heartbreaking choices

Soon to be a motion picture, The Light Between Oceans is an Australian novel with themes of love, loss, and isolation. Set in the years following World War I on a fictional lighthouse island miles from shore, PTSD-suffering Tom and his young wife Isabel are being torn apart by multiple miscarriages. When a baby and a dead man in a boat wash ashore, they decide to keep the child as their own, not knowing the consequences that decision will bring in the future. This might be my book club’s favorite book of the year for its straightforward moral dilemmas, but I imagine this book would be

The Darkest Minds has everything you want in a dystopian book and more: psychic powers, anti-government organizations, rehabilitation camps and constant struggles for survival.  Ruby is days away from turning 10, and in her society when you turn 10 you contract a disease that either kills you or gives you strange psychic abilities. As a result, Ruby has seen classmates die or be taken away before her very eyes.   On the morning of her 10th birthday, Ruby finds herself a survivor. Expecting her special breakfast of pancakes, Ruby is met instead by a mother and father who no longer know her. 

Chloe Pinter loves helping families realize their dream of having children through her job at a private adoption agency. And she’s good at it. But as one family’s dreams come closer to fruition, another family’s dreams are shattered, and Chloe is left to pick up the pieces.

In Chosen, Hoffman examines the motives of a private adoption agency and its staff, adoptive families, and birth mothers unable to care for their children. In some cases the situations are heart-wrenching, in others…well, in others it’s heart-wrenching. Each family, whether it is the Novas in persistent pursuit of a