Imagine that food is scarce, money is even scarcer, education is not an option for women and freedom of anything - speech, religion, choice - no longer exists. This is Afghanistan in the 1990s, the world in which Fereiba now lives and she is desperately seeking a way out. She grew up in a better time where she was able to go to school, teach and live a respectable but free life. She recounts her childhood and growing up in a middle-class family while remembering her first love and how heartbroken she was when he married her sister.
I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed the early 2000s TV show, Alias, starring Jennifer Garner. And I’ve been missing it ever since – I mean, what actor since has shown such facility for multiple identities and costume changes?
Facing hard moments is not easy for anyone, especially Jean Perdu, the self-proclaimed literary apothecary who prescribes books to people based on their emotional state. He has essentially shut himself off, emotionally and physically, from the world since he was left by his lover over twenty years ago. Now fate has led him back to that very moment of heartbreak when he is forced to open a door, again emotionally and physically, and give away some of his last few possessions to a friend in need. Amongst those items is a letter his lover wrote to him on that fateful day.
“I think maybe it’s the things we don’t want to talk about that are the things people most want to hear.”
Willowdean Dickson is many things. She’s a girl for one. She’s from South Texas. She works in a fast food joint called Harpy’s with an absolute dreamboat of a boy. She and her best friend Ellen are probably the biggest teenage fans of Miss Dolly Parton. She’s absolutely wise beyond her years, and she’s fat. As Willow says, “it’s not a cuss word. It’s not an insult. At least not when I say it.”
Nicki Price has just arrived in the Big Easy with her newly minted private detective's license and the desire to get to work right away, hopefully with her cousin Nate Price who has his own detective agency. Nicki plans to use her investigative skills to not only help Nate and make some money but to solve her father's murder from years ago. Nate tries to put Nicki off but she won't be deterred and follows Nate to a client meeting and manages to insinuate herself into the investigation of a recent murder.
Evelyn Wolfe, black ops CIA intelligence officer, is looking for her kidnapped sister. When the van supposedly holding her sister explodes, Evelyn is knocked out and scooped up by ex-CIA agent and current Ageis Security agent (and former lover) Zane Archer. Archer is out to get Eve for something that happened on their last mission together. Now both are implicated in the bombing that injured several innocent bystanders. When Eve wakes up, she and Archer must set aside their differences while they clear their names and find Eve's sister. Who can they trust?
I picked up The Soul of an Octopus because, ten years ago, I was utterly enamored with Sy Mongtomery’s The Good Good Pig. My expectations were so high that the contrast between what I learned about the inner lives of octopuses, and the Stockholm Syndromesque relationships between them and their keepers, quickly became too disappointing—and too tiring—for me to enjoy.
