The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Brother and sister, Leisel and Werner Meminger are on their way to being left with a foster family by their mother.  

Rosa and Hans Hubermann are barely making a living but will receive a small monetary subsidization for Leisel and her brother. Only Leisel makes it to the door.

Leisel becomes best friends with the neighbor next door Rudy Steiner.  She grows to love her "Papa" and at some point even her "Mama" who calls her names from the onset.  When they hide Max in the basement, Leisel makes a new friend.

I was half way through the story before I realized who the narrator was.

I saw the movie and liked the book much better.  The book talks more about her book thievery.  Maybe for sake of time, that was not dwelt on as much in the movie as it was in the book.     

Even though Leisels’ book thievery is what the story is about, the underlining tale is about Germany during the reign of Hitler and how small towns coped.

Just One Look by Harlan Coben

I read this book in 2014, but forgot what happened and re-read it this past May (2016).

Grace Lawson’s husband goes out one night and never returns.  Someone slipped an old photograph into some photos that she had developed and no one knows where it came from. When her husband disappears after seeing the photo a wicked plot unravels. 

Grace tries to find out who the people are in the photo and along the way people related to the people in that photo end up dead.

Grace is in for a shock at the end of this story!

The Innocent by Harlan Coben

After spending 9 years in jail, Matt is attempting to live a good life.  His wife Olivia is expecting a baby.  This will be their first child together.  Olivia convinces Matt to upgrade their phones to camera phones so they can capture special moments.  Unfortunately, the first picture he receives is of his wife with another man.  No way!!!

This leads Matt on a hunt to find out what’s going on. The hunt takes him from New Jersey to a seedy bar in Nevada.

Harlan knows how to engage a reader.  His plots thicken and you never expect the ending result! 

OREO by Fran Ross

Oreo aka Christine Clark is the product of an African American mother and Jewish father.  Her parents divorced when she was a toddler and her father left the scene and never came back.  When she reaches her teens, she travels from Philadelphia to New York in search of him.  Oreo is a witty, smart and revengeful when she sees a person doing wrong to another person or animal.

 A satirical and witty tale that touches on feminism, ethnicities and idiosyncrasies, the author uses subtle Greek inferences in Oreo’s journey. 

I picked this off the shelves because it looked new and I was intrigued by the title.  Turns out the late author worked with the late, great comedian Richard Pryor.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I read this because I just finished reading The Old Man And The Sea and this was noted in the list of books also written by Hemingway.

Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley like each other but not enough to try to get together.  She is engaged, but finds the time to have amorous affairs with other men. Jake is jealous.   

A group of people fed up with life travel from Paris to Spain and attend a bullfighting festival.  That’s really all I have to say about this novel!

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

600 pages!  Wow.

Set on the Island of Jamaica, this fictional tale is told around the real shooting of Bob Marley back in 1976.  The author uses that setting and then writes his own version of what happened and creates his own characters that may or may not be involved in the shooting.

So many killings, I can’t keep count!  There had to be more than seven.  It’s only at the end that I get it. Some thugs have an encounter with a writer who is doing a magazine article about seven killings.  Alex Pierce is a writer for Rolling Stones Magazine.  He is hired to go to Kingston Jamaica and get a story on Mick Jagger. Somehow, he gets information on the shooting of the Singer and decided to tell that story instead.  The only problem for some people is that he writes about people who don’t want to written about.

This is a story with lots of characters.   There is a cast of characters page which was very helpful.  I read the e-book so I kept that page bookmarked to refer back to.  Especially with character names like Josey Wales because there is a Jamaican singer names Josey Wales.  No relation to the character in the novel.   I like how the characters inter-weave with one another, especially Kimmy.  She has seen things that could get her killed, but in the end she is spared by the death of the person who would kill her.

I can’t really say anymore because each character seems to have their own story and for 600 pages, the only main plot I can talk about is that someone tried to kill the Singer. 

I saw an interview with Marlon James on Well Read TV show and he explained the story was written around the shooting of Bob Marley, so the Singer character represents him.  Everything else is fiction!