.

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One True Thing, by Anna Quindlen

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Ellen Gulden visits her parents' home for a few days, she does not expect her life to drastically change. But that is exactly what happens in One True Thing by Anna Quindlen.

Ellen has a successful career as a magazine writer in New York City that suits her perfectly. During her visit home, she and her brothers learn that their mother, Kate, is dying of cancer. Their father, George, lets Ellen know that he expects her to leave her job to come home and care for Kate, as no one else will do; her brothers are still in college, George, a professor at a local college, cannot take time off, and demands that Ellen is the one who will care for Kate. Ellen resists, but, in the end, is back soon to care for Kate.

The first part of One True Thing shows the interactions of the two women, one who is driven to the point of having been described as "the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes," the other a homemaker to perfection. Ellen has always lived for her father's approval, while rejecting her mother's traditional life. Yet she comes to realize that there is much more to her mother than she had realized.

As part one progresses, so does Kate's cancer, so that at the end of the first part, she finally passes away...with a little help.

Part two of the novel details the aftermath of Kate's death. Ellen is arrested, as the district attorney (along with others in town) thinks that Ellen has performed a mercy-killing of her mother, for several reasons: she was Kate's primary care-giver, an autopsy showed that Kate had enough morphine in her system to kill her (morphine having been prescribed to keep her pain to a manageable level), and, years earlier, a then 15-year-old Ellen had written that euthanasia should be legal; if we put a terminal pet to sleep, why not people?

Of course, Ellen didn't do it; she suspects her father did. We read where Ellen stays, how she deals with a grand jury, how she mistakenly believes her father helped assist Kate in dying, and, in the end, how it turns out both were wrong: neither one killed Kate.

One True Thing may sound morbid, and while part of the story's premise - dying of cancer - may be difficult, the book is actually beautifully written and shows how the two main characters (Ellen and Kate) grow closer because of the horrible circumstances. Anna Quindlen has taken what could be a difficult premise and used it to skillfully write a beautiful story of love, strength, and the idea that things are not always as they appear. It is a book to be read again and again.

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Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach

Note: This is a repeat of 2017's sole post, with slight changes. I should be back to writing here on a regular basis.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

During the early 1970s, it seemed everyone read Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. I had read it several times, and had fond memories of it.

Several years ago, I received a copy of this slim book from two different people and decided to reread it to see how it stood up over the intervening years. Since then, I've reread it several times, usually during the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull tells of a seagull who doesn't quit fit in and is banned from his flock as a misfit. Jonathan's misdeed? He loves to fly, loves learning how to improve on flight, how to fly faster, and knows that such learning is, itself, what makes life worth living. The flock, however, has come to the understanding that flight should be merely to be used for food-gathering. Thus, since Jonathan can't comply with living beneath what he is capable of, he is labeled a misfit and cast out of the flock.

It doesn't take long for him to reach a higher consciousness, learning from those who have gone on before him. However, those gulls who teach him soon admit that Jonathan is higher than they are, and that the student has become a teacher.

Soon Jonathan realizes that he must go back to his previous flock and start teaching the newer out-casts, several of whom call him the Son of the Great Gull.

This novella, with its photos of seagulls, can be considered spiritual in nature without being preachy. It shows the reader that we all need to be the best we can be, that we should be our truest self, and while we are learning from those more knowledgeable than we are, we are also to teach those coming up after us.

This is one book that I feel has held up well over the years. It is also one of the books that I read every year, usually sometime after Christmas, and wrapping around New Year's Day.

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