Book Review: Find Momo

One of the great things about working in a library is having ample opportunities to discover great books by accident.  I often find books that I want to read or look at when looking for items to put out on display.  This is how I came across Find Momo by Andrew Knapp.  Momo is a border collie who is in every single picture of this photography book.  In some pictures he is quite easy to find; in others – not so much.  He may be behind a rock, on a roof, or sitting in the middle of a very cluttered room.  He is very good at hiding.

As someone who likes puzzles and never quite grew out of Where’s Waldo, this is the perfect book for me. While my actual reading time is quite limited these days, it’s nice to check out a book that I can open to any page to give my brain some quick fun.

-Sarah

Book Review: Suspect

Sometimes reading fiction helps one figure out the mysteries of life.  After reading Suspect by Robert Crais, I now know why our dog Shiba happily pushes me out the door every morning when I go to work but whines pitifully when my husband leaves. I am not a member of Shiba's pack!

This is the story of Maggie and Scott.  They have been matched to become partners in the LAPD K-9 Platoon.  Maggie and Scott have a lot in common.  Maggie, a military working dog, lost her handler in a roadside attack in Afghanistan.  Maggie was wounded in the attack and was returned to the United States to heal. Scott, a young policeman, is also healing. He was wounded and his partner, Stephanie, was killed when they unexpectedly came upon what appeared to be a contract killing. That crime has not been solved.

Maggie and Scott have a lot to learn.  They must heal both emotionally and physically.  They must learn to trust.  They must become pack.  As pack, they can face the future. Together, Maggie and Scott can solve the crime.

I have always enjoyed Robert Crais's books because of the action and suspense.  I especially enjoyed Suspect because of Maggie.  Crais manages to make her a compelling character without anthropomorphism. The information about K-9 and military dog training was fascinating.   If you would like to learn even more about military dogs, read the article, "The Dogs of War", in the June 2014 issue of National Geographic Magazine.  Pack is everything!

~Gilby G

Book Review: The Wives of Los Alamos

“We’re moving to the desert,” their physicist husbands told them. Explanations were thin on the ground, but still the young wives said goodbye to friends, offered vague reasons to parents they would not be permitted to see again for years, and they traveled--from cities and university towns, and from as far away as Europe--to the stark New Mexico outpost that was their new home. Some of them were pregnant and most had children in tow, and they would raise their young families in unfinished houses surrounded by barbed wire, where the water ran cold when it ran at all. Their clothes were all wrong, their heels were too high, and they were not prepared for the harsh turn into isolation and military secrecy that their lives had taken. Even less were they prepared for the horrendous truth of their husbands’ mysterious “project” when it was a secret no longer.

 The Wives of Los Alamos is the mesmerizing fictional account of how the wives adapted, survived and thrived—or not—in a largely unknown episode of  the second World War. Fans of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic will enjoy the choral nature of TaraShea Nesbit’s narrative.  Delivered in the first person plural voice it is as much poetry as it is prose, and it speaks eloquently to the shared experience of women in a community born of hardship and fueled by determination. 

--Helene