'When I Found You' by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Official Summary:

While duck hunting one morning, childless, middle-aged Nathan McCann finds a newborn abandoned in the woods. To his shock, the child—wrapped in a sweater and wearing a tiny knitted hat—is still alive. To his wife’s shock, Nathan wants to adopt the boy…but the child’s grandmother steps in. Nathan makes her promise, however, that one day she’ll bring the boy to meet him so he can reveal that he was the one who rescued him.

Fifteen years later, the widower Nathan discovers the child abandoned once again—this time at his doorstep. Named Nat, the teenager has grown into a sullen delinquent whose grandmother can no longer tolerate him. Nathan agrees to care for Nat, and the two engage in a battle of wills that spans years. Still, the older man repeatedly assures the youngster that, unlike the rest of the world, he will never abandon him—not even when Nat suffers a trauma that changes both of their lives forever.

From the bestselling author of Pay It Forward comes When I Found You, an exquisite, emotional tale of the unexpected bonds that nothing in life can break.

Review:

Let me start off by saying that if it weren't for Kindle First* I wouldn't have ever heard of, never mind downloaded, 'When I Found You'. It's yet another Prime benefit that helps keep my reading list longer than it needs to be and filled with a more diverse breadth of genres. If it weren't for the services like this one, Kindle Unlimited and the Lending Library, the infamous to-be-read pile would look more like that of a Vampire Diaries fan girl then it already does... and that's (probably) saying something***.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a book review, not some free lip-service for the retail giants, so let's get on with it.

'When I Found You' is rightly billed as an emotional read, but is it "exquisite"? In a word, no. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty good and worth the journey, but I wasn't floored by it and I certainly wouldn't use a word like exquisite to describe this particular fiction. Like many others I found that the characters came across as one dimensional and lacking any sense of passion. Even then, the story itself wasn't attention grabbing though the plot has enough going on where it kept me interested.

Bottom Line: 'When I Found You' is a great, middle of the road kind of read. It's an interesting story founded on a compelling idea, but the delivery seems to be missing something that I can't quiet put my finger on so I'll just say that it feels a bit empty and leave it at that. Overall, worth the time if you're usually into reads like 'This is Where I Leave You' and 'Pearl' - although, my opinion is that both of those titles are better than this one - or you love crappy Helen Hunt movies. 

*If you haven't heard of Kindle First then let me break it down for you: Do you have an Amazon Prime subscription? If you don't, you do your primary reading on a Kindle and you're constantly looking for new titles then you should. It's a little known benefit where Kindle owners get to choose two** titles from four pre-selected early releases each month. It's a great way for lazy readers (like myself) to keep that to-be-read pile insurmountably high.

**Ah-ha! So you've heard of the program and you could've sworn that you only got one title a month, right? As of 2015 Amazon is now letting us lowly Prime subscribers increase our monthly haul to two of the four instead of just the one. Pretty exciting stuff, I know.

***Does this really surprise anyone?

'If I Stay' by Gayle Forman

Official Summary:

In the blink of an eye everything changes. Seventeen ­year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall what happened afterwards, watching her own damaged body being taken from the wreck. Little by little she struggles to put together the pieces- to figure out what she has lost, what she has left, and the very difficult choice she must make. 

Review:

Like a lot of others I picked this up after seeing the movie trailer. For me, it wasn't about preparing to go see the film, (those trips are usually to see the latest and greatest Abrams flicks), but the premise of a comatose girl trying to decide whether she should give up and die or find something worth living for drew me in.

Many other reviewers have commented that the girl, Mia, spends very little time actually contemplating this decision over the course of the novel, but I have to disagree. While the character doesn't brood openly about her decision, every memory she has helps tip the scales against or in favor of waking up and living a life permanently altered by tragedy.

What I did have trouble with is the ending, not because it was poorly written, or out of place - the last pages of 'If I Stay' were exactly what you would hope for given the emotional roller-coaster that the author pushes you through from page one. What I had a big problem with was the preview for the sequel novel 'Where She Went' that followed the closing chapter. For whatever reason, the first chapter of the second novel, told from the boyfriend Adam's perspective now, totally turned me off to not only reading the next book, but spoiled the experience of reading the first one.

