The Tea Planter's Wife by Dinah Jefferies.

 The Tea Planter's Wife by Dinah Jefferies. Crown (Penguin Random House), 2016. Adult fiction.


With lush descriptions of the beautiful landscapes and many details about the tea business, Jefferies has created a glimpse into a fascinating bygone culture. Gwen, a young English woman, marries Laurence Hooper, a wealthy owner of a tea plantation in Ceylon and goes home with him. Ultimately, she discovers his first wife, Caroline, has died several years before. While this could have been just another Rebecca remake, Jefferies has created fresh characters and a very different story. Gwen's sister-in-law, Verity, is a troubled and manipulative woman. Her cousin, Fran, is often far away. And, then there's an unusual pregnancy. The book reads smoothly and lovers of historical fiction won't put this one down for long.(Starred review in Booklist)


I receive this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.

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Before the Fall: A Novel by Noah Hawley

  Before the Fall: A Novel by Noah Hawley. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette), 2016. Adult fiction.


From the title itself, readers can tell that there's a crash coming. Sure enough, a small private plane takes off from Nantucket and disappears before it reaches New York City.  A family of four, a high profile couple, two pilots and a flight attendant, and an artist are on board. Who survives? What happened?  The author does a good job of keeping the tension going, the intrigue convoluted, and the characters real. Hawley is best known for script writing, and both producing and writing the hit series BONES. No doubt Before the Fall will be one thriller of a movie!  (For some fun reading, pair this one with the very different, but somewhat related After the Crash by Bussi.)

The Leaving by Tara Altebrando

The Leaving by Tara Altebrando. Bloomsbury, 2016. Young Adult. Fiction.

It's been eleven years since six kindergarteners went missing. Suddenly, five of them return, but with no memories of what has happened to them in those years. Someone  finds he knows how to load a gun. Someone remembers a carousel horse. Someone can use a camera well. What happened to these kids and why have they come back now? Do they just start high school now? And, the biggest mystery for one family: where is the sixth child? What makes a person real if there are few memories stored up?  Told in a series of fifteen days after they appear, readers learn of the families and their struggles to both remember and forget, to move on and live their lives. It's a mysterious, twisting tale of friends, families, trying to remember the past and trying find a future in a landscape of "What ifs".