Looking for a Miracle: Brides of Lancaster County Book 2 by Wanda E. Brunstetter

Looking for a Miracle is a novel about an Amish woman in Lancaster County, PA named Rebekah Stoltzfus. Rebekah was paralyzed in a freak accident when she was a child, and as a result she is wheelchair bound. Looking for a Miracle takes Rekekah's point of view, her suitor's point of view (Daniel) and her sister, Nadine's, point of view. Rebekah must deal with her disability with relation to growing into a self-sufficient woman and how that relates to love and marriage.

I listened to the audio book version. I give this book three stars. *** I enjoyed the story and would listen to it again if given the chance, but I found myself a little frustrated by it at the same time. Looking for a Miracle is what I would call a "sweet romance." I expected it to be pretty chaste, which it was. What frustrated me about the novel were some of the same things that I also liked about it.

The biggest thing that irritated me was that the characters were a little too realistic. Nadine was constantly whining about how Rebekah got to do things she wasn't allowed to do. Rebekah was constantly focusing on the limitations her disability posed. Though very realistic teenage behavior and behavior for someone learning to cope with a disability, I felt like I wanted to give both characters a good talking to, slap them in the face, and just tell them to deal with it. Nadine's character in particular was very realistic in her self centeredness, but it got old page after page. I wanted to suspend my disbelief a little more. Brunstetter's constant use of showing the readers these two character's thoughts annoyed me. It's bad enough to hear a teenager constantly whine in real life about her siblings, but to hear their thoughts was a little much for me.

But it was realistic...

One thing that kept me engaged in the plot was that Brunstetter did an excellent job of dropping just enough Pennsylvania Dutch into all the character's speech to remind me that in real life these characters would be using very little English amongst themselves. Brunstetter uses a lot of Pennsylvania Dutch to English cognates, which greatly added to their characterization. I found myself looking for some print books about the Amish just to see how some of these words were spelled.

Another thing I liked about Looking for a Miracle is that Brunstetter's characters aren't romanticized to the point of being flat. It's easy to pigeonhole the Amish into an idea of what they should be like, but Brunstetter's writing shows the common humanity these characters have. The Amish get angry, irritated, lazy, sad, etc. just like others. I think Looking for a Miracle's best feature as a novel was Brunstetter's ability humanize the characters into people I'd like to know if I could meet them even though this was a work of fiction.

One thing that I would have liked to have addressed a little more in the book was what Amish group was fictionalized. Was this Old Order Amish? Beechy Amish? Etc.? As I choose book 2 to listen to and review, perhaps the answer is in Book 1 and I need to read book 1. I have a knack for picking books up the middle of a series. Other than the specific Amish group, choosing book 2 was very easy to understand the plot. This wasn't a novel in which not reading book 1 detracted from the story as I plucked this one from the middle of a series.

Brunstetter also does a good job describing the way of life the characters have established. I could picture all the gas powered items, the farm, the singings, etc.

I think the other thing keeping me from rating this book higher than 3 stars was the pacing. It was fitting that the pacing of the plot was slow; The Amish have a slow pace of doing things. I just wasn't used to taking 6 1/2 hours to listen to a storyline I could have summarized in three sentences. Perhaps I should read more sweet romance before being as harsh, but oh well. I did enjoy the novel, though.

Brunstetter surely didn't have any control over the last thing that made me rank the book lower, but I have to write about it. I listened to the audio book without seeing the cover. Library audio books are sometimes that way. When I finished Looking for a Miracle and looked the title up on Amazon to link to this page, I was disappointed because the book version has the characters' faces on the cover. The Amish don't like themselves portrayed with their faces showing. The publisher surely knows it. I know that Brunstetter knows it because her web page tactfully leaves the faces obscured with the images portrayed.

Chosen Prey by John Sandford

Chosen Prey by John Sandford is the 13th book in John Sandford's Prey series. John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp. He is originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Oddly enough, I didn't know this when I chose to read/listen to Chosen Prey. I have to root for my fellow native Iowans.

In Chosen Prey, The police chief, Lucas Davenport, hunts a serial killer named James Qatar. I'm not including any spoilers in this review, so I'm not going to get into a lot of detail about killings other than to say Sandford establishes very early in the book that Qatar is the killer. It's up to Davenport and his team of investigators to find him before he kills again.

Overall I enjoyed Chosen Prey very much. It was a page turner, and although I knew who the killer was, I was on the edge of my seat while reading/listening to the audio book version of the novel. Sandford does a good job of creating realistic characters and building tension from scene to scene and chapter to chapter. I even found myself identifying with Qatar at times. It's a rare quality to identify with a serial killer when I read. I think that's why I was so drawn in. I almost didn't want him to be caught.