Bottom Line: 'If I Stay' is a quick read worthy of it's fan base. An emotional page-turner that doesn't get heavy handed but does feature characters that can be a touch unbelievable. Overall, a solid entry in the young adult category that I'd recommend for anyone looking for something substantial as it raises real questions about life, death, love and family. If you like titles such as 'The Fault in Our Stars' then this one is for you - just learn from my mistake and avoid reading the preview for 'Where She Went'

'Perks of Being a Wallflower' by Stephen Chbosky

Official Summary:
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a story about what it’s like to travel that strange course through the uncharted territory of high school. The world of first dates, family dramas, and new friends. Of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Of those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

Review: 
Once a week a friend and I leave our desks just long enough to drive down to Starbucks and order incredibly high-calorie drinks smothered in whip cream and gossip. Sometimes it's work related, but most of the time we just talk about movies we've seen recently or television shows worth checking out. This last time we went out he insisted that I watch the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower. His recommendations have yet to let me down, so when he said that it was the first film he'd watched in awhile that made him feel like he'd actually watched a moving piece of cinema, I couldn't help but check it out when I'd finally meandered back to my desk.

Unsurprisingly, the movie was based on this book of the same name and with a quick Amazon 1-click it was ready and waiting at home on the Kindle. If I'm presented with an awesome movie or the awesome book that movie was based on, I'll choose the book every time. So that night, immediately after I'd eaten, cooked and cleaned up dinner, I sat down and started reading.

The first thing to mention is that Perks is an incredibly quick read. From cover to cover it only took about three hours. The second is that the backdrop for this coming of age story is high school in the early 1990's. Having been in high school during roughly the same time period as the characters in this book, and having lived through a lot of the same uniquely '90's moments (Rocky Horror Picture Show anyone?) which made reading this book similar to flipping through a photo album filled with people and places you thought you'd forgotten about.

Because of that association, the story lingered with me, not so much because of the thought provoking content. I mean, let's be honest here, I'm a little old to do much more than reminisce over the kinds of issues complicating Charlie's life.

Bottom Line: While other reviewers seem to either love Perks by Stephen Chbosky for it's accessible, character driven narrative, or hate it because they don't identify with Charlie, the time period, the catchphrase (see left) or all of the above, I think it would be a wonderful summer reading title for kids going into their freshman year. Not just because that's the age of the narrator, but because it seems like time well spent helping these kids prepare for a complicated new phase of life filled with dating, drugs and drama. To boil it down further, if you're not either A: a Gen X'er or B: transitioning into high school, you'll probably have a tough time understanding this one and might have better luck elsewhere.

'The Misremembered Man' by Christina McKenna

Official Summary:
The Misremembered Man is a beautifully rendered portrait of life in rural Ireland which charms and delights with its authentic characters and gentle humor. This vivid portrayal of the universal search for love brings with it a darker tale, heartbreaking in its poignancy.

The Review:
When the cover of the The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna flashed up on the Kindle's screensaver two things happened:

1. I bought the book based on the interesting title and pretty cover and;
2. Amazon's ad executives had another reason to pat themselves on the back for orchestrating another successful attack on my wallet.

If you'll notice, at no time during the buying process did I stop to read the book description, check the genre or read any of the existing reviews which, at least in this case, may have stopped me from grabbing up the title in the first place. That would have been my loss. More to the point, if I'd read the severely cut down, vanilla description above I wouldn't have even given this title a chance mainly because it screams 'boring'!

Now literary fiction isn't usually my thing anyway - in fact, it's usually my experience that titles with more interesting descriptions than this one can result in some frustratingly mind-numbing stuff. And don't think for a minute that when I finally got around to cracking open The Misremembered Man  and realized that it was a staunch member of the dreaded literary fiction camp that I didn't contemplate cutting and running onto the next title on my list.

This desire to move on was amplified by the adjective laden opening chapters. Thankfully though, the overly descriptive style of the first few pages is tampered down once the stage has been set and the stories of both the weathered, rough-edged Jamie, and the spinster Lydia begins. Centered on each of these characters search for companionship using the classifieds section of the local newspaper, McKenna adeptly weaves in a poignant critique of the church and their gross abuses of children in the Irish orphanages in the 1930's while introducing some truly colorful characters along the way.

Bottom Line: Pick up The Misremembered Man if you have an interest in cultural books about Ireland, love this genre, or you liked titles like A Friend of the Family or Mariana, (although, in my humble opinion, this title is leaps and bounds better than either of those). Avoid it if you're searching out romance or humor as this title is really has very little to offer in either category even though the too short summary would lead you to believe otherwise.