Lexington, KY - Summer reads run a gamut that other seasons just don't seem to offer. Something about warm weather, perspiring glasses of cool liquid, sand in the pages and lingering daylight hours make so many more titles enticing. Enjoy.
The Fireman's Daughter
Andrea Carmichael cannot shake the nagging feeling that her father was somehow involved in her mother's death so many years earlier. And her persistent dreams seem to back up her suspicions.
A breakup with her longtime boyfriend precipitates her return to Winchester, Ky., to confront her father, breaking the near 10-year lapse since she's last seen him - only to find him mysteriously missing when she arrives at his home. His departure only leads to more questions, and the responses and actions of the friends she still has in town offer more confusion than they do help.
Intriguing paintings that she admires turn out to be her mother's work, even though she never knew she had had the talent or interest. A handwritten journal contains seeming mythical stories that curiously tie into the new facts Andrea is learning about her mother's life. And when a map is discovered in her father's car that highlights a number of beaches in Florida where her mother's ashes were spread to the winds, she finds the trip to search for her father - and the company it offers - irresistible.
Andrea's strange dreams provide pieces to a puzzle that becomes dangerous, even deadly, and not even the crashing of the ocean's waves can drown them out. Crum's cast of characters - a card-reading psychic, a B & B owner with curious appetites, an overly-helpful handsome attorney - add an interesting bent to "The Fireman's Daughter," and the local tie of Lexington and Winchester seal the deal. Enjoyable, light summer reading fit for any lounge.
The Weight of Heaven
The unbearable grief of losing their 7-year-old son to a sudden illness numbs the lives of Frank and Ellie Benton, and when Frank's company offers him a transfer to a small coastal town outside Bombay, India, Ellie encourages the move.
With hopes of surviving the grief together and hopefully reconnecting, they move into a home that offers comforts well above what the Indian nationals endure. Their attempts to move beyond their pain take them in different directions, and while Ellie suffers with the guilt of her son's death, Frank becomes drawn, almost to the point of obsession, to the young son, Ramesh, of the servant couple who live on the grounds of his home. He feels the child's future and well-being are his to accomplish.
When a young man from Frank's factory dies under police restraint that he unwittingly ordered, the vast differences in the culture Frank has come from and the one he is now living in become painfully clear, and the tensions drive a further wedge between the couple. As Ellie opens up to her new world, Frank's blindness to the humanity of the Indians and his growing obsession with the servant son push him beyond the limits of sanity, and he plans the unthinkable in order to gain control of the boy's future.
Author Thrity Umrigar writes: "There would be violence. There would be blood. This he had to accept. He had come here to take his own measure, to take measure of his love for this boy. To ask himself if he was willing to pay any price, in order to have Ramesh. To weigh the joy of having Ramesh against the tarnishg of his soul." The consequences are unimaginable.
Umrigar weaves the reader seamlessly through the dire consequences of treading carelessly through another's culture, of treading blindly through grief and of disregarding the needs of those around us. Capturing the fragility of the human heart, she shows the effects it can have on those in our lives.