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  More teen age angst than anything, it was still fun to follow the historical references to Capote, Lee, Kennedy and the tenor of the time.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?

The Baker's Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan

This WWII survival story centers around 22 year old Emma.  She bakes bread in a small village in Normandy France.  The people are suffering from both from physical brutality and hunger during the German occupation.  She is ordered to bake 12 loaves of bread daily for the Nazi occupiers.  Her acts of resistance begin by adding straw to the flour she is given which allows her to make 14 loaves.  Those two extra secret loaves will not only feed her neighbors but allow her to set up an informal bartering system that allows many of the village needs to be met. Still there is more fear then hope in her daily existence - a sense that no one really cares what happens to the people of France.  There are some beautifully written passages in this story although it often seems to lack the weight of internal struggle found in similar books like The Nightingale .  Still it is well worth the read.

Louisa by Louisa Thomas

The subtitle of this book is "The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams" - that would be John Quincey Adams, third President of the United States.  Her life was indeed extraordinary.  She was British marrying an American from a founding American family.  She lived in Paris and Russia while JQ served in various diplomatic capacities as representative of a country that much of Europe still did not know existed.  She had four live births after multiple pregnancies and only one child out lived her.  She wrote three autobiographies that don't always square with the historical record. There was much to make an exciting story but this book is not that.  There were many interesting historical side trips that were enlightening but seemed impersonal.  I think Thomas missed the boat.  This would have been great historical fiction. Use all that historical research to make Louisa an inside observer to our early, clumsy history. Flesh out the complicated relationship between her and JQ.  She had opinions about the great question of slavery and women's rights so early on.  Historical fiction would have allowed revealing conversations between Louisa and the Grimke sisters or Jefferson or Abigail Adams or even JQ.  Yea - she missed the boat on this one.

The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith

Sara De Vos is a 17th century artist in Holland.  Both she and her husband belong to the St. Luke's guild of master painters until things go horribly wrong.   In the 1950's, Australian Ellie Shipley  comes to NYC to work on her PhD in art history.  Her speciality is women artists of the Dutch Golden Age but she earns money repairing old paintings for a less than honest antiques dealer.  When she is asked to make a copy of a De Vos painting, she welcomes the challenge to put all she has learned to work.  The copy is perfect except for one minor flaw.  In 2000 in Sidney, Australia, Marty de Groot has come to confront the woman who decades before made a copy of a painting that was  stolen from his wall 50 years ago - a painting that had been in his family for 300 years.  Three lives all connected to one painting.  You may think you now how this story goes but maybe not.  That being said it is really only a bit of a mystery and more a story of discovery.

The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories by Anthony Marra

Still in Russia.  Still in Chechnya.  Still crazy good writing.  These  nine stories are connected by characters, a painting and the Siberian landscape.  After the first few pages, I was prepared for another deeply sad, beautifully written deep dive into a dark part of Russian/Ukrainian history.  It took me couple of beats to realize that I was smiling at his sarcastic humor.  This book is funny - dark - but funny. Half way through I created "A Constellation of Vital Characters".  I am really done with his take on Russia but oh so ready to hear more of the voice that writes "We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space." I mean, really.