Eve's Daughters.

GoodReads Synopsis: Yearning for love and dignity, four generations of women must come to grips with the choices they've made--and those their mothers made before them. But breaking the cycle that has ensnared them over the decades will prove more difficult than they had ever imagined... Eighty-year-old Emma Bauer has carefully guarded a dark secret for more than fifty years. But when she sees her granddaughter's marriage beginning to unravel, Emma realizes that her lies about her own marriage have poisoned those she loves most. Can she help her granddaughter break free of a legacy of wrong choices? Or will she take her secret--and her broken heart--to the grave?

With honesty and compassion, author Lynn Austin weaves a compelling story of four unforgettable women--their struggles, their crises of faith, their triumphs.

My Thoughts: I first read this book in the ninth grade and loved it.  I read it again a few years later and again loved it.  So when I started my 2015 book challenge, I knew this would be the one for "A book from my childhood."  Lynn Austin is a wonderful storyteller, and this book did not disappoint me after all these years.  Eve's Daughters is a beautiful story of four generations of women and how we are shaped by the lives of those that come before us.  Five stars.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

GoodReads Synopsis:  When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

My Thoughts:  Despite already knowing about Zelda and Scott's life, I was absolutely riveted to this story.  I listened to this on audiobook, and it was one of the absolute best I've ever listened to.  The story was beautifully written by Therese Fowler and and magnificently read by Jenna Lamia.  Z is definitely a novel, but yet also very well researched and based on actual events.  I absolutely fell in love with the Zelda that Fowler and Lamia created and felt immense sadness for her as she struggled through adulthood.  Five stars! 

Columbine.

GoodReads Synopsis: On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another Columbine."

Now, in a riveting piece of journalism nearly ten years in the making, comes the story none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris, and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who went to prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal. 

The result is an astonishing account of two good students with lots of friends, who came to stockpile a basement cache of weapons, to record their raging hatred, and to manipulate every adult who got in their way. They left signs everywhere, described by Cullen with a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of police files, FBI psychologists, and the boy's tapes and diaries, Cullen gives the first complete account of the Columbine tragedy.

In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to become a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers--an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times.

My Thoughts:  Wow, this was a fascinating book.  It's incredibly well-researched and well-written.  I found myself in places wishing a bit that the author would stop bouncing back and forth between before and after the shooting.  But by the end of the book, it make complete sense how he peeled back the onion bit by bit instead of chronologically.  

I learned so much about the tragedy, mostly that everything I knew about it was untrue.  Columbine was quite damning to the media and its coverage of such tragic events, and how their poor coverage resulted in so much false belief even ten years later (when this book was published).  

If you're curious about Columbine, school shootings/terrorism, or the psychology of people who commit mass murder, then this would be a great read for you.  I read it in less than three days, despite the heaviness of the subject matter.  Incredibly fascinating and incredibly sad, all in the same book.

Rachel Knight Series.

Overview:  Rachel Knight is a Los Angeles County prosecutor in the Special Trials Unit.  As such, she prosecutes (and apparently investigates...) high-profile cases in LA.  Along with her BFFs LAPD Detective Bailey Keller and prosecutor Toni La Collier, Rachel navigates life, work, and romance as a highly visible local figure with her own childhood baggage and a love for vodka martinis, expensive LA restaurants, and sarcasm.  GoodReads synopses (slightly edited by me for length) for each book:

Guilt by Association:  When her colleague, Jake, is found dead at a grisly crime scene, Rachel Knight is shaken to the core. She must take over his toughest case: the assault of a young woman from a prominent family.  But she can't stop herself from digging deeper into Jake's death, a decision that exposes a world of power and violence and will have her risking her reputation--and her life--to find the truth.  

Guilt by Degrees:  Someone has been watching D.A. Rachel Knight--someone who's Rachel's equal in brains, but with more malicious intentions. It began when a near-impossible case fell into Rachel's lap, the suspect-less homicide of a homeless man. In the face of courthouse backbiting and a gauzy web of clues, Rachel is determined to deliver justice. She's got back-up: tough-as-nails Detective Bailey Keller. As Rachel and Bailey stir things up, they're shocked to uncover a connection with the vicious murder of an LAPD cop a year earlier. Something tells Rachel someone knows the truth, someone who'd kill to keep it secret.

Killer Ambition:  When the daughter of a billionaire Hollywood director is found murdered after what appears to be a kidnapping gone wrong, Rachel Knight and Detective Bailey Keller find themselves at the epicenter of a combustible and high-profile court case. Then a prime suspect is revealed to be one of Hollywood's most popular and powerful talent managers--and best friend to the victim's father. With the director vouching for the manager's innocence, the Hollywood media machine commences an all-out war designed to discredit both Rachel and her case.

The Competition: A Columbine-style shooting at a high school in the San Fernando Valley has left a community shaken to its core. Two students are identified as the killers. Both are dead, believed to have committed a mutual suicide. In the aftermath of the shooting, Rachel Knight teams up with her best friend, detective Bailey Keller. As Rachel and Bailey interview students at the high school, they realize that the facts don't add up. Could it be that the students suspected of being the shooters are actually victims? And if so, does that mean that the real killers are still on the loose?  

My Thoughts:  I absolutely love the character of Rachel Knight-- she's tough, sarcastic, quick-witted, and smart.  Plus, she hates mornings as much as I do.  These stories are all fantastic with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing, but not so much to give you whiplash.  Marcia Clark definitely has a great storytelling talent, which has now served her well in two careers.  The Competition is my least favorite of the four.  It annoyed me slightly how a prosecutor was awfully involved in the investigation of a school shooting.  There were almost no courtroom scenes.  But it was otherwise a fascinating whodunnit thriller.  The first three were all five star books to me.  I gave the last one only three, which upon reconsideration might be a bit harsh.  Perhaps it's closer to a 4.  But definitely all are entertaining and worthy of reading!

The Nightingale.

GoodReads Synopsis:  In the quiet village of Carriveau, France, 1939, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another. 

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime. 

My Thoughts:  I don't know why, but I did not want to love this book.  Probably because there was so much hype about it that I wanted to buck the trend.  But alas, I could not.  It truly is a beautiful, inspiring, and devastating story.  Like most, I've read many, many novels set during World War II, some set in battle, and some on the home front.  It's almost impossible to write from a fresh perspective in such an oft-covered time period.  But Kristin Hannah has done so.  I loved the characters of Vianne and Isabelle.  They were beautifully deep and vibrant despite the author only having 438 pages to make us love two women.  And love them I did.  This book is definitely a roller coaster.  A slow build-up, some early bumps and turns, then hang on for a wild ride to the end.  Five stars.