Chance of a Lifetime

Book five in the Harmony, Texas Series introduces two new principal romances including three characters first mentioned here. The path to true love is rarely straight or free from complications. Plot lines include a fifteen-year-old unsolved sexual assault and a murder/mystery/thriller. All this against the background of the town and its citizens with whom we are already familiar. The pages are beginning to get crowded and a character list is not provided. This outing could have used some attentive editing.

Guts 'N Gunships

Like too many in the Vietnam Era this author had no desire for a military career but lacking sufficient funds to remain in University chose to become a combat helicopter pilot rather than wait for the draft to railroad him into the infantry. Again, like so many others he has chosen to write about the experience to record it for posterity and as a form of catharsis. When I entered university in 1967 in Canada I encountered so-called draft dodgers who chose to leave home to evade military service. A pacifist at heart I find the military's methods and expenditures loathsome and an abominable waste of human resources and materiel. On the other hand having exposed young men to this training, discipline, and trauma I also feel there is an obligation to provide the veterans of this war machine every therapy and healing opportunity necessary to return them to civilian life. Not all wounds are visible and not all injuries can be healed.

This author tells his story in concise matter of fact tones and has my admiration for not finding it necessary to quote the profanity that appears to be a standard part of military argot. I also commend him for not throwing bucket-loads of military and technical jargon at the reader and explaining that which he does use in terms a layman can understand—the mark of a true expert. This man is the real deal. [He does, however, tend to repeat the same explanations several times which can become tedious.]

So, given my attitude why am I reading this account? Because those who do not study history are fated to repeat it and I want no part of being guilty of repeating it through ignorance of the past.

Just Down the Road

Introduces two new characters to the town and the unlikely romance is telegraphed from the opening chapters. Meanwhile the continuing drama of Harmony hums along in the background. Strays show up on a regular basis, dogs, cats, horses, and people. More sex than I'm used to but....

I will confess that I'd never have thought about making jam with apples though a search found recipes online.

Personal Effects

When Matt's brother, Theodore Jr. died he lost more than a sibling. With his Mother gone he also lost the only remaining buffer between he and his domineering father. Still coping with his brother's death he struggles with a father who thinks he knows best and has his son's future planned for him like it or not. As the title suggests the book is about what Matt discovers about the brother he thought he knew when his possessions are returned to the family.

[Spoilers follow]

So you thought you knew someone. The brother Matt went hiking with and shared a tent with went by the name TJ. Only his mother got away with calling him anything else. So who is writing to Theo—a girlfriend Is it possible that Matt's an uncle? Who else could Zoe be? It's like his brother had a whole other life he kept hidden from his family. So that's where he went after his brief visits home on leave.

The second half of the book becomes a roadtrip in a borrowed car, the owner miffed at him that he didn't want her along for the ride. To learn what comes next you'll have to read the book. Not even I could be guilty of such a spoiler.

The Comforts of Home

Interesting choice of title. Harmony seems to be disaster prone. Last outing it was a prairie grassland wildfire, this time a tornado. Harmony seems not so Harmonious. (groan)

Of the original romances alluded to Noah has declared an intent to settle down with Reagan when he finally gets the rodeo circuit out of his system. His sister Alex married her fire chief Hank. Ty, the funeral director is on the road to making his online romance a reality.

Strays keep showing up in Harmony to enhance the gene pool lest the three founding families get overly inbred. There have been a few more marriages and old romances renewed and new ones sprouted up.

Cowboys of the Texas Panhandle tend to be tall and wear big hats, belt buckles and boots but few are three hundred-pound mountains of muscle like the Biggs Brothers. There seems to be a place for everyone who would find a home in Harmony.

Midnight Wrangler

Second in a series. Follows my observation that Romance Novel Covers provide modelling opportunities for body-builders. Somehow I doubt a largely sedentary 44-year-old rancher looks like the cover model on this book. We rejoin the widowed rancher from book one and are introduced to Bonnie Martin, an old flame from his past who has returned to settle her deceased Father's estate. At least in the opening chapters we are left guessing as to what happened to cause his daughter to leave home after graduation never to return. His curmudgeonly behaviour caused his wife to leave and divorce him. The side of him his neighbours reflect is at odds with this insider's view.

So the plot is fully telegraphed from the opening pages. If the characters were not fully developed and the background filled in this book would not be worth reading. As the story continues we bounce back and forth between the present and the summer of 1990 twenty-five years past while Bonnie sorts through the ghosts of her past in her Father's home.

Guilt weighs heavily on someone who feels their sins cannot be forgiven and forgiveness can only come with confession. Even with this hanging between them chapter 18 is devoted to a lengthy description of their love-making. It didn't seem to hinder the Biblical David and Bathsheba either. Even at this point the reader hasn't become privy to the true nature of Bonnie's guilt though by now we have our suspicions.

The climax, pun intended, doesn't come until the closing chapters when all is revealed.

Somewhere Along the Way

Depending on your point of view book 2 or 3 of the Harmony Series picks up almost exactly where the last book left off. Reagan is a year older and working in town and her adopted uncle's health is beginning to fail. We are introduced to new characters but Reagan's relationship with Noah becomes complicated, but then there are 6 more volumes for that to get sorted out. The final chapter read like a thriller.

Indeh

Meaning The Dead.

Down-loaded a preview not noticing I'd selected a different book with an identical title on the same subject. Ethan Hawke's book is a so-called graphic novel. I haven't read a comic book since Watchmen. Won this hardcover edition by entering a contest on Goodreads.

