"I'll Meet You There": A Tender Love Story

" . . . if you could make a beautiful piece of art from discarded newspapers and old matchbooks, then it meant that everything had potential.  And maybe people were like collages - no matter how broken or useless we felt, we were an essential part of the whole.  We mattered." 

Love matters.

It's getting closer to Valentine's Day, and although many people aren't all about it, I must admit that I am sucker for a good romance.  Maybe because my husband and I were high school sweethearts, I especially love to read YA books that are both realistic and romantic.  Heather Demetrios' 7th novel "I'll Meet You There" was a tender, coming of age love story that revolved around two broken teenagers growing up in the dead end fictional town of Creek View, California.

The alternating voices in this novel come from Skylar Evans (17) and Josh Mitchell (19).  Both of these characters share the common denominator of their job at The Paradise Hotel, one of only a few businesses in Creek View (others include a gas station and Taco Bell).  Skylar can't wait to escape the stereotypical fate of every girl in Creek View - pregnant by age 19 with a part time job at Taco Bell.  She just needs survive one final summer before she can go to SFU on scholarship.  Unfortunately, her mom loses her job and falls into a deep depression and delves into her alcoholic ways again. Skylar can see her dreams of leaving falling away with each drop her mother drinks.

Josh, a womanizer and party guy, has just returned from a tour in Afghanistan where he served as a Marine.  When Skylar first sees him at a party, she realizes that he hasn't just changed physically because his leg was blown off while in Afghanistan, but something seems different, maybe even softer about his overall persona.

With their broken families, broken dreams, and futures uncertain, this unlikely pair bonds together in a friendship that ultimately becomes something neither of them are completely prepared to experience. But what they do encounter together is often heart wrenching, honest and head swooning, awwww inducing love.

Although there are almost too many twists at the end of this book, the love story itself is enough to make the high praise that this book has received understandable.  Both Sklyar and Josh are beautifully crafted characters that don't want to succumb to the fates of other Creek View-lings and both of them feel like they will be stuck there forever even if they don't belong there.  Even if they have tried to leave.  Because of their circumstances and their seemingly insurmountable differences (Skylar is a scholar and an artist who has remained chaste and innocent in a town that does not encourage that, and Josh is a womanizer who has slept with most of the town and seems destined to fall into the same routines he established before he enlisted in the Marines), their surprising romance feels breathless and right.  Skylar recognizes their similarities after she tries to push Josh away.  She thinks, "It occurred to me that we were the same, in a way.  Both of us treading water, pushing against forces we couldn't control." They are drawn to the brokenness of each other and through their relationship they both begin to heal their past and present scars.

Reading young love that feels real is a beautiful thing.  It's complicated and it hurts to read when they make big errors in judgment as they navigate the tricky path to each other, but the end result in Skylar and Josh's story is worth the read.  If you are looking for a touching embrace of a love story as Valentine's Day draws closer, this one might be the one.

"The Nightingale": A Beautiful WWII Historical Fiction of Sisters, Hope, Loss, and Love

War sucks.
I continually came back to that statement in my head as I read Kristin Hannah's bestselling "The Nightingale."

After reading I'll Be Seeing You, The Girl You Left Behind, and All the Light We Cannot See  in the span of a few months, I wasn't aching to read another WWII saga about what happens to those that aren't on the front battle lines but waging the wars at home. I'm so glad that I did, though.  Kristin Hannah's "The Nightingale" is a gorgeous book that captivates from the first chapter and doesn't disappoint in the trials, hardships, sacrifices, enduring love, and the evils of WWII. I laughed. I cried. I threw the book several times.  I raced to the end, and I ached along with the sisters in this moving, epic tale.

What I've been loving about reading my latest round of WWII books is that most of them have centered on the role of women in the war.  Yes, men were fighting each other on the battlefields with gruesome results.  We've seen the war movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and we've been privy to the unspeakable horrors of concentration camps. We were inspired by "Unbroken" and what happened in the prison camps, but we rarely see the heroics of women who were left behind when the men went out to fight. "The Nightingale" centers on the lives of two sisters who live in France during the time of German occupation.  Vianne Mauriac lives in the quiet village of Carriveau, but after her husband leaves to fight in the war, a German captain billets at her home.  She and her daughter, Sophie, tread the dangerous tightrope of surrender and fight, secrecy and transparency, and ultimately learn how to live with scarcity, fear, and violence.

