2 Short Reviews of Very Good Books

My last 2 books have both been terrific.  And one of them is already scheduled for the RBC!  Here are a couple of (very) short reviews:

Faye, Faraway, by Helen Fisher:

This is a very different take on the time travel theme.  All I will tell you is that the protagonist, Faye, is 37-years old and very happily married with 2 children.  Through an extremely odd set of circumstances ( guess that's obvious if it's time travel!), she is transported back to when she was 6, and her mother, who died when Faye was 8, was 26.  Can you see where this one could be headed?  No?  Me, neither.  It's very cleverly done and has an ending you will want to talk to others about.  I've definitely read some good time travel books in my day, and Faye, Faraway, sits right there with the others.

The Nature of Fragile Things, by Susan Meissner:

Susan, who will be Zooming in to the RBC on May 12, has written a very good book centered on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.  Aside from the story, the details about the earthquake itself, along with the aftermath, are very educational.  Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area all my (long) life, it seems I would know more about this event than I do.  Plus, I definitely felt the effects of the 1989 earthquake here. But, despite all of that, I really learned a lot about it.

The story itself centers on Sophie, a 19-year old Irishwoman who leaves Ireland at 16, spends a couple of years in New York, and then answers an ad from a man in San Francisco who is looking for a woman to marry who will also help take care of his 6-year old daughter.  Sophie jumps at this opportunity, and she is wed within a couple of hours of her ship landing in San Francisco.  Between the things she ultimately learns about her husband and all of the fallout from the earthquake, we get a very interesting story.