The Secret Life of Shirley Sullivan - Lisa Ireland

79 year old Shirley Sullivan has a plan - to take her 83 year old husband Frank on an adventure, to take him back home.  Slipping him out from his nursing home takes a bit of organizing and on their journey we learn about how they met, and the story of their marriage.  This is a sweet story and I like that the protagonists are seniors having their own adventure. 4/5 

The Second Sleep - Robert Harris

Christopher Fairfax is a young priest, who arrives by horse to a small English village where he needs to perform a funeral for the parson who has died.  I did enjoy the first half of this book, and was pretty sure I knew what was happening.   I however did not get the 2nd half of the book and felt like I should have been a bit more shocked by the twist, which didn't feel too surprising.   Somehow I felt like I was getting schooled by this cautionary tale, and it didn't really shock me like it was intended. 3/5

House On Fire - Joseph Finder

Joseph Finder is for me a better Lee Child than Lee Child has been lately.  His Nick Heller is smart and fast and although I found the first part of the book easier to read and more satisfying than the 2nd half, it was still a pretty solid read.   Hired to infiltrate a wealthy family in the pharmaceutical business, Nick Heller finds himself becoming trying to figure out who is trying to bring this big company down.  4/5

The Forgotten Village - Lorna Cook

A dual timeline tale about Melissa who is on holiday and visits a small English village that was requisitioned during the war, forcing all the inhabitants to leave their homes never to return.  I found the wartime story felt a little out of place, like it should have been set in 1914, not the 1940s.  I also figured out the plot half way though, so wasn't surprised at the ending.  3/5.

The Oceans Between Us - Gill Thompson

Jack is five when a bomb explodes in his London home during the war, and he is separated from his mother Molly.  Sent to Australia as part of a child migrant scheme it is hard for him to adjust to his changed circumstances and he wonders if he will ever see his mother again.

Based on real life events. I found this book easy to read and I did have an interest in the characters, but found it a bit predictable in parts.  3/5

A Dream of Italy - Nicky Pellegrino

I was happy to read this bit of escapism during lockdown.  The story of three groups of people who are searching for something and all apply to pay one Euro for a home in a remote Italian mountain village.  They all travel to visit their new homes, and reading this book I got the sense of warm summer evenings, red wine and yummy Italian food, and it made me want to pack my bags and move.  Except you can't go anywhere at the moment anyways. 4/5

The German Midwife - Mandy Robotham

This novel is a bit of an alternative fiction about a young Midwife Anke, who is using her skills to help young women deliver their babies in the horrors of Ravensbruk Camp.  Her skills are recognized and she is plucked away to assist another woman in private, and finds herself and her family at risk if anything goes wrong.

A short novel, it does a good job of telling a somewhat complex story without weighing it down with too much detail.  I liked that the plot of Ankes backstory is spread out along the story, and I did like her as a character, while feeling slightly uncomfortable with the subject material.  4/5

Blue Moon - Lee Child

Oh man, deja vu again.  There's a bus, a country town, a bunch of bad guys, punching, shooting, running, car crashes, not many police, a chick, some ex military and more of the previous 23 books.  I kept wondering  when he got a fresh change of underpants and how bad he smelt with no deodorant after all of that running around.  I keep saying I won't read the next one, but I keep coming back I guess until it's all over.  2/5

Miss Austen - Gill Hornby

This is the story of Cassandra Austen, Jane Austens older sister who years after the authors death goes to a family home to try and retrieve some of the family letters.  Afraid that they may be published, putting a bad spin on the family story, we get to hear about the girls earlier lives and their romances. 

It is always interesting to think about how a womans life at the time was determined by the men of the family, and how there was little security for those who were unmarried or poor and their destiny was at the whim of fathers and brothers.  4/5

A Single Thread - Tracy Chevalier

This was a quiet little book about I guess what is a quiet little life.  Violet is considered a spinster in 1937 after losing her young sweetheart in the first World War.  She leaves her overbearing mothers home to make a new life for herself in Winchester.  There, on a  visit to the cathedral she comes across a group of women who making kneelers and cushions for the church.  She makes new friends and begins to find a place for herself.

I enjoyed this little read - Tracy Chevalier has a way of dropping me right into the time period she is writing about, and I often think about women like Violet, who try to make a life away from the family and how hard it must have been for them, and how easy we have it in comparison now. 4/5

The World That We Knew - Alice Hoffman

From the first page I knew that I loved this book.  Telling the story of two young women in the Holocaust, it is weaved and laced with a magical touch.  Lea whose mother Hanni senses the coming clouds and sends her away, Ettie who escapes with her sister and Ava who is sent to look after the young Lea.   Such a touching and moving book about love and grief which are bound together, and such a unique original story telling style.

I found myself relieved to read such a beautiful book on the last day of the year as it gives me hope for more fiction in 2020. 5/5

The Giver of Stars - Jojo Moyes

In 1937 a young Englishwoman Alice marries a wealthy handsome American Bennett, and goes to live with him in rural Kentucky.  The marriage is not what she expects, and in order to fill in her time, she takes a job with the rural packhorse library service.   Joining a remarkable group of women, she travels the country trails and roads  distributing books and magazines to women and children, many of whom have little contact with outsiders and little to no education.