I give this book three and a half stars. *** 1/2. There were more aspects I liked than didn't like, but a few things about Chosen Prey really bothered me too. One of those things wasn't within Sandford's control. The audio book version I used had an author interview at the end lasting nearly 40 minutes. When Chosen Prey ended, I was expecting another 40 minutes of story. Had I read the book version this wouldn't have been a problem. As it was, however, I felt cheated that the novel ended when it did. I kept waiting for one more plot twist, and suddenly the whole thing was over.

Marshall, Davenport, Lucas, and Qatar were finely crafted characters. Dell, Marcey, and Weather were harder for me to get to know. Their personalities and actions were important to the plot, but I didn't feel like I related with any of them. I think part of this was because Weather's last name was used. I wasn't sure if Dell was the investigator's first or last name. Marcey felt like a secretary to me rather than a cop. Her role worked with the plot, but I felt like a whole can of worms was opened that wasn't able to be resolved. I wanted to know if she went back to more in depth police work.

Perhaps part of my problem was choosing the 13th book in the series rather than book number one. Overall I was still able to enjoy the novel on its own merits without having to have read the preceding 12 novels, but my favorite kind of series as a reader is one in which I can pluck a book out of the middle and not have a lot of loose strings.

My other issue was that Qatar's bag of bloody clothes isn't really tidied up. Lucas Davenport spends a lot of time looking for it, and the bag with the clothes isn't really a closed issue at the end of Chosen Prey.

I did manage to listen to 13 hours of audio in 3 days, so I was pretty sucked into the plot. I would have given this one 4 stars if the bloody clothes would have been better addressed. Maybe I just need to read book 14?

Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall

Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall was a delightful book. Hepinstall weaved several stories into Absence of Nectar, all of which could have stood on their own and been interesting without the other subplots. Alice, the narrator, tells the story in a way that is both easy to understand but is also believable. Telling the story through the eyes of an eleven year old I think added to the genius of the book because Alice's perception of the events was a lot different than it would have been had her brother, Boone, been the narrator. It wasn't until the end of the book that I really started to think of the events more as Boone's story than Alice's. I think the case could be made that either of the two children could have been the main character.

I listened to Absence of Nectar on audio book, and I was glad that I did. Hepinstall's language throughout the book felt poetic in its rhythm. I definitely wouldn't classify it as a prose poem, but the rhythm of the words on the page helped me to stay interested in the plot. I listen to a lot of audio books, and very few achieve this quality.

I found myself liking all the characters in Absence of Nectar except for Simon Jester. I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say that Hepinstall's writing makes it easy to hate some of the characters I ultimately ended up liking. There was enough room for redemption to keep them from becoming flat on the page.

Although I enjoyed Absence of Nectar, I'm not sure how I categorize it. I've seen it listed as a thriller when looking up information online. I don't agree that it's a thriller per se, but I'm not sure it's genre fiction at all. There's a little bit of everything in the book. Death, life, romance, tragedy, etc. I think contemporary fiction is probably the best label for it. There's a universal quality to the plot that makes me think readers of many different types of fiction would enjoy reading Hepinstall's work.

I give Absence of Nectar four stars. **** Without a doubt, I recommend the book.

There were a few things that bothered me about the plot that keep me from giving it five stars. First and foremost, I found myself wondering why Boone was so religious/spiritual. Alice gives details over and over again on her take on her pagan gods and her own sacrifices to them to keep her family safe from Simon Jester, but ultimately Boone is more spiritual than she is. He's always talking about God and so forth, but there's never really an explanation for why. Did he have a conversion experience? There isn't anything particularly useful by way of exposition that would suggest Alice and Boone's parents were spiritual or even took the kids to church or made them read the Bible. Yet, Boone borders at times on being a religious fanatic during certain parts of the novel. I don't know many people who were that way as kids without either the parents being pretty zealous or the kid having some huge experience causing him to talk about God all the time.

At one point, Alice and Boone are in a Catholic church and Alice describes the church in enough detail to make me think that either Hepinstall intended the kids to be Catholic or she stepped out of Alice's perspective for a few pages to add detail regarding their setting. Other parts of the story would suggest the kids weren't Catholic, though. The biggest two things were that both Alice and Boone's mother and father divorced and remarried.

Given the vast detail and length (it took over 10 hours on audio book to listen to the unabridged version) these are somewhat minor things I'm criticizing. Even with those questions lingering, I finished Absence of Nectar in 3 days.