Chicago Ridge Picks

”I still see her, our Liz, sitting on a plank, dangling over that well. She held on to the rope that hung from the pulley, her bare feet pressed together so tight that the points on her ankle bones were nearly white. She was six.”

The deathly Badlands of South Dakota will forever remind me of this story. Instead of the usual tale of slavery, this author took a refreshing turn by telling the tale of Rachel Dupree. Rachel worked in the kitchen of a boarding house owned by a prominent and well-to-do African American woman.  This boarding house rented to men who worked in the slaughter houses in Chicago in 1917. It is there that Rachel meets and falls in love with Isaac, the only son of her employer and a soldier in the United States Army.  Isaac makes a pact with Rachel that he will marry her if she gives up her 160 acres of land that she is entitled to in the Homestead Act so he can double his share.  Rachel agrees and leaves her family and everything she has ever known behind and they stake their claim in South Dakota.

Fast forward thirteen years and almost eight pregnancies later (two of whom passed away).  Rachel is pregnant with her eight child and they are experiencing a deadly drought that has resulted in the loss of crops and livestock. And they are about to lower lower their child into a well to try and retrieve some water...

Sophie Kinsella has chosen to move in a different direction with this Young Adult story about a teenager named Audrey.  Audrey experiences such intense bullying at her high school that it results in three girls being expelled and a long hospital stay for her.  The result is really sad.  She is afraid of everything.  The outside world. Loud noises.  People outside her small family.  She doesn’t even own a cellphone anymore because just the sound of a text coming in will bring on a panic attack.  She can’t even make eye contact with people because she feels it is too intense and personal. So she walks around day and night in sunglasses which she hides behind.  She doesn’t return to school and will eventually drop down a year when she feels able to return.  Her doctor gives her a project in order to ease back into communicating with people.  She asks her to make a documentary and talk to people this way.  Starting with her own family.  She can’t make eye contact with them, but maybe through a camera lens it might make a difference.  So Audrey begins filming.

If I gave you the impression that this is a sad, depressing book, the exact opposite is true.  It is FUNNY.  She deals with her issues in a unique way and her family (who are dysfunctional and loving) rally behind her with no questions asked.  Her mother is hilarious with her daily obsessions and rants concerning everything from gluten to video games addiction, and her brother sarcastic responses to every accusation make you think he is practicing for a future career as a lawyer.  And if that is not enough there is a sweet love story that unfolds between her and her brothers friend Linus who starts coming to the house to practice for a gaming tournament and instead makes a connection with her which helps her begin her journey back to health.  I read it in two days and I highly recommend it. 

"Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after." 

I have to start out by saying that this book is brutal.  If you are faint of heart and only expect “rainbow and unicorn” endings, please put this book down and walk away.  You will be immersed in a world where an entire nation is enslaved and rape is a daily experience.  The Martials rule a nation that they wrenched away from the Scholars.  This is a world where it is normal to be beaten and tortured and the ability to “read” is a death sentence.

Laia is a free girl who lives with her grandparents and her older brother.  She spends her days canning jam to sell at market, or helping her grandfather with his healing herbs and potions.  Then one night, the Martials military hit men, “the Masks” come for her brother.  They arrest him for affiliating himself with the rebels.  Her grandparents are executed in front of her and Laia manages to flee.  Her only hope is to find the rebels who are living in the catacombs beneath the city.  She hopes to invoke “Izaat” which is the Scholars version of “no man left behind”.  Laia’s parents were famous leaders of the rebellion, so the rebels are obligated to break her brother out of prison.  A deal is quickly struck to break her brother out IF she promises to act as a spy for the Scholars by infiltrating the Martials biggest Military academy and being the Commandments personal slave.

There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest solder and secretly, its most unwilling.  All Elias wants is to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce.  He is making plans to run away the day after graduating to the “free lands” but fate and the Empire itself has other plans for him.  He suddenly finds himself in competition with his best friend and two other soldiers in these horrible tests called the Trials.  The winner will be crowned the next Emperor.

Can you imagine living your life never being able to forget anything? I mean you remember the detail of every single thing that is done, that is said, looks, tastes and feels? They say time heals all wounds, but that is because time enables you to FORGET, to lock away, and you move on. It is the minds way of protecting itself.  But when you CAN’T forget, you live with the raw emotions of traumatic events like they just happened yesterday.

Amos Decker life changed forever twice.  The first time was on the football field, where on his very first play as a pro-athlete, a head on collision knocked him off the field for good, and left him with this ability...of never forgetting anything.  The second time his life changed, was two decades later. Amos, who is now a police detective, comes home from a work one day to find his whole family slaughtered.  Unable to forget a single detail of the horror he experienced, his life spirals out of control and he ends up losing his job, his house and becomes a homeless man on the street.  The identity of his families killer is unknown, and the case goes cold.  He eventually cleans up a little bit and gets enough jobs as a private investigator to rent a room at a motel.  He passes his days and simply exists.  

Then one day, over a year later, a man turns himself in to the police and claims that he is the serial killer that murdered his wife, daughter, and brother-in-law.  At the same time that this stranger is confessing to the murders, a horrible massacre is taking place at the local high school near by.  Amos is called in to investigate and quickly realizes that these two events are not only linked, but that the real killer is leaving messages that will taunt him, torture him, and force him to relive his nightmares. In order to figure out why his family was taken from him, Amos might just have to sacrifice his life.

