Follow the Stars Home has such promise, but in the end the promise not fulfilled. The novel tells the story of Lydia and Nicholas Roosevelt, who make the first paddle steamboat trip down the Mississippi River in a boat Nicholas designed. Along the way they encounter, among other perils, the infamous New Madrid earthquake. The novel is narrated by Lydia, who accompanied her much older husband on this adventure as well as on a previous unsuccessful flatboat trip on the same river. She is accompanied by their two young children, one of whom was born on the paddle boat on this journey, and two female servants. Regrettably, the tale is filled with repetition, much of it tedious iterations of her love for her husband and children; her traumatic childhood loss of her mother, abandonment by her father, and subsequent reunion with him and his new wife; of a blossoming on-board romance between one of her servants and a crew member, and more. I really wanted to love this novel, but in the end I really just wished that it had been more rigourously edited. Still, fans of historical fiction will appreciate learning about this remarkable historical navigational achievement.

I had a difficult time getting into The Wren, The Wren, but the beautiful language would not let me walk away. The more I read, the more I wanted to keep reading. Once into it, the story engaged me, and while I wouldn't say I was hooked, I will say that in the end it was well worth the read.

Using his family's story as the inspiration for Hotel Cuba, Aaron Hamburger spins a fascinating tale of the struggles of immigrating from Russia to the United States (with a significant diversion to Cuba) in the period following WWI. Although the story is that of three sisters, the focus is on Pearl, the sister on whom everyone relies. She has raised her younger sister Frieda following their mother's death and she continues to be the dominant personality as the two sisters are diverted to Cuba due to a change in U.S. immigration law. The third sister, Basha, who was the first to immigrate (directly) is almost totally undeveloped and her story is not really told.

Hamburger raises many important questions about immigrants, although he glosses over the implications of illegal immigration with hardly a look back. He also briefly touches on homosexual subcultures in Havana and New York City, but he leaves much undeveloped. But there is much to admire in this novel. He is particularly skilled in making places - Havana, New York, and Detroit - come to life as additional characters. For the most part, Hamburger tells a compelling story and he tells it well. Hotel Cuba will appeal to readers of historical fiction as well as to anyone interested in immigration in the early 1920s.

War on the home front can be as chaotic as war on the battlefront, especially if the home front is the last house before the mountain in Western Austria. The Moosbrugger family, known locally as baggage, is isolated and struggling to survive while husband and father Josef is away on the battlegrounds of WWI. Male attention to his wife Maria, mother of four children, intensifies during Josef's absence and includes the postal carrier who has lusted after her for years, the mayor, on whom Josef relies to watch Maria and tend to the family's welfare, and Georg, a German stranger. Although Josef comes home on leave, when Maria becomes pregnant, everyone suspects the German stranger. Daily life is chaotic and Helfer does an excellent job of portraying the main characters as well as the landscape, the rigors of daily life without electricity and running water, and the impact of secrets on families throughout the generations.

This heartbreaking story, which is based on Helfer's family, is narrated by a granddaughter of Josef and his exquisitely beautiful wife, Maria, but the narration is not told in a linear way. The novel's style reflects the story it tells. The prose is beautiful but the story unfolds in bits and pieces, leaving the reader to either become absorbed in the book, as I was, or to put it down in confusion. There will be a limited audience for this Last House Before the Mountain, but that audience will be well rewarded.

This impressive debut by Nyani Nkrumah came as a very welcome surprise. Unlike the ordinary novel of a friendship between a preadolescent Black girl and an older Princeton female graduate student in 1982 that I expected, Nkrumah has written a moving story that humanizes the ongoing struggle between Black and White inhabitants of a segregated Mississippi town located near Philadelphia, site of the infamous murder of three civil rights activists in the 1960s. The novel grabbed me from the start and kept me in its thrall to the end. Highly recommended.

Echoing the pace of life in Marralee compared with Aaron Falk's busy life in Melbourne, Exiles begins deceptively slowly. Layer upon layer, Jane Harper builds a complex picture of life in a small rural town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows what to expect. Despite a cast of many characters, Harper depicts each one carefully and with the complexity befitting them, just as she depicts the landscape that plays an important part in the story, as it always does in Harper's books. Once again, Harper gives us a mystery, actually two mysteries, that are hard to figure out but, when revealed, tie together all of the clues that's she's planted along the way. Jane Harper remains one of my favorite mystery writers. I hope there are more to come in this series.

