Watchers was a great thriller and extremely well written.

Two beings were created in a lab with near human intelligence. One is a golden retriever normal in every way other than his intelligence. The other is called The Outsider. A frightful being resembling no animal or man. Both beings escape from the lab and are free in the wild.

A man named Travis finds the dog and soon learns of its secret, however he is unaware that the dog still has more secrets to reveal to it. Along the way, Travis and the dog, newly named Einstein, meet a woman named Nora. Nora has been sheltered all her life and Travis befriends her and finds their friendship quickly grows into something more.

In the meantime, The Outsider is still out there. The NSA are searching for both The Outsider and the dog which means that Travis and Nora have to watch themselves carefully.

Without giving anything else away, I’ll just say that I completely enjoyed this book. Animal stories always hit me right in the heart and Einstein, with his human-like intelligence, is completely endearing. I found myself reading the book at a quick pace, always wanting more and always thinking about where I’d just left off when I wasn’t able to read. There are very few boring moments in the book.

The only subplot I could have done without was that of a man named Vince who kills the scientists who created The Outsider and the dog and believes that taking lives insures his own immortality. The entire subplot is almost ridiculous in its ending.

If you’re an animal lover or dog lover, this book is a definite read. You will find yourself looking after Einstein and thinking about him long after you put the book down.

This book was marked as “suspense” by the library and several other places have also insinuated that this is a suspenseful story. I don’t know why.

The book starts out shortly after Leslie has a miscarriage. A mishap with anesthesia causes her memory to be poor. She discovers an article about a little girl that was kidnapped 25 years ago and she’s convinced it is her.

She finds the family and tries to make herself a part of their lives.

Okay, the storyline was interesting, but I’m not sure why some elements were thrown in. For instance, her miscarriage is fairly important, but her sudden memory problems were not at all relevant. At no point in time did I believe she even remotely had a memory problem and the fact was just thrown out at me time and time again only until it was no longer a convenient excuse for the author to explain Leslie’s weirdness.

And suspense? Don’t get me started. I figured out the ending after Part One. The plot was entirely too predictable and the characters completely lacked emotion or conviction.

I wouldn’t classify this as a bad book, but there are too many flaws in it for me to say it was good.

This was a fun, magazine style book. A perfect read for any fan of the show. One of the most surprising things to me was how few interior designers are actually on the show. I wish the book would have gone into more detail as to what happens “behind the scenes” however the biographies they gave on every cast member was nice.

In general, I like time traveler stories and this one is no exception.

Henry has a genetic defect that allows him to time travel. It’s not nearly as glamorous as one might think, in fact, it’s usually dangerous and frightening! Henry cannot control his time travel, although he seems to only be drawn to locations that have an emotional significance to him. He arrives at his destination confused and without clothing. He normally needs to be able to run fast and steal in order to survive his trips through time.

Along Henry’s travels, he meets Clare. The most interesting thing about their relationship is that he meets her when she is six or seven and he is forty-three. He is coming from the future – a future in which they are married. Henry doesn’t meet Clare until he is 28. Although Clare has known Henry all her life, Henry has never seen her before.

This book really made me think about time travel. Sometimes the Henry of the future does or says something that will directly affect someone in the past. For example, in order to get his doctor to give him the time of day, the Henry of the future looked up the birth certificate of the doctor’s child, memorized the information and gave it to the Henry of the past in order to prove to the doctor that he could really time travel. What would have happened if Henry didn’t do that? What would be the outcome?

The author makes it clear that the past cannot be changed. Henry has lived through many things and has tried to change the past, but everything is concrete. You could imagine this would leave a person feeling helpless and a slave to their own future. Henry has stated that he thinks people have free-choice in their present, but when exactly IS the present?

Trying to change the past doesn’t work out. One day when Clare was a teenager and Henry was coming back from the future for a visit, she drew a sketch of Henry. While she was drawing, they were talking about how the past cannot be changed. When she finishes the sketch, she starts to put the date down in the lower right hand corner, however Henry stops her. He tells her that in the present, the sketch has no date on it. In order to test Henry’s theory, Clare puts the date on the sketch anyway to see what will happen.

When Henry gets back from that trip, he finds the sketch to see the date, however there still isn’t a date on it. When he asks Clare about it, she says she was paranoid that something might not go right or they might not ever meet, so trimmed the sketch to chop off the date.

So although they were trying to change the past to see its effect on the future, they couldn’t. In the past she had always put the date on the sketch and chopped it off. Henry had just assumed when he saw the sketch that it had never been dated.

I’m going to have to go through and read this book again to make all the connections between the past events and future events. The book is so circular and the author never seems to skip a beat. The story was funny and sad and romantic and filled with action.

I highly recommend it.

I’ve been screaming for a while for a good chick-lit book with strong, independent female characters and when I finally find one, I get bored halfway through. The book was good, but I had a hard time holding my interest in it. It follows the lives of three completely different, yet connected women.

Lisa is a flashy magazine editor from London. Her work is everything. She’s been hoping to get a glamorous job at a magazine in New York City, but instead she’s been assigned to setup a brand new woman’s magazine in Dublin, Ireland. She goes from a staff of hundreds to a staff of less than ten. On top of all that, she’s dealing with the breakup of her marriage and realizing she isn’t quite such an awful person after all.

