February 2025 Books

 Personal Reading

Queen's Thief Series

Book 1: The Thief

Book 2: The Queen of Attolia

Book 3: The King of Attolia

Book 4: A Conspiracy of Kings

Book 5: Thick as Thieves

Book 6: Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

A gripping young adult series full of political intrigue, mystery, plot twists, memorable characters, dry humor, and some laugh-out-loud moments.  Set in a fictional world with Greek sounding names and its own mythology and pantheon of gods, this series is similar to (but pre-dates) the False Prince series by Jennifer Neilsen.  Each book is told from a different character's perspective.  It's every bit as intricate and complicated as The False Prince, but a bit darker and more violent, with more involvement of "the gods" and more actual cursing (damn, hell, bastard, and the like) and mild innuendo (non-explicit references to lovers, marital infidelity, and what might or might not have happened on a wedding night).  There is some sweet, understated romance, not all steamy.  I had to read the first three books at least twice and used the search feature on the ebooks to piece together the pieces of the puzzle for a better understanding.  There were some plot twists that I was able to predict, but some caught me by surprise.  After reading all the books, I went back and listened to the audiobooks.  I liked the ones narrated by Jeff Woodman best, but it appears that he hasn't narrated the later books, so I had to settle for Steve West as narrator for those.

Moira's Pen

by Megan Whalen Turner

A collection of short stories and background information set in and around the world of The Queen's Thief series. Very enjoyable.

Biography/History

The Spy and the Traitor

by Ben Mcintyre

A fascinating true story about a Russian KGB man, Oleg Gordievsky, who worked as a spy for the British government until he was betrayed by the CIA's Aldrich Ames in 1985.  The account of his escape from Moscow was on-the-edge-of-your-seat storytelling.  Content considerations: there are some details about Gordievsky's and Ames' adultery.

D. L. Moody

by Kevin Belmonte

A fairly short biography of the famous American preacher D. L. Moody (from the mid-1800s).  A good introduction to his life and work.  Does not delve deeply into his doctrinal beliefs. Short chapters make it easy to read.  Lots of quotes from friends, letters, and other biographers.

The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne

by Catherine Reef

A fairly easy to read biography of these famous sisters who wrote several novels that are now considered classics.  They had to write under masculine pen names because it wasn't considered proper for women to be authors in their time (Victorian era).  If you've read their works, it is easy to see the influence of their lives and experiences on their novels.

Newbery Award Books

Maniac Magee

by Jerry Spinelli

A homeless white orphan makes friends on both sides of town (black and white) and helps them begin to see that people are people -- some kind, some mean -- no matter what the color of their skin.  The audiobook was well-read, with the appropriate accents and dialects.  The message of the book was good, though there was some crudeness of language.

1991 Newbery Winner.

Jacob have I Loved

by Katherine Paterson

A story of twin girls and their sibling rivalry, told from the perspective of the one who seems to not be loved as much by her parents.  I got about halfway through before I was really sick of the spiteful, judgmental grandmother who used Bible verses out of context and her "religion" to verbally abuse her granddaughter.  I was also turned off by the girl seeming to "fall in love with" and be aroused by being close to her 70-year-old male neighbor. Abandoned and don't recommend.  The more I read of Newbery winners, the less I trust them as reliable recommendations of good books for kids.

1981 Newbery Winner.

Read-Aloud

Understood Betsy

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Elizabeth Anne is an orphan raised by her unmarried, overprotective aunt and grandmother.  When the grandmother becomes ill, Elizabeth Anne (Betsy) is sent to live for a while with the dreaded Putney relatives on their farm.  They are unexpectedly kind and do not coddle her as her other aunt did.  She learns to do many things she never imagined and to think for herself.  A delightful book.  Audiobook was excellently narrated.

January 2025 Books

 Personal Reading

George Knightley, Esquire Book 1: Charity Envieth Not

George Knightley, Esquire Book 2: Lend Me Leave

by Barbara Cornthwaite

 A delightful retelling of Jane Austen's Emma from Mr. George Knightley's perspective.  It was faithful to Knightley's character as portrayed by Austen.  Very well done and clean. Recommended for fans of Emma.

