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The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

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I recently finished the Stella Crown mysteries by Judy Clemens. Stella is an interesting character, a tattooed, Harley-riding dairy farmer. Set in Pennsylvania, the series highlights the hardships of small dairy operations and provides some insight into the Mennonite community.

After finishing the last book I used NoveList in our catalog (a reader’s advisory tool the library subscribes to) to find similar books. It’s easy to use. Search for your title or author, choose Full Display (below Where Is It in the catalog) then scroll down.

Depending on the title you may see all the books in the series, read-alikes for the title, author, and series, story elements, reviews and more. Story elements are the parts of a story such as character, plot, and setting. I chose the story elements of atmospheric and intricately plotted then wandered through the results.

One click led to another and I found The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda. Miranda writes psychological suspense which is not the genre for the Stella Crown books. But like Clemens, Miranda has crafted an intricately woven plot that keeps you turning the pages.

Leah Stevens had it all, an apartment in Boston, a budding romance with Noah and the journalism career she’d work so hard to get. Then it was all gone.  She had a routine assignment to write a piece about the lack of mental health care on a college campus with 4 suicides in the last year. But the circumstances of the last suicide were too familiar to Leah and the story became something else entirely. Consumed with finding and printing the truth Leah steps over the line. Once published the fallout from the story costs Leah her job and Noah.

At her lowest Leah runs into Emmy Grey. Leah had roomed with Emmy 8 years earlier while she worked an unpaid internship that was a requisite for her job. Even though they had lost contact Leah was thrilled to see an old friend. After too much vodka and desperate for change Leah agrees to leave Boston and move with Emmy to western Pennsylvania.

Leah’s new beginning is teaching writing to disinterested high school students and living in a rustic rental with a front entrance of sliding glass doors. Emmy’s job working evenings at a motel means the two friends usually pass each other coming and going. To complicate matters Leah has attracted the attention of one of the married high school coaches and receives unwanted emails and late night phone calls.

On her way out one morning Leah leaves a note to let Emmy know the rent is due. When it blows it under a shelf she finds other notes she’d left for Emmy and realizes she hasn’t seen Emmy for days. Emmy doesn’t have a cell phone and has never given Leah the name of the motel so there is no way to check on her.

On her way to the school Leah passes a roadblock at an area near the lake. Worried about Emmy she stops to investigate. It is not the car accident Leah feared but an injured woman, a stranger to Leah. Heading on to school Leah’s thankful she avoided the police and that the victim it is not Emmy.

Called to the office during her first period she finds her contact with the police was delayed not avoided. The prime suspect in the attack on the victim, Bethany Jarvis, is Leah’s unwanted admirer Coach Davis. Bethany Jarvis also bears a striking resemblance to Leah and the attack occurred less than a mile from Leah’s home putting her right in the middle of the investigation.

Although interviewed by more than one police officer Detective Kyle Donovan becomes Leah’s primary contact on the case and it is to him that she reports Emmy’s disappearance. As Kyle continues to investigate, Leah gets pulled deeper into the case primarily because Emmy doesn’t seem to exist.

Loyal to Emmy, Leah uses her journalism skills to try to find and prove to everyone that Emmy is Emmy. But as clues are uncovered and facts revealed, Leah has to reevaluate her friendship with Emmy. Then Emmy’s boyfriend is found with his throat cut in the car she drove. Since Emmy doesn’t seem to be real and parts of Leah’s past that she hoped to hide becomes known she goes from potential victim to suspect.

The deeper she goes Leah finds that most of what she thought she knew isn’t real. She must find the real Emmy and determine if she is a victim or the orchestrator of a clever and deadly plan. With its many twists and turns this novel is hard to put down. It pulls you from page to page to finally uncover the truth. The library has this title in both regular and large print editions.

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Only Child by Rhiannon Navin

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First graders huddled in a closet listening to the pop, pop, pop of gunfire in the hall is the stuff of nightmares. It is also the beginning of Rhiannon Navin’s novel Only Child. Navin’s first book is a heart-wrenching tale of trauma and loss told through the mind and heart of a child.

Six-year-old Zach Taylor, his classmates and teacher, Miss Russell, have been in the closet before during a lockdown drill. They weren’t in there long before Charlie, the security guard, came to unlock the hall door and tell them to come out. This time though Charlie doesn’t come and the pops keep going and getting louder.

When the door finally opens it’s the police. The class is led through the bloody scene in the hall out into the rain to a nearby church. When Zach’s mom, Melissa, is finally let in to find him, the first thing she asks is “Zach, where’s your brother?”

Andy is not in the church nor at the hospital when they go there. Finding Andy is Melissa’s singular focus and when she learns that Andy is one of the 19 fatalities she collapses and is hospitalized.

