AJ Dunn Reads

  The Missing Years By Lexie Elliott   Ailsa Calder's artist mother has died, leaving Ailsa as part owner of a large house in rural Scotland called the Manse. Ailsa wants to sell the house she had lived in as a young girl with her parents, but her missing father is a co-owner, and Ailsa has to prove his disappearance had resulted in death before she can sell the Manse. Ailsa brings her half-sister Carrie to stay at the Manse while she sorts it all out. While staying there strange things start to happen: doors banking open, windows open when they should have been closed, flies in a smoke detector, dead animals left on her doorstep, and live animals that refuse to set foot on the grounds. Then there's the feeling that the Manse is watching her. Carrie doesn't see or experience most of these things, but the Manse has a reputation in the community. As they try to settle in they make some friends with a group of neighbors and locals, a mix of personalities that each play importa...

  Ordinary Grace By William Kent Krueger In the summer of 1961, thirteen-year-old Frank Drum and his stuttering brother Jake stumble upon a man over a dead body in a place they shouldn't be playing. They tell the authorities and their pastor father. Thus begins a summer of deaths surrounding this family. Frank and Jake live with their father, a pastor, their mother who once wanted to be famous, and their sister who is their mother's pride and favorite child. Frank and Jake live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. It is in Minnesota, on land that once belonged to the Sioux, and where some tribe members still reside. The line between who can and cannot be trusted is thin and changing, almost amorphous, in this small town called New Bremen. The deaths that come that summer are the result of murder, accident, and suicide. The next to occur hits close to home, when Frank and Jake's sister Ariel is found in the river. The tow turns its gaze to her rich boyfriend K...

  Empire of Wild By Cherie Dimaline Joan is a member of a tribe in Canada that is made up of what she calls half-breeds, a tribe that is constantly struggling against political factors that want to take their land for profit. One night, after a fight with her husband Victor over selling some of the land left to her by her dead father, Victor disappears. Joan's life falls apart afterward as she struggles to get through life without him, always looking out for him, and not knowing what happened to him. One day she stumbles across a religious revival tent in a Walmart parking lot, goes inside, and finds her husband as the Reverend of a church devoted to getting the half-breed population to adopt this Christian religion. But the whole thing is a cover created by the very shrewd businessman, Heiser. Is this Reverend Wolff her husband. He doesn't recognize her and insists he is not who she thinks he is. Along this story is the legend of the rogarou, a wolf/man hybrid that is said to ...

  A Study in Scarlet By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle This is my first experience with a Sherlock Homes story, and I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. A Study in Scarlet revolves around Watson's first meeting with Homes and the first case Watson witnesses Holmes solve. Holmes, in this story, is just 24 years old. I always expected him to be much older, but I imagine as the stories progress through time he'll age. The case is about a man found murdered in a vacant house with no sign of injuries, but a bloody word written on the wall. Holmes, who has previously tried to convince his new housemate Watson that he can figure things out based on deduction, is called in by two local detectives who like to take credit for his work. Holmes figures out who killed the man and how, except for one clue which comes later upon the discovery of another murdered man, where the mode of the murder is revealed to him. After this all takes place in the first part, the s...

 IT by Stephen King When they were eleven years old, seven kids in Derry, Maine started to experience an evil in their town that preys on children every 27 years. It is a shapeshifter that takes the form of their biggest fears, but often shows itself as Pennywise the clown. After little George Denbrough is killed in a sewer grate, his older brother Bill and Bill's group of friends, called the Losers, takes on the task of hunting IT down and killing it. Years later, as adults, they are called back to Derry by one of the group who tells them they made the promise to return if IT should ever come back. Only six of them reunite. One just couldn't face IT and kills himself. These six reminisce to regain their memories which were lost when they left Derry. They forgot all about one another and about IT. But now, once they start to remember, they plan to find IT and kill it for good. This is probably one of King's most beloved books, and I can understand why it is so well loved. I...