Ashling is older than Lisa and has worked for the same small magazine in Dublin for the past eight years until she invents a cleaning tip that ruins a reader’s couch and is subsequently fired. She lands a job as the assistant editor of Lisa’s new magazine. Not much else is going on with her life. She’s 31 and on the dating scene, not a terribly good mix.

Clodagh is Ashling’s best friend. As far as Ashling is concerned, she has the perfect life. She’s been married to Dylan (an ex-boyfriend of Ashling’s) for the past ten years and has two bratty kids. She has a wonderful house and never has to work. Clodagh is not even remotely happy with her life though. There’s never a hint that she actually loves her children or her husband. She is a spoiled brat, plain and simple.

In the end, everything works its way out. I could have done without Clodagh altogether and some of Ashling’s friends (Ted and Joy) seemed to be written into the story only to be used in a small way later on. They have no real purpose in being there at all.

I thought it was a good book overall. It was a bit slow. Wouldn’t have hurt the author to shave about 150 pages off the book. Sushi wasn’t even mentioned until page 290 and then for the remaining 136 pages it’s like the only thing people could think about was sushi. It almost seems as though at that point in writing the book the author thought of the clever title “Sushi for Beginners” and decided to incorporate as much sushi and explanation of “beginner’s sushi” as she possibly could throughout the remainder of the novel.

Elizabeth Berg does a very good job at making every day life seem interesting. This was the 2nd book I’ve read by her. The first was Open House and also dealt with a newly separated couple. This one, unlike many others, sympathizes with the husband. It was an engaging book, but I felt uncomfortable through most of it. No good times, just doom and gloom.

An overweight person reading a book about an anorexic. I really know how to pick them, don’t I? After I found out I was reading a book about an anorexic, I thought I was going to hate the book. Admitedly, it is a fluff chick-lit style book. Something about me actually liked it though. I found myself feeling emotions (albeit rarely GOOD emotions) towards the characters and I’ll take moving books where I can find them.

The Runaway Jury is marked as suspense, but I didn’t think there was much suspenseful about it. Nicholas Easter is selected as a juror in a tobacco trial. He’s a friendly guy with two years of law school behind him and all the jurors respect him and sometimes even look to him to explain what’s going on.

Inside the courtroom, the plaintiff is trying to prove that a man died directly from cigarette smoking. They throw in all sorts of obscure facts about advertising and targetting kids. Things that are supposed to make the jury hate cigarettes, but these things have nothing to do with the case. The defense, in my opinion, is very weak in this case.

But the book isn’t really about the trial, it’s about the jury and what goes on behind the scenes. I’m really afraid to serve on a jury for a large trial now. Both the defense and plaintiff trail all prospective jurors and gather as much dirt on them as they can. Once jury selection is complete, the defense goes to work on influencing each of the jurors. Sometimes they use their spouses to get to them. Sometimes they do so directly with a dirty little secret.

Rankin Fitch works for the big tobacco companies and is, in effect, running this operation. He is very perceptive and can probably tell you your life history just by looking at you. Fitch starts getting notes and phone calls from a woman named Marlee and it doesn’t take long before Fitch realizes that Marlee knows exactly what’s going on and Nicholas Easter is working with her somehow to control the jury.

The question is, what does Marlee want, why is she doing this? Both her and Nicholas seem to have appeared out of thin air and Fitch must track them down and learn their dirty little secrets in order to get the upper hand. Will he be too late?

This was a quick and fun read, although the whole thing was rather transparent. The theme is lies. Alice Thrift reminds me of Carrie Pilby. I think if they met each other they’d get along fabulously.

Not much else to write about this book though. Not much of a plot. Not much romance. Not much feeling or emotion felt while reading it. Still, it’s a fun book if you want to get away from it all for a few hours.

This was a beautifully written book about the Sparrow’s family history spanning 13 generations. Rebecca Sparrow walked out of the woods one day when she was seven or eight and no one knew where she originated. Named Rebecca by the washerwoman who took her in and Sparrow by the local boys who saw Sparrows flocking to her almost supernaturally, she lived a short life affecting the small town of Unity, Massachusettes for generations to come.

Each Sparrow woman kept her surname and bore only one child, a girl. Upon the girl’s 13th birthday she would awake with a gift of some sort. Sarah Sparrow, Rebecca’s child, was said to need no sleep. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter Jenny can dream other people’s dreams. And Jenny’s daughter, Stella, who just turned 13 can tell how some people are going to die.

Surprisingly, the book focuses little on the supernatural gifts of the Sparrow women and more on their unity and history. Each of the remaining Sparrow women have something to learn from one another. Each of them have made mistakes needing to be corrected. The Sparrow women touch the lives of the people of Unity in a wonderful way and help them to realize what has been there all along is exactly what they need.

I felt the last third of the book had pacing problems. Sometimes it was agonizingly slow. Sometimes details were given so quickly and subplots were wrapped up so hastily I had to wonder if I missed something. The last third of the book didn’t keep my interest the same way the first parts did. In the end, everything falls into place exactly as you expect it would with few twists and turns.