Rapid Fire Book Review #9

The Job by Steve Osborne - A short story collection from the author's long career as a member of the NYPD. You get the whole range of emotions reading this book - you laugh, you cry, you get to see that sometimes buying a hot dog is an act of kindness people don't expect. Officer Steve also talks about his 9/11 experience which serves as a reminder about how we need to support the people who ran into danger on that day. There's also a sad story about a dog. (Don't read this book, Rita!)

Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss and Hope in an African Slum by Kennedy Odede and Jessica Posner -
Im going to kind of sound like a jerk about this book, but it is what it is. The best part of this book is Kennedy and hearing about how he overcome and all caps UNFATHOMABLE childhood in Kenya. He worked hard and saw things that needed changed in his community and helped to start the changes needed. And then this girl comes over from middle-upper class America and they fall in love and blah blah blah. They are trying to do big things and I wish them all kinds of success but she was all kinds of clueless sometimes and it drove me nuts.

Book of Aron  by Jim Shepard - A story about a young boy who works as a smuggler in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. This book is not for the faint of heart. There is talk of kids with so much lice their hair looks silver, dead bodies on the street, and a kid who has to pull gold teeth from his dead Dad's body so he can use them to buy food. Not an uplifting book, but an interesting story told from an angle I hadn't heard before.

Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savrit - I really liked this book, but somehow it fell threw the cracks on getting reviewed, as happens occasionally. Anna finds herself alone on the streets of Poland after her dad gets picked up by the Nazis for being an intellectual. She is in desperation when a friendly stranger on the street starts talking to her. Through a series of weird events and near captures by the Nazis they spend the next few YEARS roaming the countryside together trying to stay away from the Nazis AND the Russians and others who mean to do them harm. The writing in this book was just so fantastic. I loved it. It's "technically" a YA book, which surprised me because some sh*t goes down! Anyway, thought this great book with it's magical realism element (my favorite!) was truly great)

And we finish on a low note, haha:

DNF

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexanda Kleeman. I picked this one up from the library for readathon and just couldn't hack it. I gave it the standard 100 pages and it just wasn't drawing me in. I probably would have just stuck with it and finished it but I have a pile of other great sounding books that need reading and I just didn't want to spin my wheels on something. Others have raved about this book though, so if you're intrigued give it a try!