 The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Tom Ripley is a con artist, though this is not blatantly stated. While running away from an impending arrest, Tom is approached by Mr. Greenleaf who asks Tom to go to Italy and convince his son Dickie to come home. Mr. Greenleaf believes Tom and Dickie are good friends and that Tom would have some influence over him. Tom sees an opportunity for escape when Mr. Greenleaf offers to pay his way. In Italy, Tom finds that he enjoys living the carefree life of the rich, even though he seems to despise them. And he feels the same about Dickie when they meet. Dickie lives the kind of life Tom wishes he had. When his attempts to persuade Dickie to return to the US fails, Tom decides to stay with Dickie, to become his best friend if he can, and continue to travel with Dickie at Dickie's expense. Things don't go to plan, however, and Tom realizes that in order to live this life, he needs to wholly become Dickie. And he does just that, removin...

  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Umuofia is a village in Africa where Okonkwo lives with his three wives and several children. He is a strong man who is respected in the community. He has strong traditional beliefs and has firm convictions about what constitutes being a man and doing what a man would do. He frowns on any action he deems to be feminine when performed by another man. Okonkwo works hard to raise his sons to be like him and takes in a boy from another village as a trophy prize from a conflict they had, and admires the boy, bringing him up like his own son. Okonkwo participates in all of the rituals of his village and holds fast to their ways. But Okonkwo also makes mistakes and he takes the consequences of those mistakes seriously, maintaining all of the customs that are expected of him. When a band of missionaries sets up residence in his and surrounding villages, Okonkwo has to deal with these strangers and the new religion they bring to his people. His own son b...

  Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin An American man named David is on an extended stay in 1950s Paris, unwilling to return home to his widowed father who is desperately trying to get him to do so and refusing to send any sort of significant financial support. His father wonders what it is he is doing in Paris? What David is doing is hanging out in gay bars and restaurants, pretending he is not gay and looking down on those who so obviously are. All the while, he is lusting after one man or another when, in a bar owned by a man named Guillaume, he meets a new bartender working there named Giovanni. Giovanni is a beautiful Italian man with whom David pretends not to notice and then quickly comes to be enamored with. The two begin to spend time together and Giovanni falls quickly in love with David, who is still afraid to be who he knows he truly is. Instead, David holds himself distant and longs for his friend Hella to return from Spain to save him from what he perceives as his deprav...

  This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger This Tender Land is a beautiful story of running, searching, and longing set in 1930s Missouri. Twelve-year-old Odie O'Bannion lives at an Indian training school with his brother Albert, his good friend Mose, and a host of Indian children sent there or forced to be there for various reasons. Odie and Albert are orphans, very different from one another, but always looking out for one another, until a series of terrible events occurs forcing them to run away from the school with Mose in tow. Along with them is a young girl named Emmy whose mother has been killed in a tornado, and who was destined to live with the school's headmistress, an evil, greedy, selfish woman who rules the place with an iron fist along with her coward husband. On their way south along the river, the four kids meet various people, some nice, some not-so-nice, who either bring them together or pull them apart. On their journey they each learn what they want most ou...

  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski I can't pretend I know how to talk about this book other than to briefly say what happens in it and what my impressions are of it. The story is about a young man named Johnny Truant as he makes his way through a documentary writing by a man named Zampanò, who himself discusses a documentary film involving the Navidson-Green who made the film that came to be know as The Navidson Record. The film documents their time living in a new house that turns out to be bigger on the inside than it is on teh outside, and which has the ability to change itself in astounding and incomprehensible ways. This film seems to affect everyone who sees it in some way, and the record of it, and Johnny's attempts to work his way through it and unravel its meaning, ultimately causes him to lose his mind. It is a smartly written book, though the prose is simple. It is supposed to be a horror novel, but it is far too complicated and thought-provoking for me to redu...

  Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller When Peggy Hillcoat was eight years old her father, James, took her into the woods in Germany from their comfortable home in London and told her the world had ended, that it was just the two of them left. Everyone else, including her mother Ute, was gone. For nine years the two of them live off the land while staying in a cabin they call die Hütte. In London James had been part of a grassroots end of days prepper group. Peggy battles impending starvation, blizzards, and loneliness with only her father for company. And he is slowly losing his mind. As the years go on, James begins to have ideas of killing himself and Peggy as well, whom he sometimes mistakes for his wife. Which, in the end, leads to a devastating finale for both James and Peggy. Interwoven with this story is Peggy's life after it all with Ute back in London, where she now has a little brother and is coming to terms with life once again surrounded by comforts and other peo...