His mom has always been Zach’s main caregiver. They did projects together, she made his meals and put him to bed. They read together each night then sang a special song together before he slept. All of that goes away with Andy’s death. As Zach sees it his mommy got changed into another person at the hospital.

His family was strained before this tragedy. Andy had oppositional defiant disorder and his behavioral problems caused dissension between his parents who also had other issues. Instead of coming together as a family Zach’s parents isolate themselves with their grief and he is mostly left to deal with his fear, confusion and grief alone.

He doesn’t understand why people bring food and have a party when Andy has just died. He worries about what happened to Andy, where is his body and is his soul safe in heaven? Zach’s nightmares start the very first night but the adults seem almost dismissive of his fears and questions.

Zach is drawn into Andy’s room and each day he checks the top bunk to see if Andy is there and maybe he just had a bad dream. He first goes into Andy’s closet to hide but finds he can quiet himself in there and make bad thoughts go into his “brain safe” so he won’t be afraid.

Andy’s closet becomes his safe haven and secret hideaway. It is there that he realizes that the red he just painted on a page is like the red his face gets when people look at him and he is embarrassed. He decides to give each of his feelings a color so they won’t be all mixed up inside him.

He brings a picture of himself with Andy to the hideaway and he starts to talk to Andy. He doesn’t let Andy off the hook because he died and lets him know he was a jerk to Zach. But as life outside the closet worsens and Zach has to deal with his own uncontrollable feelings he begins to see Andy in a new light and remembers the good.

He reads aloud to Andy from the Magic Tree House books. The books were Andy’s but became Zach’s when Andy outgrew them. The main characters are brother and sister Jack and Annie which sounds like Zach and Andy. When he reads it’s like all 4 of them go on the adventure together.

But the comfort Andy feels in his hideaway is lost outside the closet. He doesn’t understand why he has started wetting the bed or why he suddenly gets so angry and can’t make it stop. His mom has become determined to make the parents of the gunman pay and has little time or patience for Zach. His dad, Zach’s only real support, has gone back to work and his parents fighting grows worse. Zach has gone from a family of 4 to feeling like he is alone. Can Zach find a way to help his family heal or is the loss of Andy too much to overcome?

Navin has written a gripping novel and stayed true to Zach’s voice. But the raw emotion and subject matter makes this a very tough read. I almost quit after the first few chapters. But Zach drew me back and I’m glad. The library has this title in regular, large print, and ebook editions.

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It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A. J. Jacobs

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A. J. Jacobs has amused and informed us by living for a year following the tenets of the Bible, reading the Encyclopedia Britannica to become the smartest person in the world, becoming a human guinea pig, and attempting to become the healthiest person in the world. He now tackles genealogy and what is means to be family in It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree.

What started his quest to help build the World Family Tree was an email from Jules Feldman. Feldman is a dairy farmer in Israel who in his spare time is building a family tree. A huge family tree consisting of 80,000 relatives including Jacobs who is the eighth cousin of Mrs. Feldman.

Skeptical but intrigued Jacobs follows the suggestion of his brother-in-law and contacts Randy Schoenberg. Randy is a lawyer of some repute (see the film Woman in Gold) and a genealogist. According to Randy genealogy in undergoing two revolutions, DNA and Internet family trees.

He introduces Jacobs to the collaborative genealogy site (Internet family tree) Geni.com. There are others like WikiTree and FamilySearch where you find an ancestor on your tree who is on another family’s tree and soon you are connected to thousands (or more) new relatives. A check of Geni at the time showed over 70 million people in 160+ countries listed on the site.

Geni also has an interesting feature you can use to find your connection to famous people. He describes it as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon where everyone is Kevin Bacon. Jacobs finds he has connections to Dr. Ruth, Jackson Pollock, Rachel Weisz and Barack Obama who is his fifth-great aunt’s husband’s father’s wife’s seventh-great nephew.

Geni has his interest; next for Jacobs is DNA testing. His DNA test matches him with 1009 presumed cousins including his wife Julie, his seventh cousin. Julie is less than thrilled but, as Jacobs finds, marriage between distant cousins is not that unusual.

With all these cousins and the potential to uncover more Jacobs comes up with the idea to hold a family reunion– a worldwide family reunion. Bringing all these people together he can make even more connections plus he might get in the Guinness Book of World Records. Now all he needs is a place, money and plenty of help.

The reunion is the conclusion of the book and its progress is remarked upon at the end of most chapters but most of the book is about family. What family is, all its different forms, and how would your worldview and prejudice’s change if you thought of people of different nationalities and ethnic background or even the guy who cut in front of you in line as your cousins.

The author talks about Y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, evolution, and the DNA humans share with animals. Jacobs explores many aspects of genealogical research including privacy, the emphasis on celebrity connections, how some cultures and ethnicities are not represented, and the significance of names. He even includes an appendix with a guide to getting started on your family tree.

