Hosted at Book Journey.

The Aloha Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini – This is part of the Elm Creek Quilters series. Bonnie is going through a very messy divorce and gets a chance to help her old college roommate start a quilt camp in Hawaii. There is a lot of information about Hawaiian history and Hawaiian style quilting.

These are quick and easy reads. The dialogue is clunky sometimes but I enjoy them. It almost made me want to do a Hawaiian style quilt even though I don’t like them and it don’t hand applique.

The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan – This is the third Percy Jackson book. The stakes are getting higher in the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans and the Half-Bloods are in the middle again. Atlas has escaped from holding up the sky. Percy travels to San Francisco to try to rescue his friend who is being held captive.

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen – I am a plot person. When I read a book I want a story. This is a book where nothing happened until 160 pages in. I understand that she wanted to show a picture of a normal family life that then will be disrupted by violence. But seriously, 160 pages? Then, then, she goes out of her way to avoid saying what happens. Half the characters in the book are murdered one night. You get that by inference. Over the next hundred pages she occasionally dribbles out bits and pieces about what happened to them. I put this book down soon after the murders happens because it was so frustrating to not know what happened. You aren’t told how, or why, or even by whom even though you can guess. But I picked it back up and then it started to get better. It became a story about how to survive tragedy and that was interesting.

Don’t read this if you expect it to have a real plot. This is a character study. I tend not to care about feelings so this wasn’t the best book for me. My library has a rating sheet in their books and everyone had given this an A+. I gave it a D and felt I was being generous but after finishing it I move it up to a C.

Crossfire by Dick Francis and Felix Francis – I picked this one next since it would be all plot. A British military officer is sent home from Afghanistan after having lost his foot in combat. He goes to stay with his estranged mother and step-father. His mother is a champion steeplechase trainer. He finds out that she is being blackmailed and because he’s bored and restless he decides to find out why.

This is Dick Francis’ last book. He died this spring. His son has been helping him write the last few books so I don’t know if there are going to be more of these like the estate of Robert Ludlum has done or not.

Sky Coyote by Kage Baker – This is the second Company novel. I enjoyed this one much more than the first. It is 1699 in California. The Company based in the 24th century wants to take a whole Chumash tribe for study. Joseph, an Immortal, is sent in costumed as the trickster god, Coyote to convince them to come with him to a Paradise. But the Chumash are smart and aren’t going to fall for simple tricks.