The Orphan Collector by Ellen Marie Wiseman

 One of many novels that will likely draw comparisons between the 1918 flu epidemic and the recent Covid epidemic.  Pia is a 13 yr. old German immigrant.  Her father goes to fight in WWI and her mother dies of the flu.  To try and find food for her infant twin brothers, she places them for safety in a cubby behind a bedroom wall and looks for help.  First stop is the apartment of Finn, an Irish immigrant who is her best friend.  When no one answers the door, she suspects the worse and heads out to the ravaged city of Philadelphia.  While searching, she falls victim to the flu that can strike and kill in minutes.  Six days later she awakes with no idea what has happened to her brothers.  She is driven by her hope that they survived and her need to find them.
Beatrice Groves lives in the same apartment building as Pia.  She is grief stricken by the death of her infant son.  This, mixed with her hatred of the crowds of immigrants entering the country, drives her to unthinkable acts of selfishness and cruelty.  And so their stories begin to intertwine.  There is so much depressing detail - rotting bodies, cruel orphanages, the orphan train, separated families - it was hard to believe there could possibly have been a happy ending.

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C. Slaght

 Slaght's love of the Russian far east wilderness began as a young boy when his father was part of the USA diplomatic corps in Russia.  Then as a Peace Corps volunteer he began to zero in on giant owls of the same area.  Eventually his focus was on the endanged Blakiston's fish owl.  For a good part of every year, Slaght followed these owls through frozen rivers and rugged terrain.  The quirky characters that join him create another story.  The conditions went beyond challenging straight to horrible.  Got to admire his commitment - this would be a no way situation for me.

The Air Between Us by Deborah Johnson

 Dr. Cooper Connelly and Dr. Reese Jackson are both doctors in Revere, Mississippi - one is white, one is black. One works in the top floors of the Doctor's hospital and one serves clients from the back door. But this is post "Brown v the Board of Education" and changes are on the way. When a 10 year old black child arrives at the hospital with a white man suffering from mysterious gun shot wounds, there are more questions to be answered other than which door is the right one to use. There is reason to feel good about events in the end of the story but a lot of secrets to unravel first. Start your pondering with Connelly's words on page 155 about "the air between us".

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

 If ever a book screamed Booker Prize, this is it - uniquely structured, thought provoking and really really depressing.  Four people set out on a trip from NYC to Arizona - 2 adults and 2 children. The adults are married. The boy child came to the marriage with the man.  The younger girl child, with the woman. They are never named.  They are identified by the role they play in the narrative - mother, child sister, husband, lover..etc.  The adults are documentarians.  They met recording sounds and languages of the city.  But that project has ended and now they are each pursuing a different path - a path away from each other.  He is recording "echoes" of Geronimo and the Apache nation.  She is focused on the lost children attempting to cross our southern border.  Among their luggage are seven boxes which introduce various sections of the book..  Four are all the notes and history gathered for his project. One is the beginnings of her research including a small red book that appears to be both historical and prophetic.  Boxes six and seven belong to the children and are empty at the beginning. The boy hopes to fill them with the images he is capturing with his new Polaroid camera.  His lack of technique often produces hazy almost ghostly images. The girl is too young to record anything but memories.  With the marriage unraveling, the tension in the car is punctuated by conversations about Native American genocide and the tragedy at the border.  At one point the children get lost and the young boy records their journey on 20 pages of thoughts and observations unhindered by any "full stop" punctuation.  It is a book I kept reading because it was so highly recommended.  Not something to read if you are looking for a cheery tale.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

 I read somewhere that Doerr kept a chart of the characters and events of this book so he wouldn't lose track of the story. In the beginning there seems to be too many threads to possibly make sense of it all.  Really it turns out to be three stories with multiple narrators and lots of time leaps all connected by a single book.  The earliest story is the tale of Anna and Omier.  Both young and poor, their paths cross during the  battles of Constantinople in the 1400's. They find the book.  The "contemporary" story follows the life of Zeno who, at the age of 80, is helping a group of young children in a library in Idaho perform a story from the book- and Seymour, a troubled teen whose attempt to blow up the library is thwarted by their practice. The third story is told by the young girl, Konstance, locked in a room alone aboard an interstellar space ship in the not-so-distant future.  Frantically, she copies, from memory, bits of the book her father read to her.  The technology aboard the spaceship keeps her alive and oddly connected to life on Earth but to what end? 

All of this, Doerr says, is to honor books and the libraries and librarians who guarantee our right to read them, to freely "know".  As Licinius, the old man who taught Anna to read says, "But books like people, die.  They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whim of tyrants.  If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world.  And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death."  This 600+ page journey is at the very least memory making.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

 Really more than one specific sentence but - actually more about the power of books.  This fiction skirts around the biographical reality that Erdrich owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.  She even appears briefly in the story as herself and maybe parts of her live in the other characters as well, all members of various Native American traditions.  Typical Erdrich, the mythical and supernatural are just as central to the story as the realities of Covid and the George Floyd tragedy.  Flora, a regular at the bookstore, has died but her ghost lingers.  Her favorite target for misty mischief, is Tookie.  Tookie believes books saved her in prison and fears Flora's actions will drive her from the bookstore job she loves. Tookie's story and struggles are shared with humor and stunning language for most of the book but the events of 2020 drive the rest of the novel.  So much to ponder - one sentence at a time.

The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin

 Although Garvin's book has a "Hallmark Special" feel about it, these days a happy ending is welcome.  Plus - it is about bees in Hood River, Oregon.  Alice is 45 and hoping that raising bees will fill the "love of the land" void created when her family loses the apple orchard they love.  But the work is hard and she knows she will need help.  Enter Harry, a lost soul with a record, but looking for a new way to be.  And then there is Jake, bitter and isolated. One foolish act ended his HS hijinks to begin life in a wheel chair.  When she almost runs him down one evening, he is added to the crew - and the bees lead the way forward for all of them.  There is a good bit of environmental conflict to add to the huge amount of bee information and life lessons. All raised up sweet as honey.  You knew that was coming.