Monk in the Inner City / Mary Lou Kownacki / 176 p.

Let's start with this: Mary Lou Kownacki is NOT your average nun, or at least, not what I, in my apparent small mindedness, envisioned a nun to be like.  In a series of stories, recollections, and simple thoughts arranged in alphabetical groupings, Mary Lou leads the readers on a spiritual journey. Mary Lou is a Benedictine Sister living in Erie, Pennsylvania, attempting to "stretch [her] monk's robe until it embraces the suffering world."  She offers insights to a variety of topics from angels to Thomas Merton to zen wisdom and everything in between.

Reading this was actually a lot more fun than I expected.  Sister Mary Lou is a bit of radical, at least in my mind.  She participates in peace demonstrations and gets thrown in jail.  She advocates for better roles for women in the Catholic Church.  She surprised me at every turn.  Her stories tugged at your heartstrings and made you stop and think.  I felt like she made you stop and reconsider your preconceived notions about monastic life and about religion/Christianity in general.  An enlightening read.

Shadow / Jenny Moss / 384 p.

Shadow's job is to protect the queen, who is fated to die before her sixteenth birthday..  To stay with her every minute of every day, experiencing everything she does. Shadow is less than a servant; she has no standing whatsoever.  While the young queen is doted upon, Shadow is unknown, unloved, uncared-for. Without a name or identity of her own, but only a burning desire for freedom, she waits, and always plots her escape. 
But when her freedom becomes possible through the queen's death, Shadow discovers that not everything is as she thought, and that freedom and love both exact a high price. 

This joins my list of royal bodyguard books, along with Mistwood (which is excellent) and The Decoy Princess. This is an interesting book; the characters were surprisingly layered in parts for fantasy, but then they kept falling back into flat roles. An interesting book.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase / Joan Aiken / 173 pp.

If you like your plots and characters outlandish, your language somewhat archaic, your worlds steam-powered, your orphans locked in dungeons, and your villains horrible child-hating adults, you will like this book.

When the genteelly-impoverished Sylvia goes to live with spirited Bonnie, villainess Miss. Slighcarp uses the absence of Bonnie’s parents to dismiss the servants, burn wills, and terrorize the children. The book’s title comes from the fact that the children live in a town where wolves roam after dark and will attack people and trains. Surprisingly, the wolves are not very prominent in the story.

Published in 1963, this book fits in well with the recent mock-gothic Children’s genre that includes the “Unfortunate Events” series or the Eddie Dickens Trilogy.

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable Than Ever Before / Jean M. Twenge / 243pp.

Twenge argues that people who are part of Generation Me (her term) are the first generation to be raised with a strong self-esteem culture taken for granted. This leads to more individualism, confidence, and sometimes narcissism and an inability to take criticism. A stronger sense of entitlement often leads this generation to disappointment and depression when they encounter a world contrary to the “your dreams will come true” philosophy with which they were raised.

This book was an interesting study of my generation filled with statistics, surveys and anecdotes. Not everything was flattering, but I felt it was fairly evenhanded with occasional snarkyness. Outside reviews, however, are mixed. Some found this book too critical of this generation, some found it highly accurate, and some took offense with Twenge’s claim that this generation has it extremely hard. Twenge includes herself in Generation Me and sees generational differences as inherent - not something to change. At the very least, this book provides interesting conversation starters.

Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys / Kay S. Hymowitz / 189 pp.

Hymowitz argues that there is a new stage in life, especially for men, called preadulthood that can last for quite a while. Some of the contributing factors she cites are rising average marriage ages, the rising cost of living, and America's shift to a knowledge-based economy that favors women. This book is a quick read, has a more inflammatory title than the content deserves, and is very-polarizing in Amazon reviews. I personally enjoy societal-survey books and found that this one, at the very least, raised some interesting topics.

Wither / Lauren DeStefano / 358p.

Society has advanced to the point where senseless diseases (like cancer) no longer exist among the world's remaining population.  The problem: men only live to 25 and women to 20--then "the virus" takes hold. Young girls are being sold into prostitution or as wives to young men in hopes of procreation--just to keep the human race going until a cure is found. Rhine and her twin brother, Rowan, were careful to avoid the Gatherers--to keep Rhine safe.  Until one day she answers a job ad...a trap.  Rhine is sold as a wife to a wealthy young man whose father is determined that he will find a cure for the virus.  Rhine is determined to escape.

DeStefano's writing is beautiful.  I felt like the story pulled you in right away with the description of riding in the van with all the other girls, not knowing your destination or your fate.  Rhine is one of the lucky three chosen to become a wife to a wealthy "house governor" while the unlucky girls are dragged back to the van and shot---one-by-one.  Rhine is such a complex character and you really watch her struggle with her situation--feelings for Gabriel, feelings for/about Linden, fear for her brother. 

Linden, Rhine's husband, is such an intriguing character to me as well. Rhine is tricking him into loving her and making her "first wife," but along the way, you start to wonder if little bits are real.  He's a likeable character despite the situation, especially as his ignorance comes to light.  I found myself rooting for him here and there and almost hoping Rhine would stay with him.  I was so torn between him and Gabriel.

Overall--wow. 

Evergreen - Belva Plain 593 p.

Evergreen is one of those novels that span several decades as seen through the eyes of generations of a family.  Such books always contain themes of continuity and change, personality and situation, and how every person's combination of inner self and social world sets her on a trajectory that overlaps and intersects with the trajectories of others, and produces a vast alone-ness in each individual life.

The other major theme in this book is: what is love, and what is its relationship to personality experience, to loss, to truth, to religion, to money and to family?   The central impact that causes the ripples forming that theme in Evergreen is the two very different loves of Anna, the main character.  Paul is the man with whom she feels an instant bond, and Joseph is the man who adores her.  Both men remain in different ways in her life, and so she is doomed never to be whole.  But in this early-to-mid-20th-century world of Jewish immigrants fighting to make their own place in New York, of wars and the Holocaust in Europe, turmoil and tragedy everywhere, is anyone really whole?  Anna's are not the only hard choices that must be made.

Though it was published in 1978, this novel did not feel the slightest bit dated to me, but warm-blooded and real.