At 18, Andi Alpers has lost her will to live. Her brother Truman has died, her father has deserted the family and is putting her mother in a mental hospital. In Paris, where her father is working on a project on King Louis-Charles, Andi vows to make their three-week visit a misery. But when she finds a journal that might hold the missing key to Louis-Charles history, she completely forgets about everything, including her senior thesis, and focuses instead on solving the mystery of his death.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a historical fiction set mainly in 1996 and 2004. The novel opens with Dokka, a villager in the town of Eldar in Chechnya is kidnapped by the Feds, leaving behind his daughter Havaa. A kind neighbor, Akhmed takes it upon himself to care for her and brings her to a local hospital where he hopes she can find refuge. This novel is beautifully written with gorgeous intertwining storylines.
It’s just a simple game of dice between Love and Death. Love is personified as a man and Death is personified by a woman. They each pick a player and roll the dice, the players have to choose each other over everything else or Death will take her player. Death has always won the game, since the beginning.
A beautiful love story set in the jazz age of Seattle. For centuries, humans have been the pawns in the game between Love and Death. You may be familiar with a few of the challenges, Antony and Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and Paris, Romeo and Juliet. And Death always wins…always.
A new game is afoot and Love and Death have chosen the players.
Flora is an African-American girl who is truly at home in the sky. A plane mechanic by day and a jazz singer by night, Flora lives with her grandmother and is trying to save up enough money to finance a flight around the world!
At the funeral of her brother, Liesel steals her first book. When she arrives at her foster home, freshly separated from her mother, she is terrified. But she does not expect the incredible kindness shown by her eccentric accordion foster father and begrudging love by her foster mother. With their help, she slowly learns to read, and shares the books she steals from book burnings and the mayor’s library to her terrified neighbors during bombing raids, as well as to the Jewish man hiding in her basement.
When Tamar’s grandfather dies, she finds out he left her a box containing a series of clues and coded messages. These lead her to discover another Tamar from the past, a resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Holland a century before. His story is one of passionate love, betrayal, jealousy, and tragedy against the backdrop of the daily fear during the second World War, and unraveling it is about to change her life forever.
I thought this was a very well written book. I enjoyed it because it is about a side of World War II that I haven't often read about-the Dutch resistance efforts.
Vango is a thrilling adventure mystery set in Europe on the cusp of the second World War, focused on the mysterious identity of a young man on the cusp of adulthood. Not even Vango, said young man, knows the mystery of his origins, and no one believes he is constantly watched and hunted by shadowy figures. They consider him paranoid. Talented, pleasant, and promising, but strangely paranoid.
Beginning at midnight on Sunday August 13, 1961 the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany, ran coils of barbed wire fencing through the center of Berlin. By morning, East Berlin was completely cut off from West Berlin. After the wire came the wall and the Stasi – the East German state security service, one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed.
The companion novel to Saints, this book looks at the same situation from a different angle. Little Bao has grown up reenacting his favorite Chinese operas and looking up to his father. When his father is hobbled by European colonists, Bao's older brothers take over the family, relegating Bao to the role of little brother. In secret he trains with a martial arts master, and quickly out paces his brothers.
Four Girl is unwanted and unloved by her family. Seen as a demon-child, her family practically gives her up as a lost cause. Four girl, searching for acceptance discovers catholic missionaries near her small Chinese village. After one exceptionally harsh experience with her grandfather, Four runs into the forest and sees a vision of Jeanne D'Arc. As Four distances herself from her family, and grows closer to the missionaries visions of Jeanne come more often, offering peace and guidance.
