Jane O'Connor's Dangerous Admissions
This light mystery centers on a former copy editor who is now giving tours at her son's elite private school; when the director of college admissions turns up dead, she finds herself snooping into the case. I will note that any book featuring a character who's always noting grammatical errors should be gone over with a fine-tooth comb--I found two typos. Anyway, it's basically exactly as it sounds, right down to the ubiquitous sexy and helpful love interest. B.
Jonis Agee's The River Wife
When a young girl's new husband keeps slipping away to run mysterious errands in Prohibition-era times, she finds a series of his great-grandmother's journals and begins to believe their lives are paralleled. Some other women who were part of his great-grandfather's life also come into the story. The first half of this book is very strong, but when random other women come into it and we lose sight of the new young wife (for several hundred pages), things start to falter. The ending also feels very, very rushed. B-.
Travis Holland's The Archivist's Story
Ah, this was more like it. A man working as an archivist under Stalin's regime in the late 1930s encounters the great Isaac Babel, imprisoned, and his final story. Holland does a good job with the rising sense of terror as Stalin's regime grows more oppressive, and the archivist's own past as a literature teacher makes his choices all too believable. A-.
Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter
I've been meaning to read this for ages and I'm glad I finally got around to it. It's a heart-wrenching story about a doctor in 1964 who delivers his own twin babies. When he realizes that his baby daughter has Downs Syndrome, he asks his nurse to take her to an institution and tells his wife that the baby died. His decision changes all their lives and haunts his wife and himself. It can be frustrating to read a book about someone who you just want to bitch-slap, but Edwards tells a riveting story. A-.
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