There is moonlight shining before my bed,
I suspect that there is frost on the ground,
Raising my head, I gaze at the moonlight,
Lowering my head, I think of my home village.
Lin Bai (701-762)

Just like the voice in what is arguably the most famous poem in China, so too the widowed Dao Meilin and her son Renshu are separated from their home village by war. Poems and stories tell of the past, of the present, and of the future. They are strong links between us and those who came before us. Peach Blossom Spring tells us the story of a mother's struggles, hardships, sacrifices, and hopes for her only son as they run for their lives from Changsha to, eventually, Taiwan. It also tells the story of Dao Renshu's immigration from Taiwan to the United States, his complicated transformation from Dao Renshu to Henry Dao and the issues that challenge him. And it tells us the story of his struggles to understand who he is just as his daughter Lily later struggles to understand who she is and who she wants to be. Author Melissa Fu has set an ambitious task for herself and she mostly succeeds. Always in the background is the sweeping history of modern China, little of which is explored in much depth. Readers seeking to learn about this tumultuous time in Chinese history may be disappointed. But they won't be disappointed in the novel as a story. Fu is an excellent story teller and Peach Blossom Spring is an absorbing read.

Reimagining the Daphne and Apollo myth and through lyrical prose, The Latinist tells the story of an aspiring scholar and her controlling mentor. Prins captures the nuances of life in contemporary academia, including the discovery of the work of a second-century poet and the control that a single senior person, acting as a mentor, can have over the career of an aspiring academic. Although I found The Latinist a little slow at the start, it was not long before I was hooked. The book will appeal to a wide range of readers and be especially popular in academic communities.

I so wanted to like this memoir from J. T. Hill. Although there were parts of it that I found quite interesting, in the end the book didn't work for me. Technically, I found the constant switching of the narrative voice between first and second person to be distracting and confusing. But more fundamentally, I was frustrated by the barrier Hill places between himself ands readers. Continuing to be concerned about how other people perceive him, he relates a mostly superficial version of what is a complicated and complex story of a man struggling with the near-loss of his sight and, more fundamentally, with his perception of himself.

Carolyn Phillips has written a charming memoir/recipe book, enhanced by her often-whimsical illustrations. She is at her best when describing food - its many tastes, smells, and looks. Although her stories of her great love and his family are interesting, I found them somewhat choppy and hard to follow. Nevertheless, everyone with any interest in Taiwan and Chinese food and culture will find much to like about this book, especially the recipes that she's adapted for the home cook. I'm sure many readers' woks will be working hard as they're used to prepare Phillips' enticing offerings.

Louise Callaghan has written an excellent and very readable book that, while focusing for the most part Abu Laith and his efforts to protect the animals of the Mosul Zoo during the long ISIS occupation, is so much more than a portrait of how ordinary citizens coped during that time. Like the caged animals, Moslawnis primarily were confined to their homes, whether by edict or choice. Women, especially those who were not young children or old, were vulnerable to the whims of the invaders, in spite of having to cover every part of their bodies except their eyes. Callaghan draws in her readers so that we experience the hardships, the tensions, and the quiet courage of people who could have been us. Father of Lions will speak to a wide range of readers, and will continue to haunt me.

Nicole Dennis-Ben is an exquisite writer; in some ways is almost too good. She tells the heart-wrenching story of abandonment - both physical and emotional - of both Patsy and her daughter. Her characters are even more carefully layered than her story, making it both easy for readers to understand their actions and motivations and difficult for readers to separate themselves from the hard decisions each must make. We all know that life is a struggle, whether as a resident of an impoverished island or as an undocumented immigrant in the America of one's dreams. Patsy is hard to read at times and yet one doesn't want it to end. Dennis-Benn has prodigious talent that she puts to excellent use in this novel. I look forward to her next one.

Having admired Dara Horn's previous books I looked forward eagerly to reading Eternal Life. And I was not disappointed. Far from it. In her telling of the story of a life lived for centuries Horn examines the very essence of a life. Is a life without the prospect of dying something to be wished? Is it a blessing or a curse, or something else? Rachel and Elazar traded normal life spans to save their infant son, and although their love for each other intersected throughout the ages, they also went their separate ways, each to marry and have children time and time again; each to lose loved ones time and time again; and each to be reborn again and again. This is a powerful book of Jewish history, of mysticism, of relationships, of love, of death, and of the meaning of life. Horn cements her place as one of our most thoughtful and brilliant contemporary writers with Eternal Life, a book that takes on as many shapes as life itself.

It is a rare novel that is written so well, that brings its characters to life while exploring their depths, and that tells a such a compelling story. Elma, Nan, Juke, and even the twins come alive under Henderson's deft pen. I can't remember the last time I stayed up all night reading a novel, but Twelve-Mile Straight grabbed me from the start and kept me rapt until the end. Eleanor Henderson has created what might be considered in the future to be a literary classic.