Feed - Mira Grant

I'm really torn on giving this book three or four stars. I really enjoyed it. It was really well researched. Exhaustively researched. Exhaustive. Yeah sometimes I felt the details were exhaustive. The background research bogs down the story line sometimes and slows down the action.

Feed is an interesting offering in the zombie apocalypse genre. Following the combination of two miracle drugs each curing their own affliction but then combining to create a super-virus which, yep, reanimates dead people and causes them to hunger for others' flesh. Oops. Thanks science. The research into virology and epidemiology is so well done. It's amazing. But, it also reads a bit like a peer reviewed journal.

The thing that I love most about the book is that in the midst of the zombie outbreak, the country has recovered somewhat. The government is still functional. People still have jobs and live throughout the country, except Alaska (sorry Alaska). But it's sort of a life goes on and technology evolves rather than disappears angle that I really enjoyed.

The story follows Georgia and Sean Mason as they, in turn, follow the campaign of Senator Ryman as he runs for president. They become attached to the campaign as embedded media. Georgia, the "newsie" covers all the straight forward news for their combined blogging/news/multimedia site. Sean, the "irwin" is the part of the team that pokes zombies with sticks and films it for an adrenaline rush. Buffy, the fictional, writes poetry but also handles the team's technological needs.

The three team members each have their responsibilities covering the Senator's promising campaign. As they travel with him, they endure one zombie outbreak that starts to look a bit like sabotage and then uncover a plot to use the zombie virus as a weapon - terrorism in 2039. How much will their pursuit of the truth cost them? Well, it's not all hugs and puppies folks.

Still the inventiveness and thorough approach to the story deserve some well earned accolades for author Mira Grant. I imagine the next book in this trilogy (why is it always a trilogy!?) will likely flow faster since a lot of the background material is out of the way.

Let's call it 3.75 Stars because it's closer to 4 than 3.

Things We Set on Fire - Deborah Reed

I really want to give this book 4 Stars, but there's just something a little missing to get it over that hump.

Things We Set on Fire starts off really strong. Vivie commits a terrible act. She shoots her husband as he's out illegally hunting, which in turn makes it look like a hunting accident. This event is the gravitas around which all other events in the book get their weighty meaning. And for whatever reason, it just doesn't work.

Fast forward about twenty-five years and we are again shown Vivie getting a call from the police that her two granddaughters who she hasn't seen in six years, are in need of shelter after their mother has been admitted to the hospital.

Drugs? That's Vivie's thought, although later on in the book it's not really clear why this would have been her guess. In any case, Vivie takes in Kate's two daughters and calls Kate's sister Elin who lives in Oregon. Vivie and the girls are in Florida, but Elin agrees to come and drives all the way to see them.

Elin has lived in Oregon for about 8 years, having unceremoniously packed up and left Florida behind. She was trying to escape the heaviness of her life there and created a new life for herself in Oregon. When she arrived in Oregon she found that her longtime boyfriend had moved on... to her sister. This man is the father of the two girls who Elin becomes the caretaker of.

This all happens in the very first chapters of the book and the momentum builds as it is apparent that the Elin is aware of her mother's action from long ago and no one has spoken of it. But then something happens with the book, where the characters, and their background stories don't really match up with their current actions. The reason for Kate's hospitalization is laid bare, but there isn't really any time dedicated to getting the characters through their processing of events. Instead they have these wholesale realizations and understandings that don't really ring true.

The book meandered toward the end and the ending was overall not very satisfactory. So while the writing was great and the story line good, the book just missed some element to push it over into a four-star rating.

Three stars.

The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman

I should have prepared myself. I should have known about 20% into this book, when two people, tending a lighthouse on a desolate island, far off the coast of Australia, find a baby in a boat. A tiny, helpless, perfect baby.

And decide to keep it.

I should have prepared myself then. I should have known I would cry. But instead, I drove 5 1/2 hours to Cincinnati to run a 1/2 marathon and the entire way, listened to this book on audio. And cried. Cried so much my sunglasses remained on in the gas station where I stopped in Kentucky and was worried people would think I was crazy. Cried so much I ran out of Kleenex somewhere in Northern Kentucky and then had to go into the exhibit hall to pick up my race packet with my eyes feeling puffy and raw.

It's hard now, to read stories about loving and losing children that don't get to me. The way my own two have planted themselves firmly in my soul, in my heart, in my mind and everything in between. Imprinted.

So in this story, Tom and his wife Isabelle man the light station on Janus rock. A lonely island out to sea that sits between to oceans. After three heart-breaking miscarriages, a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a baby. And from the second it does, I knew Isabelle would want to keep the baby. Keep it and pass it off as her own. And she does. Even after learning that the baby is really the child of a local woman who has mourned and longed for her child, just as Isabelle has done for her own dead children. Because by then, how could Isabelle let go? There are no real winners in this scenario and the book is all the more heartbreaking because you cannot cheer for any of the characters. There is so much loss to pass out.

So if anything, the book gets 4 stars because when I cry this much, I'd like to be happy at the end, and really, I never was lifted from this state. The book could not have ended or gone any other way, I see that, but all the same, it's a sad read, even if it is wonderfully written.

4/5 Stars.