Okay...So if you have already read this book, I would love for you to drop me a line and let me know what you thought.  This story had a lot of media hype and came and went so fast due to popular demand that it took me a while to get a hold of it. 

I usually don’t listen to media hype. For instance, Gone Girl was such a hit that they made a movie about it.  People were raving at the authors dark, twisted story line.  I like dark.  I like Twisted.  I HATED THE BOOK.  I should have listened to my instincts with this story as well. Even though It did not inspire hate this time, It did irritate the crap out of me.  I mean, I just wanted to slap the main character a few times and yell at her to get it together.  She is drunk, she is sloppy, and she kept getting herself into situations that could have easily been avoided if she was just a tad sober.  

The story revolves around Rachel,a divorced alcoholic who spends her days riding the train into London.  She harasses her ex husband and his new family daily with phone calls, text messages, and turns up at his door a raging drunk.  She pretends to go to work every day to the job she was fired from so her roommate doesn't kick her out. She is usually under the influence on the train (or craving a drink) and likes to people watch outside her window. A young couple lives in one of the homes the train passes and  is just a few houses down from where she used to live,and where her ex still lives with his new wife and baby.  Rachel likes to watch this couple on their deck and she creates a whole life for them in her head...Names, occupations, love story.  Except one day, the train passes by and she sees another man kissing the woman.  The next day, the woman goes missing.  

Okay so this book had me going til the very end.  I honestly could not predict the outcome because every time I felt sure about something, the author threw in another loop.  

“The stranger appears out of nowhere, perhaps in a bar, or a parking lot, or at the grocery store.  His identity is unknown.  His motives are unclear.  His information is undeniable.  Then he whispers a few words in your ear and disappears, leaving you picking up the pieces of your shattered world.”

Adam Pierce is one of those people. A lawyer, a husband, and a father of two teenage boys.  He is living the American dream.  Then one day, all of this changes when the stranger approaches him at his sons Lacrosse meeting and whispers a secret about his wife in his ear.  Suddenly, the world he thought he knew disappears when, upon confronting his wife, she disappears.  Adam suddenly finds himself tangled up in something even darker than his wife’s deception, and if he makes one wrong move, the conspiracy he stumbled into will not only ruin lives, it will end them.

Every time I read a book in this series, I literally can’t put it down. I’m serious. I had to be at work at nine a.m. today and I finally went to sleep at 3 a.m. last night.  Anne Bishop is a master story teller and I am not joking when I tell you that you will remain on the edge of your seat, feverishly turning the pages, anxious to see what will happen next.  I was so curious to see what the breaking point will be for the “Others” and what the consequences will be for the human populations that are still in denial of what kind of world they live in, that I got very little sleep, and today I am a walking ZOMBIE writing this review while drinking my fourth cup of coffee.

Nevien Shaabneh will be at the Chicago Ridge Public Library on Thursday, May 28th at 7 P.m. for a "meet and greet" and book signing.

My cousin, who is a local high school teacher in the south suburbs first mentioned this book to me a few months ago.  I put it on my "to-read" list and forgot about it. But then a patron came into the library and asked me if I read this book.  Since part of my Job in Adult Reference is Readers Advisory and I run a Book Club, I decided to give it a go.  Now let me tell you, that the patron who asked me this question was not very happy with the author.  She felt that the author made all Arab men look bad and gave non-Arab people a twisted view of how the culture is.  I picked up this book and sank into the pages and into the world of Layla and after flying through it (and passing it on to my best friend) I have to say that I totally disagree with my patron.  But we are all entitled to our opinion.

This story was a SOAK YOUR PILLOW with tears kind of book.  It is a beautifully written story that really brought home the Holocaust like never before. It is written from a fresh perspective and the author does and outstanding job of researching historical events and weaving them flawlessly into her story.

Alyson Richman really evokes magic with this love story of Lenka and Josef, two Czechoslovakian Jews who are briefly married then ripped apart by war and circumstances outside their control.  You really get a feel for the concentration camp where Lenka is forced to live and you learn about the artists (like Lenka) who were forced to paint pictures and postcards for the Germans to hang in their homes.  It was the first time I learned about the underground effort by these artists and sympathetic friends on the outside, who were secretly painting pictures of what was really going on in the camps so the outside world could see the horrible reality.

"As a young man, I fell in love with a girl who loved me.  Her smile was a golden rope around my heart.  Wherever she pulled me, I followed.  But sometimes even the thickest rope frays and gets lost."

The year is 2008 and a young lawyers career comes to a screeching halt as it slams against the tidal wave of the recession that has drowned everyone in its path.  In one day, Samantha Kofer goes from being employed at a top wall street firm to being downsized, furloughed, and escorted out of the building.  Being one of the "lucky" associates, she is told that if she works at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, there might be a slim chance that she would get her job back.

This story revolves around a boy named Jack who lives in a village on the coast of Maine.  It has all the elements of a good horror story….

A winding road on the coast with a light tower in the distance ☑

A sinister atmosphere ☑

Dark and stormy with things that go bump in the night   ☑

A presence that you can see from the corner of your eye ☑

The list goes on and on and slowly builds on the tone of menace and starts moving quickly as the incidents escalate.