“Something was affecting the very being of every animal species in Decoy that it didn’t kill, something that caused madness as well as created intelligence – something, something. But what?”
“What are we going to find in there?” he asked, noting the hospital, and remembered why they were there. “Nothing you haven’t already seen,” said Hollie, exiting the Humvee. But it wasn’t true. There were plenty of dead bodies; however these were nothing like the corpses Kaufman had seen out in the desert. The remains here were ghastly, like malformed ghouls out of some horror video game. Most of the beds were empty at first, but as Hollie led them nearer the terminal ward, they were almost all filled with the abhorrent forms.”
“This is exactly what he wants,” he said. “He’s been luring us here from the very start.”
2020 was definitely not a normal year for any of us. It felt, at times, like we were living in one of the books we read, and not one we want to. But we made it through and are settling in to our new normal, whatever that may look like. I, like so many, experienced an emotional tribulation that took a few months to overcome. In that time, I remembered that reading books was not a competition on how many I can get through in a month or a year but something that I love doing. I have a tendency to set goals and then obsess over them. I am working on breaking this unhealthy habit. I also don’t need to feel like I must write a blog post everyday. If I do, that’s awesome, if not, its not a big deal and people will not unfollow me because of it. There are so many other things that I enjoy doing as well and I don’t want to forget about those or spending time with the people that I love.
So, 2021 will be about having fun and doing what makes me happy every day.
2020 books completed: 36 Books 12,454 pages My average rating – 3.9 🌟
“She began glancing around the deli. Nora knew exactly what she was thinking. Who can I tell first? The Kranks are skipping Christmas! No party! No tree! Nothing but money in their pockets so they can blow it on a cruise.”
Nora and Luther Krank’s only daughter Blair has joined the Peace Corps and left for a year to Peru. Christmas without her just won’t be the same. Luther gets a brilliant idea to skip the circus of Christmas altogether, save money, and take a ten day cruise on Christmas Day instead. It’s a full boycott, no decorating, no cards, no parties.
“Detective Mackenzie White braced herself for the worst as she walked through the cornfield that afternoon.” “It took no more than five seconds of seeing the blonde woman tied to the wooden pole before Mackenzie knew there was something much deeper going on here. Something unlike anything she had ever encountered. This was not what happened in the cornfields of Nebraska.”
“Nearly thirty years after my mother’s death I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered.”
Natasha shares her experiences of growing up in Mississippi as a mixed race child in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The wonderful stories of living around her grandma, aunts, and uncles. The ways that they helped shape her with their stories and metaphors. After her parent’s divorce, her and her mother move to Atlanta. Natasha speaks about the trauma during these years with a new step father that she had tried to block out. “For a long time I tried to forget as much as I could of the twelve years between 1973 and 1985. I wanted to banish that part of my past, an act of self-creation by which I sought to be made only of what I consciously chose to remember.” “Those two years would be like the set of bookends I’d kept on my desk back then…” “The years 1973 and 1985, side by side, with no books between them, no pages upon which the story I could not bear to remember had been written. But there is a danger in willed forgetting; too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I needed to most. Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly. Even when I was trying to bury the past, there were moments from those lost years that kept coming back, rising to mind unbidden. Those memories — some intrusive, some lovely — seem now to have a grander significance, like signposts on a path.”
“An icy wind had kicked up, and the metal walls of the truck creaked and groaned with each gust. She wasn’t the type to be frightened at nothing, but Hannah couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if the killer had found out that she was searching Ruby’s outtakes for the sight of his cuff links.”
Hannah Swenson, baker and owner of The Cookie Jar, has been chosen as head judge for the first annual Hartland Flour Dessert Bake Off competition. In order to boost ratings, they have asked Hannah to bake a dessert on camera during the news every night before the competition as well. After the first night, fellow judge, Coach Boyd Watson was not making any friends. He has a good pallet but could use some tact. “But feelings have no place in a competition like this. Either you win or you don’t. There’s no sense in sugarcoating it. If you don’t come in first, you’re a loser.” When Boyd turns up dead in his garage that night, murdered from a blow to the head with a hammer from his own workbench, it seems like maybe someone else doesn’t like him either. Could it have to do with his judging on the competition or something else?
“I know why we’re all here,” Elhouse said, his lower lip trembling, eyes unblinking. “It’s worse than you can imagine.”
“Death is a big and ugly thing. It’s clumsy and loud, yet somehow it manages to be so damn clever and sneaky. It just doesn’t seem fair.”
Peter and Sylvia lost their little boy 2 years ago in a horrible accident. As a lot of couples do when a child is lost, they have grown apart in their grief. Drawn to drinking and pills to numb the pain and memories, they both know that their marriage is on it’s last threads. “Sometimes things weren’t fine. Sometimes the broken thing stayed broken until it was thrown away.” “Death had hardened the soil of their hearts, and now no new love could grow.”
“Are we captains of our souls? Absolutely. But masters of our fate is stretching it. The harbor we reach is sometimes a long haul from the course we plotted, because storms, and doldrums, and monsters intervene. Ask Odysseus.”
Marlow is an old Vietnam vet, the VA hospital where he was treated after the war has just been torn down and Marlow has travelled 4 hours to see it. Now he is drinking in a bar, telling the young bartender all his memories and stories he was told as a bartender himself before he makes the bus ride home.
“Turns out, that talking-ass, other-timer had my number. I’ve remembered his stories for thirty years now.”
“Me remembering thirty years later that old madman remembering people from his own way-back-when feels full-on weird. I see myself seeing him see them, and it’s like I’m looking in a mirror reflecting a mirror.”
“You can’t be no great priestess if you are always walking on the safe side of the path. Take risks even if that might mean fighting against normal.”
16 year old Joan Renault is the great granddaughter of the legendary voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, whose magical gifts have been past down to Joan. Teased her whole life by the other kids and called “hoodoo hag”, she just wishes she was normal but what comes to her little town is anything but normal and she must rely on all her training in order to put a stop to the evil.
“I merely encountered Lucifer, and he thinks I can bring him out of hell and give him back paradise.” “I avoid Lucifer if I can. I understand his ambition and recognize it in myself. It’s just another name for power, and it can be a heady brew.”
Catherine has just returned from a job in Peru when she gets a call from Venable, the deputy director of the CIA and her boss. He needs her in Hong Kong now. There is a situation that only she can help with, Hu Chang. A mysterious Chinese medicine potion maker, he is also a master poison maker and assassin but he is the closest thing to a father that Catherine knows. He took her in when she was young, alone, and on the streets. “Hu Chang stopped being innocent a long, long time ago. He’s capable of doing anything that he chooses. But he doesn’t usually choose anything that would get him into this kind of trouble. What’s he done?” “I think he’s concocted some potion or drug that’s fairly world-shaking.”