He made connections with a lot of people gathering information, promoting his family reunion and lining up speakers for his event. Most had a story to tell and Jacobs does a wonderful job using them to highlight his chapters.

Jacobs also uses a lot of his own family history which is by turns amusing, touching, and surprising. The story of his great grandmother Gertrude Sunstein emphasizes the point that women are not well represented in the historical documents. Gertrude was a suffragist and very active. When she died in her obituary her suffrage work was noted but she was identified only as Mrs. Elias Sunstein, no first name.

As word of the reunion spreads he hears about other reunions. One is the Hatfield-McCoy event. Yes, the famous feuding Hatfields and McCoys.  He also explores black sheep in your family tree and that for every connection you get to Isaac Newton or Malala Yousafzai you get one for John Wayne Gacy or Joseph Stalin.

The global family reunion does happen, in fact 44 simultaneous reunions were held around the world. As Jacobs points out success or failure depended on point of view and I’ll let you be the judge.

Jacobs is an amusing writer and his style is engaging but he also makes you think. How differently would you react and how would your views change if you think of everyone as family?

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Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan began the research for her latest book years ago. It was 2004 when she first learned of the significance of New York’s waterfront and the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The result of her years of research and interviews is a very compelling read titled Manhattan Beach.

The novel is in a way three different stories intertwined. The central story is Anna Kerrigan. She is both a secondary character and the catalyst for change in the stories of Eddie Kerrigan (her father) and Dexter Styles.

The Depression changed the fortunes of the Kerrigan family.  Before the crash Eddie and his wife Agnes worked in theater and lived well with Anna and her disabled sister Lydia. Eddie was forced to take a job with an old friend as a bagman to support his family.

He took Anna with him when he could as no one caused trouble in front of a child.  They formed a close bond that Anna believed was unbreakable until the day she accompanied him to see Dexter Styles. The meeting at Styles’ home wasn’t the normal errand she ran with her father but for a new job.

Anna didn’t know about the job but she knew instinctively that Eddie wanted her to lie about the day. Eddie began to worry about what he had exposed Anna to plus his new job took him to places a child couldn’t go.   The errands ended and the bond broke. Eddie worked long hours and one day he didn’t come home. As days turned to weeks the family accepted he wasn’t coming back and life went on.

Anna is in college when Pearl Harbor is attacked and the U.S. joins the war.  She gladly leaves college to work in the Naval Yard. She is patriotic and eager to do what she can for the war effort but longs for something more exciting than measuring small parts for ships.  Though frowned upon Anna goes out each day at lunch to explore the shipyard and witness the different jobs being done. She discovers the divers.

With so many men fighting the war women are doing jobs traditionally done by men but diving isn’t one of them. The suit alone is a deterrent because of the weight.  The dress or diving suit weighed 200 pounds with the shoes 35 pounds, then add the collar and helmet at 56 pounds and the belt at 84 pounds. With the suit on you had to be able to walk with all that weight and perform tasks as delicate as unraveling a knot while wearing the three-fingered gloves.

Anna knows nothing of the requirements but she is determined to try. Her life outside the Naval Yard revolves around the care of Lydia but in her limited free time she visits her first nightclub. The club belongs to Dexter Styles. She remembers him and introduces herself but doesn’t reveal her true identity. Styles may hold the key to her father’s disappearance.

Dexter’s story now becomes part of the narrative. The author not only did her homework on the waterfront and naval yard but on organized crime as well. Styles runs his own small criminal empire and he married into society.  His relationship with his boss and his connections through his father-in-law make Dexter feel he is close to untouchable. But no one is untouchable.

Anna gets her chance to dive but tragedy at home has left her living alone. To escape her loneliness and to celebrate her new job as a diver Anna goes out and ends up at Dexter’s nightclub. She doesn’t see him but he finds her and what happens next changes the course of both their lives.

Anna does learn at least part of what happened to her father but not all of it. We now get Eddie’s story. Eddie was an astute, observant man and at his core moral. His jobs provided for his family and put him in a position to see things he couldn’t ignore. When one of his friends is murdered he makes a decision that changes all of their lives.

Egan’s writing style immerses you in the story but Eddie’s story was so compelling that it was as if I was reading another novel. I forgot about Anna and Dexter as Eddie’s life unfolded.

This is not a perfect novel. The switches in storyline from one character to another kills the momentum a little and she rushed to an end.  Anna’s life is glossed over at the end when before it was rich with detail.  But I’m being picky because the novel is well-done and an engrossing read.

The characters come alive in your mind and you can see the waterfront and hear the ocean. When I was a teen I read “Hannah Fowler”. I don’t recall much about the story but I’ve never forgotten the character. This novel is like that, the nuances of the story will fade but I’ll remember Anna Kerrigan.

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