The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte

Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Well maybe others stopped when they were 5 but I am still fascinated by these fantastical creatures.   While attending a meeting where books were being discussed, one of the presenters shared that she had read 200 books in the first 5 months of the year and this was the best. Of course I had to read it.  The subtitle of the book is: A New History of a Lost World.  If Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote about dinosaurs and the people who study them, this would be the book.  Accessible science, surprising history, fascinating details.  Dinosaurs millions of years older than the giants we are familiar with.  Dinosaurs with feathers.  Dinosaurs of many colors.  A pierced, tattooed, rocking out young woman in China who is part of a team making many of these discoveries.  Great stuff.

No Saints in Kanses by Amy Brashear

We picked this up on a lark at the beginning of a road trip to ...Kansas!  It turned out to be just the kind of easy reading to share aloud to each other as we drove.  Sixteen year old Manhattan transplant Carly struggles to find her place in 1969 small town Kansas.  Things turn even uglier when her public defender father is required to represent the two men suspected of murdering the Clutters - a crime made famous in Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood.  More teen age angst than anything, it was still fun to follow the historical references to Capote, Lee, Kennedy and the tenor of the time.  It was such a good story we actually made a trip to Humbolt - the very, very, very, very, small town where it all happened.  We even had coffee in the Garden City coffee shop in what was once the lobby of the hotel where Capote and Lee stayed while researching for the book. Fun!

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Rosemary is our narrator.  She begins the story of her unusual family from the middle when she is a student at UC Davis.  She left her academic family in Indiana because she hoped to reconnect with an older brother who many years earlier had abandoned his family for a life as a domestic terrorist opposing the cruel scientific treatment of animals.  But at the center of the story as it unfolds both backward and forward is Fern, Rosemary's "sister".  Certain copies of this book give away the reality of Fern but mine did not and I thought my reading was the better for it so I will not tell you here.  There is much to be said about family in the story, about memory and about what it means to be uniquely human.  It kinda sticks in your mind...can that happen in any other creature?