Anne Hart

Is it better to grow up poor and then become rich or grow up rich and become poor?  In The Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randel, it is better to be poor and then become rich.  If you are born poor you’ll know how to survive, whereas if you’re born rich and then become poor you won’t know how to feed yourself.  The Last Rose is about the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in WWII.  The story starts with an American filmmaker in a hotel in Shanghai in 1980 Shanghai, China meeting the millionaire businesswoman Aiyi Shao.  Aiyi then tells the filmmaker the story of Shanghai housing many Jewish refugees who fled from German-occupied Europe during WWII.  Before the occupation, Aiyi is a wealthy heiress running a jazz club.  Then she meets Ernest Reismann who is one of the penniless Jewish refugees.  He’s a piano player and connects with Aiyi through music.  Aiyi makes multiple complex decisions that have consequences for a lot of differen...

Have you ever called in an anonymous tip to the police?  If you read The Monsters We Make by Kali White, you would be calling in every slow vehicle that drives by your house, anyone who ever offered your kid candy, and any house with an attic or basement.  I’m not sure my kids will ever be let out of the house again after reading it.  Sammy and Crystal Cox are siblings growing up in the 1980s.  They live with their Mom who works two jobs and is a bit clueless.  Crystal has a vision disability where she is legally blind but she writes for the school yearbook and newspaper.  Following the disappearances of two paperboys from their small Midwestern town, Crystal decides it’s the perfect story to win a writing contest for a scholarship. Officer Dale Goodkind is the detective on the case who is haunted by his past.  This book is gut-wrenching!  We are given two possible men who are the potential monsters kidnapping the boys.  Sammy and Crys...

Can you imagine being the child of a serial killer?  In Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark Chloe Davis is a psychologist in Baton Rouge.  She became a psychologist to deal with the trauma of being the daughter of a serial killer.  She has a loving, doting fiancé, Daniel.  Then one of Chloe’s patients is murdered and she’s once again haunted by her past when six teenage girls were killed.  Chloe is determined to not let the past repeat itself which makes her quite the heroine with compelling vulnerability. Her brother, Coop, disagrees with Chloe’s choice of fiancé and is quite vocal about it.  Chloe’s mother is in a semiconscious state in a nursing home but has answers Chloe needs not just to the past murders but also to the current ones.  Chloe resorts to denial and abusing prescription drugs when she can’t cope.  It doesn’t help when a reporter calls because he’s doing a 20th-anniversary story of her father going to prison for the or...