Whisper Me This by Kerry Anne King

When Maisey returns to her hometown after an incident that leaves both of her aging parents in the hospital, she’s not sure what she is going to find. Running away from her problems and drifting through life seems to be her way of dealing with things, but now she’s stuck back in small-town Washington trying to figure out what secrets her parents have been keeping from her all these years. Throw in her controlling ex and a hot local firefighter, and you have some drama! The real core of this book is about abuse though, including the many forms it can take and what people do to get away from it. I shed many a tear but was also uplifted by the hope and love along the way.

I'll Be Your Blue Sky by Marissa de los Santos

I’ll Be Your Blue Sky is the third installment from Marissa de los Santos about a large blended family. I haven’t read the first two, and while this book does still work as a standalone novel, it might be better to read the other two first if only to know who everyone is. (There is one dizzying paragraph that tries to explain how everyone is connected to each other, but it probably serves better as a reminder than a primer.) This installment features Claire, a young woman who’s about to marry an overly-possessive and easily-angered man, but is having seriously cold feet the day before her wedding. A chance meeting with an elderly woman, Edith, makes her call it off, only to find out a few weeks later that not only has Edith died, but she’s left Claire her beach house on the Delaware coast. This sets Claire off on an adventure, both to figure out what she wants out of love, and also what Edith was up to by leaving her the house. There are flashbacks to the 1950’s from Edith’s point of view, and we slowly learn that the two of them are more connected than just a chance meeting. While some might complain that the ending was too pat, I thought she tied it up nicely, and the whole book was quite beautifully written.   

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Great Alone follows the Allbright family as they leave their peripatetic lifestyle in the lower 48 and move up to Alaska in the mid 1970’s. Ernt’s stint in Vietnam and five years as a POW have left him broken and abusive. Cora just can’t quit him – “There was a poison in him, and I drank it up.” – but is fiercely protective of their teenage girl, Leni. The whole family is hoping for a fresh start in Alaska, and at first it delivers it to them. The first half of the book is an engaging tale of what many families must have gone through when searching for a different lifestyle up in “the Great Alone.” But Ernt’s demons soon catch up to him, and the reader has to spend the rest of the book waiting to see what will go wrong, and just how bad it will be. Leni is constantly foreshadowing what is sure to come (“winter is coming,” literally), and I truly dislike books like this, as why should I invest in the characters when I know that bad things are going to happen to them?

When the sh%t does hit the fan, it’s one devastating event after another, each one getting more and more unbelievable. This could have been a beautiful book about so many things, and there’s no question that Hannah knows how to write well, but instead it just feels like a setup for tragedy so that it can have a “literary” label slapped onto it.