Isabelle, Vianne's younger and fiercely independent sister, yearns for love and adventure.  She finds her calling during the war by distributing war leaflets illegally, and delves deeper into the resistance movement after she discovers a downed pilot who needs her help to survive.

Hannah's book provides moments that made me squirm.  At one point after I growled and threw the book, my husband asked, "Are you alright?" with a concerned look on his face.  I didn't feel alright.  Actually, at certain times while I read "The Nightingale" I was sickened by our modern day excess.  Vianne and Isabelle, and millions of others learned to survive on so little during the war.  WWII left a gray cloud of want, hate, sadness, death and starvation.  On the flip side of all the devastation,  "The Nightingale" also showed the tenacity of the human spirit to survive in desperate times.  Vianne and Isabelle showed resilience and love while surrounded by horrors that were unimaginable.

Maybe that is why I put myself through reading another WWII book which make me so sad - all that death, all the innocent lives lost, and the innocence of so many taken away.  Hope is what keeps people going and keeps me reading, and Hannah shows so much hope through Vianne and Isabelle's stories.  I found myself thinking often as I was reading, "Would I have been strong enough to help others?" "Would I have survived?" "Would I have sacrificed so much to keep going?" It's impossible to know what we are truly made of until we find ourselves thrown into situations where we need to survive.

I hope I never need to find out, but reading the stories of the sisters in this book (Isabelle is actually based on a real life character) will help me to remember how strong women can be.  "The Nightingale" is a must read for anyone who loves a good historical fiction book - especially those of you who are like me and can't seem to get enough of WWII historical fiction.

A House in the Sky: A Story of Hope

A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett held me hostage for two days. I couldn't stop reading the terrifying account of Amanda and Nigel's kidnapping in Somalia.  I felt their fear when their captors forced them into a jeep and locked them in a room with two small mats and mosquito nets. I visualized their anguish when their captors shackled their ankles just in case they tried to escape.  I cried for Amanda's torture and rape.  I understood her religious conversion and her clever manipulation of her guards.  When she and Nigel found ways to communicate after their separation, I rejoiced in their  reunion and secret Christmas presents.

Mostly as I read this book I gasped.  My husband watched me reading and continually asked me, "What is going on in that book?  It's like you're not here."  And when I told him the story of Amanda and Nigel's Somalia capture, he wanted to know the play by play.  Each hour he saw me reading he asked, "Did they escape?" or "How are they doing now?"  I hardly wanted to come up for air to explain it to him as I flew through the pages to find out what happened to Nigel and Amanda.

What, you might be asking, led to the capture of Nigel and Amanda, two amateur photographers and journalists, in Somalia? The story Amanda tells starts in her impoverished childhood where she dumpster dove for fun - rifling through the remnants of other's trash to find treasures.  As an adult Amanda sought escape and comfort in travel, and when she found her footing on foreign soil, she wanted the thrill and challenge of visiting forbidden places - Afghanistan, Beirut, Baghdad, Amman, and Damascus.  When she received the opportunity to travel to Somalia as a journalist and photographer, she reasoned with herself that "there were stories here - a raging war, and impending famine, religious extremists, and a culture that had been largely shut out of sight." She wanted to "do stories that mattered, that moved people" even with the impending danger and even with the knowledge that few reporters risked going to Somalia.  As the Italian missionary man on the fretful plan ride to Somalia told her and Nigel, "Be very careful in Mogadishu . . . Your head is worth a half million dollars there.  And that's just for your head."

Even with the sinking feeling in her soul, and the warnings from others, Amanda and Nigel forged forward to Somalia with the blind faith that their guides and press passes would protect them.

They didn't last long in the harsh landscape of violence before Somalia reared its ugliness.  Amanda and Nigel were captured and held hostage and thrust into a bizarre business world of negotiations, ransom, political maneuvers, religious extremists, fear, and suffering.

I felt this book the whole way through, and rejoiced at the end of the story because ultimately Amanda's story is one of hope, survival and forgiveness.  I cried during my two day A House in the Sky binge and got sweaty as Amanda and Nigel suffered at the hands of their captors.

When I finished the book, I sat still in front of my iPad for a few minutes - wanting to absorb the full weight of Amanda's story.  My husband asked, "So how does it end?" and I didn't know what to tell him.  I simply said, "Do you know how strong the human spirit is? We can survive anything.  We just need to convince ourselves that we can."