Copper Beach by Jayne Ann Krentz

I have a great love of paranormal books and I have to say the plot and characters in Jayne Ann Krantz's book Copper Beach were very realistic. Abby is a solid female character that fights with trust issues. She ends up working with Sam after incapacitating a man with her talent. She learns to trust in him as they go on a whirlwind adventure. 5 Stars

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore

Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore is the story of painter/baker Lucien Lessard and real-life artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec as they try to figure out if their friend Vincent Van Gogh really killed himself or if he was murdered. This book was definitely bizarre, as Moore usually is, but it was more insignificantly charming than laugh out loud. 3 Stars

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer really read as if each chapter was a short vignette and I really enjoyed each and every word of this book. It's a series of dissertations that explore the work of a chosen artist and how his or her work predicted some scientific finding on the nature of the mind and our insights and acuities. 5 Stars

Landed by Tim Pears

Landed by Tim Pears is about a man’s personal tragedies. The main character was in a car accident in which his daughter perishes and he has to have his right hand amputated. After all this his wife divorces him and she has full custodial rights over the children making it impossible for him to see his kids. The characters are all detached and after finishing the book I feel like there is another, deeper, story in there. 3 Stars

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes painted the horror of the Vietnam War as a war with no real purpose, taking the life of young men, some that were still considered teenagers, before they actually had a chance to live and the politics that make you want to move out of the United States. This was a horrendous situation in which our soldiers followed their commander in chief and lost. 5 Stars

Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor

As a novel, Even the Dogs is stretched to sparsely. McGregor's dialect is a relentless volley of a drug-addled torrent of realization that after about 20 pages I found deadening. The lack of dialogue and strange multi-person point of view and rambling intensified this effect. The dysfunctional lives of the book's characters became more attention-grabbing later in the book though the last chapter was my favorite. 2 Stars

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

The Memory of Love was very hard to get into because it starts off very slow BUT it does gradually build as the theme becomes clearer. The book is set in Sierra Leone soon after the end of the civil war and has three main characters whose lives and loves traverse the story . 3 Stars