The London House

by Katherine Reay

A combination of modern romance and historical fiction.  Spurred on by a former college friend's about-to-be published article about her aunt's supposed defection from Britain to run off with a Nazi lover, Caroline sets off from Boston to London to uncover the truth about her aunt and namesake and save her family's reputation.  Along the way, she finds healing in her own relationships with her parents and her friend.  A fascinating read, though a bit "steamier" than previous books by this author that I've read.

A Shadow in Moscow

by Katherine Reay

From the back book cover: In the thick of the Cold War, a betrayal at the highest level risks the lives of two courageous female spies: MI6’s best Soviet agent and the CIA’s newest Moscow recruit.

Vienna, 1954

After losing everyone she loves in the final days of World War II, Ingrid Bauer agrees to a hasty marriage with a gentle Soviet embassy worker and follows him home to Moscow. But nothing within the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime is what it seems, including her new husband, whom Ingrid suspects works for the KGB. Inspired by her daughter’s birth, Ingrid risks everything and reaches out in hope to the one country she understands and trusts—Britain, the country of her mother’s birth. She begins passing intelligence to MI6, navigating a world of secrets and lies, light and shadow.

Moscow, 1980

A student in the Foreign Studies Initiative, Anya Kadinova finishes her degree at Georgetown University and boards a flight home to Moscow, leaving behind the man she loves and a country she’s grown to respect. Though raised by dedicated and loyal Soviet parents, Anya soon questions an increasingly oppressive and paranoid regime at the height of the Cold War. Then the KGB murders her best friend and Anya chooses her side. Working in a military research lab, she relays Soviet plans and schematics to the CIA in an effort to end the 1980s arms race.

The past catches up to the present when an unprecedented act of treachery threatens all agents operating within Eastern Europe, and both Ingrid and Anya find themselves in a race for their lives against time and the KGB.

This was a fascinating, page-turning, tear-jerking Cold War spy novel. The author's list of books for further reading about true stories that inspired elements of this novel just might derail my carefully planned to-read-list for the year.  This is a good one to pair with The Berlin Letters by the same author and The Divine Plan by Paul Kengor.

A Portrait of Emily Price

by Katherine Reay

A typical novel by Katherine Reay in her modern romance genre: single protagonist in her late 20s struggling with work and relationships meets cute, sensitive guy who helps her work through her issues as she helps his family work through theirs, using lessons from literature to help them.

Classics

Martin Chuzzlewit

by Charles Dickens

Old Martin Chuzzlewit is rich, crotchety, and justly paranoid that all his relations are after his money.  He is estranged from his grandson and namesake, young Martin Chuzzlewit.  His only ally is an orphan girl he has taken under his protection to serve him, with the stipulation that she only benefits as long as he is alive. A long, winding tale of all the various characters who touch these two characters' lives.  Contains an unflattering (but amusing to me) portrait of America.  Dickens later visited America a second time (after the civil war and abolition of slavery), revised his opinion, and published an apology of sorts.  When it was published, this book was not as popular as his previous ones. This led to financial difficulties, which led him to write A Christmas Carol to try to recoup some of the monetary losses. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, narrated by Frederick Davidson.

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

Plain Jane grows up unwanted and mistreated by her aunt and cousins, is shipped off to a school for girls run by a miserly church man, and becomes a governess for a French girl who is the ward of mysterious Mr. Rochester.  She falls in love with Mr. Rochester, but the wedding is called off at the last minute because of a dreadful secret he's been hiding. That's not the end of the story, but to tell more would be a spoiler.  I really enjoyed the audiobook narrated by Alison Larkin (she also did all of the Austen novels).

Wuthering Heights 

by Emily Bronte

The term "toxic love" is a popular term these days. I don't know when it was coined, but this novel is the perfect illustration of it. A boy of unknown origins (Heathcliff) is brought to the home of a well-to-do family in England and is belittled by most of them, except for the father and the daughter (Catherine).  After the father dies, the boy is treated worse than ever.  Heathcliff and Catherine are friends, but she rejects him and marries another.  Heathcliff disappears for a while but returns with a plan to exact revenge on both families (Catherine's and her husband's).  The long-time housekeeper narrates the story to a visitor.  There is one character that speaks in such a heavy dialect, it's almost impossible to decipher (unless you have an annotated version that translates it).  There are no protagonists in the story.  All the main characters are despicable and impossible to sympathize with.  I'm not sure what the appeal of this story is or why it is a "classic."

