Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng, 338 pages

The story begins with a house burning down and then details backward, explaining what happened in a seemingly serene suburban community.  Set mostly in the late 1990's, the book is an emotional thriller about being a woman and motherhood.

I listened to 3/4 of this book and then read the last 1/4 because I was desperate to finish it.  The story was so emotionally fraught I just wanted to finish it as quickly as possible.

I wasn't really sure if I liked the book and then it ended and I thought, oh wow, that was good.

Since We Last Spoke by Brenda Ruffener, 287 pages

This was a hard book to read subject wise but you know that's a possibility by the blurb on the back.  I kept putting the book down but then almost instantly picking it back up because I had to know what happened. I didn't cry until the end of the book at which point I started sobbing. It's the type of book that I hope everyone will read. It brings to light things people don't always want to talk about but should. Grief should never be bottled up. Teen readers and adults readers will both get a lot from this book.

Road Trip by Gary and Jim Paulsen 114 pages

As the foreword tells us, this started not as an intentional book-writing endeavor, but just a father and son having fun and telling one another a story.  I'm very glad they did.  The book is actually told from the perspectives of a teen boy and a border collie, a very smart dog indeed, alternately.  Ben is pretty upset when his dad announces that he's quit his job to flip houses.  Especially since it means that the sports camp he'd been looking forward to is now not a done deal.  His father is impetuous and spontaneous, Ben and his mother are not.  One more spontaneous gambit is that his father tells him that they are going on a long road trip.  Why?  Because there's a homeless border collie puppy out there that needs them and the shelter is several cities away.  Ben's pretty okay with the new puppy idea, but he's still angry with his dad about the rest of the drastic changes in their lives.  So, he invites his "bad influence" friend to come along.  This is kind of a, well, road trip kind of book.  They have a series of happenstances that makes their group keep growing.  Atticus is the most observant and the most knowledgeable about human behavior, but he's a dog, so only the reader gets to know what's in his head.  All's well that end's well, and while this one was wrapped up pretty tidily, it was a nice trip getting there.