I was just waiting for a touch of magic from this book, and I was a bit umoved and even bored by it.  I am sure it will make a great ensemble movie, I can picture it easily easily being adapted.  3/5

The Collaborator - Diane Armstrong

I have enjoyed many of Diane Armstrongs earlier books, and she writes fiction and non fiction that seems centered on the World War II experience.  This one fell a little flat for me.  I did enjoy the parts based  on young  Australian journalist Annika and her search for what happened to her family in Budapest in the War.  So much of it however seemed focused on a trial that occurred after the war and I struggled to read it,  particularly with the second half of the book dragging for me. 3/5

The Hand Maid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

I've read the original novel several times over the years, watched the movie, and enjoyed the current tv series very much, so I thought I would reread the story as a graphic novel.  It is pretty true to the original story and makes it digestible in one quick and easily read.   Its pretty grim stuff.

I am sure that most people are aware of the story.  In a not too distant dystopian future in the country of Gilead, furtile women are transformed into handmaids whose job is to produce babies for their infertile ruling classes.  The story centers on Offred, a young woman who is separated from her young daughter and husband, and tries to figure out how she can escape from this rigid controlled society.  4/5

Cilka's Journey - Heather Morris

This is another of those stories that will stay with you.  The author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz follows up on filling in the story of Cilka Klein, one of the characters of the earlier book, but this definitely can be read alone.   As a 16 year old sent to  Auschwitz Birkenhau she is picked out because of her beauty and abused.  It is hard to imagine what horrors a girl had to see and do in order to survive in such circumstances.

When the war ends, she is then charged by the soviets with being a collaborator and given a 15 year sentence to a Siberian gulag.  There the horrors continue, with little to eat, hard labor digging coal and being abused by the male prisoners,  but she is able to find friendships with the women she is imprisoned with and help work in the hospitals and ambulance. 

Sitting in our warm and cozy homes it is hard to imagine what women like this went through during the war, and wonder if we would have had the strength to survive. 5/5

All The Flowers In Paris - Sarah Jio

Caroline wakes up in a Paris hospital with no memory of her accident or what went on in her life before, and we meet Celine struggling to survive during the war with a young daughter and father to protect.  I have been on a bit of a run with WWII stories, so I may have been a bit jaded when I read this novel.  Normally I like Sarah Jio novels but I wasn't as drawn into this one as others.

I always get a bit frustrated at stories like this.  One where the thirty something living in a huge Paris apartment, seems to have unlimited funds, isn't worried about paying rent or bills or worrying about a job.  She also seems to have no other family or friends that might be concerned about her.  I couldn't quite believe elements about Celines life either.  I wasn't sure how many florists would have survived in the war, who was out growing flowers?  I am sure that rations would not have had a relatively poor family eating pastries at breakfast, when only a 1/3 of a loaf was rationed for the week.  Having lettuce and tomatoes when it was snowing outside or going to a cafe for a salad just didn't seem realistic to me.  It was just these small things that made me lose a bit of interest in the story.  3/5

The Mother-In-Law - Sally Hepworth

Lucy is married to Ollie with three small children, and no matter what she says or does, she can't get along with her mother-in-law Diana.  This story gives us multiple points of view and swings between the past and present, but for once I didn't get to confused and could follow the storyline pretty easily, which made it a quick and enjoyable read for me. 4/5

Lock Every Door - Riley Sager

Jules has just about hit rock bottom, when she applies for a job working at a famous New York landmark  All she has to do is to house sit a fabulous penthouse apartment for 3 months and be paid for it.  Of course nothing is quite as simple as it sounds, and things begin to look sinister quite quickly.  I did feel the menace in the story and was waiting for probably more spookiness than it offered, as I realized about half way through what was going on.  Still it was a pretty evenly paced Gothic horror that didn't fizzle out at the end like so many.  4/5

The Note Through The Wire - Doug Gold

This is a fictionalized novel about Bruce Murray a young New Zealand Prisoner of War and his chance encounter with Josefine Lobnik, a young Yugoslavian resistance fighter.   Such a nice unique war story that is based on the true story of his in-laws and how they got met.  It was so nice to read a story that sadly had to be based on letters and articles as like so many of their generation, they didn't talk about their experiences, and to have this story before it is lost.  4/5

You'll Never See Me Again - Lesley Pearse

When Bettys husband returns from the war a shell of the man he was, she realizes that she will be trapped with him and his shrew of a mother.   Escaping, she finds a new life for herself, but she wonders if she will be able to escape her past.  Finding a new life as Mabel, she finds new friends and supporters and begins to have the life she deserves. 

I felt comfortable with this book as soon as I started it, and it was an easy read all the way through as many Lesley Pearse stories are.  She is comfortable with telling stories of women finding there way in the world, when they were often restricted by the society rules of the time.  When without money, you were often forced into doing what the family wanted and unable to choose your own path . 4/5