The Surrendered, Olive Kitteridge, Hush

The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee

This story of three interwoven characters beautifully depicts the human toll war takes on innocents and soliders. It also exposes the brilliant ability of people to adapt, overcome, and live.
June is an 11 year old left to take care of her siblings when her mother and sister are killed by a bomb in the Korean War. Her younger siblings don't fare any better, and when June is left alone she, too, is prey to the evils of men in a war zone; until she meets Hector, an American GI.
Hector and June end up at an orphanage where she becomes the black sheep among the gaggle of children left behind and he falls in love with a minister's wife. Sylvie, the subject of Hector's passion, turns out to have a devasting story of her own.
The novel follows these three, using backstory and dialogue, from their childhoods to the present. Hector's tale felt to me like the main plot but I think that may be open to interpretation depending on which character you find most relatable.
The Surrendered is beautifully written and difficult to put down - though the subject matter is hard to read. This is not light reading - coming in at 480 pages - but an enlightening tale you are sure to remember for a long time.

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

This novel is a Pulitzer Prize winner and an Oprah recommendation so I won't review too thoroughly as it clearly doesn't need my 2 cents.
Olive is a collection of short stories woven together by a common thread: Olive Kitteridge a retired school teacher. She is crochety, mean, and hard to like; everything they say you shouldn't have in a main character. But she's like most of us. We see her judging herself (and others) like we all do. And there is a lot to judge - from her infidelity-longing-unable- to-follow-through husband, to her son, Christopher, who can't get far enough away from his mother, and she can't understand why.
Each story opens us up to new limb on Olive's tree , making us wonder where it will end - and end it does, in a twist you'll find surprising.

Hush, by Kate White

This is a beach read; a summer quickie.
Lake Warren (see the name even evokes summer time) is a marketing consultant for a fertility clinic. She is coming off of a recent divorce and gets herself into hot water with one of the new doctors at the clinic. Twists and turns ensue as she learns she can't trust anyone, even her closest friends. The one piece I would have liked to see more realistically depicted is her relationship with her children, who are away at camp during the entire book. Otherwise it was a fun, mystery/thriller.

Lake Overturn - Vestal McIntyre

If you read, you'll like Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre. This is a unique and compelling story set in a small town in Idaho but really about Anytown, USA. Two young boys read of a natural disaster, called Lake Overturn, that happened in 1986 in Cameroon, West Africa. One of the boys, Enrique, decides to base his upcoming science project on the phenomenon. He asks his friend to be his partner but the friend proves to be more of a project than the model they build.


Enrique, his mother and brother live in a trailer park. Enrique's Mom, Lina, cleans houses on the other side of town. When her client's husband, Chuck, comes on to her, the two begin to fall in love. Lina's guilt over the affair leads her to confess to both her priest and her son. The situation is made more complicated when Enrique's father makes an unplanned visit and Chuck’s wife turns out to be fatally ill.

While Lina dusts and debates whether to follow her heart, across town, Wanda, a down on her luck recovering-ish drug addict, tries to pull her life together. She decides she will never find the perfect man so she looks to surrogacy to fill the void. She meets a needy couple, says all the right (lies) things and gets pregnant. As Wanda's story unfolds she falters and recovers over and over. Ultimately whether she can change her life lies in one moment of decision making. Vestal's story telling is at it's best with Wanda. One moment you are rooting for her, the next you hope she’s hit by a bus.

While Lina cleans house and Wanda tries to get clean, Connie, Lina's neighbor in the trailer park and a religious zealot with an unrequited libido, latches on to a traveling missionary. Connie's son, Gene, is Enrique's somewhat autistic science partner, and as Connie tries to follow God's path (which of course includes judging everyone else along the way) she ignores her son’s needs to the point the reader is left shaking their head wondering how much religion is too much.

As these characters make their way through what amounts to daily life, we feel we are in the room, in their heads, with them as they make decisions good and bad. We feel their pain, we see the road ahead, and when the book is done and all the lose ends come together, it's one of those books where you wish there were more just so we could hang in Eula, Idaho a little longer.

If you enjoy fantastic storytelling, beautifully written descriptions and complex, realistic characters this novel is for you. Check it out!