Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt: Fiction

The following review is from:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58733693-remarkably-bright-creatures

Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tells the story of a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

Personal Commentary: Remarkably Bright Creatures is an informative novel. It is a story about how various individuals react and behave as they move forward while coping with life's challenges.

The Tenant - by Freida McFadden - Fiction

In the novel, The Tenant, author Freida McFadden takes the reader into a world of thrills and suspense. The following review is taken from: 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221733722-the-tenant?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=CWO5vbXxL6&rank=1

There’s no place like home…

Blake Porter is riding high, until he's not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone that he shares with his fiancée, he's desperate to make ends meet.

Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She's exactly what Blake's looking for. Or is she?

Because something isn't quite right, the neighbours start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night. And soon Blake fears someone knows his darkest secrets...

Danger lives right at home, and by the time Blake realizes it, it'll be far too late. The trap is already set.

Personal Commentary: This novel was a distressing read for me.  It evoked unpleasant emotions, and yet I was able to read the whole story. 

Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross - Fiction

When two young rival journalists find love through a magical connection, they must face the depths of hell, in a war among gods, to seal their fate forever.

After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again. But eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow just wants to hold her family together. Her mother is suffering from addiction, and her brother is missing from the front lines. Her best bet is to win the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette.

To combat her worries, Iris writes letters to her brother and slips them beneath her wardrobe door, where they vanish into the hands of Roman Kitt, her cold and handsome rival at the paper. When he anonymously writes Iris back, the two of them forge a connection that will follow Iris all the way to the front lines of battle: for her brother, the fate of mankind, and love.

Shadow and Bone meets Lore in Rebecca Ross's Divine Rivals, an epic enemies-to-lovers fantasy novel filled with hope and heartbreak, and the unparalleled power of love.

Source: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/divine-rivals-a-novel/9781250857439.html

Personal Commentary: In the fantasy novel Divine Rivals, the author Rebecca Ross takes the reader to a world of magical connections through the interactions of two journalists from rival newspapers. The story evolves as the journalists go from enemies to lovers. The main character, Iris Winnow, worries about her brother, who is fighting on the front lines. She writes letters to her rival, who responds to her correspondence incognito.  Through their interactions, they become intimately involved and are faced with hope and heartbreak.  

Thinking Small and Large by Peter Forbes - Non-fiction

Thinking Small and Large reveals the ingenuity of microbes at key stages in life's 4 billion-year history and highlights their developing role in resolving our deepest problem: climate change, which is flooding and burning our world more menacingly every year. 

Ground-breaking ongoing research with some of the most ancient bacteria is leading to a parallel carbon economy using engineered bacteria for fuel, food and materials. This would enable rewilding on a vast scale, with the small land footprint of bacterial technologies solving the current conflict in land use between farming and fuel and materials production.

In this fascinating and illuminating book, Peter Forbes shines a light on this crucial technology and offers a tantalizing glimpse of what is possible. To solve the big problems, you have to think small.

Source: https://guardianbookshop.com/thinking-small-and-large-9781837731701/

Personal Commentary: Peter Forbes, author of Thinking Small and Large, takes the reader into the world of microbes. Forbes' vivid descriptions of bacterial technologies illustrate how human life is affected through the production processes of farming, and the use of fuel and materials in these processes.  

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden: Non-fiction

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.

In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. 

Six years later, Snowden reveals for the first time how he helped build this system and why he was motivated to expose it.

Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online. This man became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candour, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

Source: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/permanent-record/9781250772909.html?searchType=products&searchTerm=Permanent%20

Personal Commentary: The audio version of the non-fictional story entitled Permanent Record is a written evidence of Snowden's life while working for the United States government.  It is a stunning exposé of how he implemented a system to track people and then eventually brought the system down.

FDR Drive: A Crime Novel by James Comey

James Comey held several posts as Assistant Attorney General to the Attorney General and FBI Director under different American Presidents. 

After a stint in the private sector, working at the largest hedge fund in the world, Nora Carleton has returned to her former role as a New York City federal prosecutor. And she's arrived just in time to face one of the most dangerous domestic terror attacks in the history of the city. 

A threat is building in the city, with far-right extremism powered by internet demagogues and funded by shadowy organizations. 

Together with legendary investigator Benny Dugan and aided by colleagues at the FBI, Nora builds a case against the key players in this burgeoning movement, arguing before a jury that some speech is actually a deadly crime. But the menace taking root is far bigger than any courtroom, and as the militants target an upcoming United Nations rally, Nora and her team must race to disrupt the plans and minimize casualties. 

At once a fast-paced legal thriller and a close look at the very real perils of political extremism, FDR Drive harnesses former FBI director James Comey's life experience to tell an authentic and compelling narrative that listeners won't soon forget.

Source: Publisher: Highbridge Audio

Personal Commentary: FDR Drive by James Comey is a fascinating and revealing novel of life in the Attorney General's office of America. This is a one-person's narrative of the meanderings of working in the Attorney General's Office in America. 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she recognizes that plants and animals are our oldest teachers.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Source: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/braiding-sweetgrass-indigenous-wisdom-scientific-knowledge-and-the-teachings-of-plants/9781571313560.html?searchType=products&searchTerm=Braiding%20for%20

Personal Commentary: Braiding Sweetgrass is a powerful story that provides insights into the lifestyle of the indigenous people; their connection to nature, how to give and take from nature. Yet through this connection learn to take care of nature just as nature does so by providing humankind with an abundance of resources.