The Wake Up by Catherin Ryan Hyde

The Wake Up is a bit of a slow burn of a novel that sucks you in by then end. We first meet Aiden Delacorte as he is getting ready to meet his girlfriend’s kids for the first time. While Gwen’s daughter and Aiden seem to hit it off well, things do go so smoothly with her son, Milo. Withdrawn, barely eating, and with a propensity to hurting animals, Milo is clearly a damaged child, and not very likeable. Aiden has to grapple with whether he can forgive the boy for some things he has done, and come to terms with the terrible things that Milo endured. While any novel involving child abuse is a difficult read, there is a fundamental question in the novel that intrigued me – we can forgive a child’s bad behavior when we know it is a result of unspeakable things that were done to them, but when that child grows up and repeats those unspeakable things we are usually not as forgiving.

As a side plot, Aiden had something that he refers to as his "wake up." After being shut off to all emotion after his mother left his father when he was a young boy, he one day starts to feel all of the emotions of his animals. The deer he shoots, the cows he raises, the rabbits about to be turned into dinner by his neighbors, etc. This makes him have to re-evaluate his life and his work. This semi-magical plot aspect was a little weird, but as someone who doesn't believe in magic but fully believes in fairies that take my stuff and hide it from me, I guess a little bit of the whimsical is okay every now and then.

Artemis by Andy Weir

It’s hard for any writer to follow up a major success, and Book #2 usually doesn’t turn out as well as Book #1. So it was no surprise that Artemis, by Andy Weir, was a bit of a disappointment, but what was surprising was how much of a disappointment it was. Set on the first and only colony on the moon in the not-too-distant future, Weir did create a compelling world where rich tourists come for a once and a lifetime experience in 1/6th gravity (Disney in Space!), but the plot and character development was heavily bogged down. Jazz is a young porter who has spent most of her life on the colony and probably can’t go back to Earth without getting very sick. She’s messed up every opportunity for a good living that has come her way, including trashing her father’s welding business and failing her EVA exam. Life on the Moon is expensive though, so when a lucrative but illegal business proposition comes her way that involves a lot of dangerous stuff, she jumps right in, and of course, bad things then happen.

In an attempt to re-create The Martian’s strengths (fast-pacing, quirky narration, using SCIENCE to solve problems, and an easy adaptation to the big-screen), we are left with a non-stop run of drama and physics/chemistry 101 with a twenty-something female narrator who thinks and talks exactly like a fifteen-year-old boy. Perhaps Weir wanted to challenge himself as a writer by taking on a female narrator, but it was so off-putting at times. She seems like a sci-fi fantasy projection: beautiful with a gorgeous body, tough-talking, will have sex with almost anyone apparently, and of course, is a genius. Oh, but she does cry in the corner on several occasions, just to remind you that she’s a woman. Hope they make her more realistic in the inevitable movie.

A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake

A Tangled Mercy tells the dual tales of present day Kate, who is having somewhat of a breakdown after the death of her mother, and Tom Russell, a slave in Charleston in 1822 who gets swept up in a revolt. Joy Jordan-Lake expertly weaves these disparate timelines together, which are each compelling in their own right. Kate returns to Charleston from her PhD work in the Northeast to pick at the threads of her mother’s mysterious life, pushing to find the answers that have eluded her for so long. Tom wants to keep his head down and manage as best as he can, given the circumstances, but has to watch as his love is raped by her owner and live with the uncertainty that their expecting child may or may not be his. It’s hard to reveal much more without giving away some of the interesting interconnections and plot twists, but the title “tangled” really does explain it well.