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Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
300 pages
 
What’s it about?
  Greenstone is a small mid-western town that has seen better days.  Virgil Wander owns the local movie theater.  It seems like Virgil’s life has been on autopilot for a long time, until one day his Pontiac careens off the road and lands in the icy waters of Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are just not the same.  This is the story of a small town…
 
What did it make me think about?
 I have read so many good books lately with a small community at the heart of the story.  This story just made me think of the goodness in most people.
 
Should I read it?
I loved “Peace Like a River” years ago and I loved this book as well.  Who wouldn’t love Virgil, Rune, Nadine, and Bjorn- as well as countless other characters living in Greenstone.  I will miss them all!
 
Quote-
“A person never knows what’s next-I don’t anyway.  The surface of everything is thinner than we know.  A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.”

If you liked this try-
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
Beartown by Frederik Backman
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

9 stars

The Last Girl by Nadia Murad
306 pages

What’s it about?
Nadia Murad was born in raised in Kocha, a small village in Northern Iraq.  She is a member of the Yazidi community and has always lived a quiet life in her close community.  Nadia is just twenty-one years old when ISIS militants take over her village. They quickly execute all the men that refuse to convert to Islam, and all the women too old to become sex slaves.  Nadia ,along with thousands of other Yazidi women, is taken to Mosul and forced into the slave trade.   This is her story.
 
What did it make me think about?
 Reading this I kept thinking about all the Holocaust books I have read.  I always thought,, "We need to remember so it does not ever happen again".  But it does happen- Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria are just recent examples.  It just boggles the mind that such evil exists- and so little is done to stop it.

Should I read it?
 Nadia Murad just won the Noble Peace prize.  She is remarkable young woman who has turned her personal tragedy into her life's work.  As she said, "I know now that I was born in the heart of the crimes committed against me."  I found this book to be a page-turner that was disturbing and unsettling.  How do these events keep happening?  How does religion so often play a key role?  We see the refugee crisis on the evening news, but this book makes the crisis personal.

Quote-
"I still think that being forced to leave your home out of fear is one of the worst injustices a human being can face.  Everything you love is stolen, and you risk your life to live in a place that means nothing to you and where, because you come from a country now known for war and terrorism, you are not really wanted.  So you spend the rest of years longing for what you left behind while praying not to be deported."

If you like this try-
Madame President by Helene Cooper
​Forty Autumns by Nina Willner
​My Brother Moochie by Issac J. Bailey
Everything Happens for a Reason and other Lies I have Loved by Kate Bower

9 stars