North and South

by Elizabeth Gaskell

From the library description: The novel follows the story of Margaret Hale in her move from the tranquil setting in rural southern England to the raw and turbulent northern town of Milton. Margaret takes an instant dislike to her new home and its people, including the handsome and charismatic cotton mill owner John Thornton whom she believes epitomizes everything unpleasant about the North. As events throw Margaret and Thornton together, the two spirited characters have to overcome their repressed physical attraction for one another and conquer prejudices of class and circumstance.

This book reads like a Dickens novel (the author was a contemporary of Dickens and the novel was published in one of Dickens' magazines) in that it has long passages dealing with the social issues of the day, but the characters are not as interesting and colorful as Dickens' characters, and it lacks the ironic and sarcastic wit of Dickens.  Fortunately, it wasn't as long as Dickens' novels.  I almost quit reading it several times.  I'm glad I pushed myself to finish it, but I likely won't ever read it again.

Biography/History

God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

The memoirs of a Dutch man who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s and 1960s. Very powerful.  Content considerations: somewhat graphic descriptions of his life in the military prior to conversion to Christianity; one co-worker in a factory makes suggestive comments.

The Divine Plan

by Paul Kengor and Robert Orlando

After reading a couple of novels set during the Cold War, I was inspired to learn more about some of the key historical figures of the latter part of that time.  This book discussed the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, their faith in God, and their belief that God had a divine purpose for sparing both of them from assassination attempts.  Fascinating to me, especially since I grew up during this time.  As a kid, I certainly didn't understand the significance of many world events that I heard about on the news.  So it was interesting to read more about it.

The Billion Dollar Spy

by David E. Hoffman

The subtitle is "A True Story of Cold-War Espionage and Betrayal."  This was a fascinating account of the spy work done in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, focusing largely on Adolf Tolkachev, a Russian engineer who passed thousands of secret military documents to the CIA before he was caught and executed.  While it delves deeply in Toklachev's work, it also gives much background about the developments of spycraft during this era and the people who worked with Tolkachev.  A good companion to the novel A Shadow in Moscow by Katherine Rheay.  The audiobook was excellently narrated.

Newbery Award Books

Up a Road Slowly

by Irene Hunt

This is called a "coming of age" story, as the main character grows up from up distraught seven-year-old to a seventeen-year-old high school graduate.  After her mother's death, Julie and her brother are sent to live with her spinster aunt in the country. I couldn't figure out why the father was so uninvolved with his daughter or why the boy was sent to some boarding school after a year and rarely heard from again.  Though Julie struggles against her aunt's "inflexibility," she does learn from her and grows and matures.  As a child, her brother and a friend forcefully hold her down while another boy kisses her.  She punches the boy in the eye, but she is the one who gets in trouble for hitting rather than the boys getting in trouble.  One disturbing comment in the book was something along the lines of "a woman is never complete until she has loved a man."  Later, Julie thinks she is in love with a handsome boy in high school (even though he's only using her to do his schoolwork) because she is lonely and longing for someone to love her.  Her family doesn't approve, steps in to prevent him using her for other purposes, and finally offers some good advice. I don't recommend it.

Genre: Realistic Fiction.  1967 Newbery Medal winner.

A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L'engle

Meg Murry, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin travel through time and space to find and rescue Meg's father who has been captured by an evil force, known as IT, which seeks to bring everyone into a life of conformity and uniformness. Kind of a science-fiction/fantasy blend.  We listened to the audiobook and my kids though it was kind of weird and aren't interested in reading anymore of the series.  I disliked the blending of fantasy worlds with out-of-context Bible quotes; the author also equated Jesus with other "good men" like Buddha.

Genre: Fantasy.  1963 Newbery Medal winner.

Middle-grade Fiction

Between Flowers and Bones

by Carolyn Leiloglou

This is the second book in The Restorationists series. See my review of the first book, Beneath the Swirling Sky. Cousins Vincent and Georgia are traveling through paintings again fighting the "distortionists" who steal and distort famous paintings.  Georgia struggles with her attitude toward her cousin, as he seems to get more attention and praise from her parents and grandfather than she does.  In the end, they learn to work together to accomplish their mission.  This episode concludes nicely, but the story isn't finished yet.  There's at least one more book planned in the series.

Read-Aloud

Juan Seguin: A Hero of Texas

by Rita Kerr

A brief introduction to Juan Seguin, who was an important figure in Texas history and the fight for independence.