What comes through most clearly is the cultural divide between the Apaches who had no word for deceit or untruth, had no understanding of or need for money so they could not be bought, and no conception that anyone could own the land.

The inevitable clash between First Nations and an unending tide of White Settlers could have only one conclusion. 

And yes there is profanity, mind you history is profane. 

Ice by Azelin Philips

[Spoiler Alert]

In chapter one we meet old man Crealy who rails Scrooge-like about the poor reminding me of my own experiences. A welfare mother of 32 already twice a grandmother, a drug-addled women who let a fridge full of food spoil because she failed to close the door. A neighbour who had 10 children in 8 years the progeny flow stopped only by “the pill” and the departure of her husband. Contrast with a bank president who makes $500,000,000 a year while his tellers make $50,000.

In chapter two we meet 14-year-old John Crealy who attempts suicide because the parish priest is sexually abusing him and leaves home at 16 because he catches his father out at sleeping with another woman while his mother fails to do anything about it. Where is this headed?

The author's past in social work shows in this work. Expect no fairy tale endings. The child is father of the man and his unresolved and untreated traumas manifest in the adult. Even living in small communities with unsophisticated staff it is difficult to credit no one questioning a string of 5 dead wives. There are a few editing errors that detract only slightly from reading enjoyment.

The Golden Spruce

Haida Gwaii or the Queen Charlottes is a place of myth, awe, and superlatives where the normal laws of nature seem not to apply. Trees in the West Coast Rainforest grow to colossal proportions and ages. As Churchill is quoted as saying to cut these trees to make newsprint seems a crime but logging companies see dollar signs and Natives in areas of high unemployment see jobs.

This may be the story of a specific Golden Spruce but it is also the tale of the West Coast Forest, the logging industry it supported, and the way of life of the men who worked it, the home of the First Nations People who honoured it.

Early settlers found the primeval forests of North America a thing that had to be beat back to enable civilization to follow. Those forests were believed to be limitless. The logging industry has found their limits. Environmentalists now fight to preserve the last remnants of Old Growth Forests that remain. Just as the Japanese Whaling Industry would say, what's the point of a whale if we can't hunt it a logger finds a tree pointless if he can't fell it. Somehow they're like Canada's Symbol the Beaver who upon hearing the sound of running water is determined to dam it.

So the book goes on to document the trade between the Haida and Europeans, a history of exploitation, deception, and destruction. First in sea otter pelts and then in wood. For anyone being an environmentalist such as myself this makes depressing reading.

With regard to the specific mutant sitka spruce whose legend the book describes it is symptomatic of the forest as a whole. As to the whereabouts of Grant Hadwin, alive or dead he has become as mythical as the tree in which he has become bound.

The Bad Beginning

The second of this author's books I've read I fear I don't get the popularity of this series which now extends to at least nine. Obviously I'm not the targe audience but I had difficulty ploughing my way through the pages. Oh Well.

Welcome to Harmony

Having begun this journey with the prequel, A Place Called Harmony, I was surprised to discover that book one jumps nearly 2 centuries to the year 2006, close to present day. The population has jumped from 14 to 14,000. Lighting has progressed from lanterns and candles to traffic lights and compact fluorescents.

I hung in there and the book grew on me. No town can prosper if its residents don't procreate so the book follows three romances. First young Noah McAdam, tall and lanky, is confident that once his complexion clears and he gets some muscle on his bones he'll be a ladies' man. He courts Reagan Truman who lives with her ancient dour Uncle Jeremiah. Noah's Sister, the redoubtable Alexandra, the town Sheriff is courted by Hank Matheson, the town Fire Chief – when they aren't fighting. And finally Ty Wright, the town's forty-something Undertaker has an E-mail Romance with a woman in another State he met on one of his collection runs.

The town's centre is not the courthouse, but the local coffeeshop, the Blue Moon. The Trumans, Mathesons, and McNabbs represent the three founding families we met in the prequel. Amarillo and Palo Duro Canyon on the Texas Panhandle are real places, Harmony is fiction. The fear of Grass Fires on this flat land prairie is very real.

Tribe

This is a disturbing tome that should be required reading for every bank president, politician, and captain of industry in America. A society where CEO's of major corporations make exponentially more than their lowest paid employees, a quarter of all children go hungry, where a reduction in the unemployment rate causes a drop in the stock exchange has lost track of the egalitarian tribal society that was supplanted when Europeans settled America. As North Americans become more independent and comfortable they become more isolated and less self-fulfilled. It is this dislocation that is seen as contributing to difficulty veterans have in reintegrating into society when they get back home. What this book has to say is damning to the political rhetoric splashed across our media in the present political campaign. Lest you attempt to dismiss the arguments here presented the author cites 40 pages of reference materials to back his premise.

I Am Number Four

A coming of age high school drama with a difference. This fifteen-year-old's an alien with what on earth would be considered superpowers and other aliens who are tracking him have killed one through three. Add to hormones and boy meets girl developing abilities to be mastered. The story progresses to the ultimate fight scene.

Made for the movies. 

Commeth the Hour

Being book six in the Harry Clifton Series. I broke down and read it as it concludes the series save for book seven yet to be published. Most of the characters are the kind of people one would rather not have dealings with. Either underhanded or English peers confident of their rank and privileges. The concluding chapters resolve most of the outstanding issues save whether Harry's Father's body lies within a double-hulled freighter about to be cut up in his wife, Emma's shipyard. We'll have to wait until November to have that confirmed.