FALLING TOGETHER by Marisa de los Santos

Pen (short for Penelope), Cat, and Will were inseparable in college.  Now it's time for their college reunion (10 years?), and the three have not seen one another in six years.  Pen has a 5-year-old daughter, Augusta, by her on-again off-again married boyfriend and has no intention of going to the reunion, until she receives an email from Cat, imploring her to attend.  Will has received the exact same email, but Jason, Cat's husband and the real author of the emails, approaches Will and Pen at the reunion with the news that Cat has disappeared.  Now we have a different threesome, with Will, Pen, and Jason becoming a team as they head to the Philippines, the home of Cat's deceased father, in pursuit of Cat, who may not want to be found.  Jason is a big, annoying lunk, who's not sharing everything he knows, but he does really love Cat, although the extent to which she returns this love is in serious doubt, given that she's left him, without any explanation.  Will apparently has been carrying a torch for Pen since college, and the anticipation of seeing this relationship finally blossom was what kept me interested.  What happened to Cat is the big mystery, I guess, but, since she's absent through most of the book, I didn't feel that vested in her story.  Marrying Jason in the first place seemed particularly unwise, but more importantly, Cat is an epileptic who takes her meds sporadically, at best.  Her seizures mark two pivotal events in the plot, and I guess we wouldn't have much of a novel otherwise.  All the characters have good intentions, with malice toward none, but the author makes a somewhat lame attempt at injecting some conflict, in the form of a spat at the end between Will and Pen, which amounted to nothing more than a serious case of over-reaction on Pen's part.

ROBOPOCALPYSE by Daniel H. Wilson

A war against robots is as ludicrous to me as time travel.  The Terminator had both, and for some reason that appealed to me, but there's no Schwarzenegger equivalent here.  The juggernaut-robot in this novel is buried in Alaska and has no personality.  The humans seem pretty vanilla also, and I had some difficulty keeping them straight.  Each chapter is a video transcript, diary entry, or other document from the war, and I wasn't wild about this format, either, which reminds me of the Star Trek captain's log voiceover. Three characters, however, did stand out.  One is Cormac Wallace, who has assembled all these snippets and ultimately has an argument with his brother that bears consideration:  How much like the machines do we have to become in order to survive?  In other words, do we have to sacrifice our humanity?  Another key character is Mathilda, a child whose eyes the machines have replaced so that she can see into the machines themselves.  This experiment seems ill-advised on the part of the machines, since she uses her power against them.  My favorite, though, is a Japanese man whose "wife" is a robot.  When she turns on him during the robot uprising, he has to take her offline and then misses her terribly.  I get that.  I also like the fact that the humans are not warring with each other and are united in their efforts against a common foe.  Why are the machines waging war?  Here's my favorite line in the book:  "It is not enough to live together in peace with one race on its knees."  Doesn't that succinctly describe the cause of most of history's rebellions?

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

After bouncing around among assorted unpleasant foster homes since infancy, Victoria Jones is now being thrust out into the world ("emancipated") on her 18^th birthday.    Victoria is an angry young woman who flinches at being touched and who believes that she is unable to sustain any sort of bond with another person.  We learn about Victoria's past through alternating chapters that reflect mainly on the year she spent with Elizabeth, a vintner who taught Victoria the language of flowers.  Elizabeth was saintly in her forgiveness of 10-year-old Victoria's many transgressions, which were not slip-ups but intentional acts of meanness.  Victoria outdid herself in the malice that caused her to leave Elizabeth's care, and now, 8 years later, she strikes up a friendship of sorts with Elizabeth's nephew, Grant, who grows flowers to sell to florists like Renata.  Elizabeth's knowledge of flowers and the emotions they are supposed to evoke (jealousy, love, regret, etc.) have landed her some occasional work for Renata.  As she struggles to limit her emotional attachments, Victoria encounters a slew of encouraging and caring people, including Renata, who help guide her through a transition to a woman who can thrive in the real world.  This smattering of friends and mentors seemed a little unlikely, and the storyline is a little too typical for my tastes.  I found Elizabeth's unconditional love of Victoria a bit unbelievable, too, but the author has more experience with foster children than I do, and I'm sure she has the ability to tolerate misbehavior more patiently than I ever could.  Despite these minor drawbacks, the novel is charming.  The most obvious consequence of having read it is that now I'll want to consult a flower dictionary before sending anyone a floral arrangement.

THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta

A number of persons, not necessarily all virtuous, have been scooped up into heaven by The Rapture.  At least, that's what everyone assumes when family and friends suddenly just evaporate into thin air on Oct. 14.  The town of Mapleton has its own list of unlikely vanishers, including Nora's husband Doug, who was having an affair with a much younger woman.  In fact, Nora's kids vaporized also, and she has suffered probably the biggest loss of loved ones in Mapleton.  However, Nora's not the only one having trouble coping.  Laurie, whose family has remained intact, becomes so unmoored by the event that she abandons her life to join the Guilty Remnant, a bizarre cult that requires all members to smoke, stalk their former neighbors, relinquish all tokens of their previous lives, and make martyrs of themselves or their fellow members.  In fact, most everyone has lost their rudder, not knowing when/if they, "the leftovers," will disappear as well.  Rather than relish and enjoy each day as a gift, many of Mapleton's residents have basically given up or joined some fanatical group in order to find some sort of safe harbor.  Laurie's son, Tom, has become a follower of Holy Wayne, who has a string of teenage wives, while Laurie's teenage daughter, Jill, has veered off course, under the not-so-watchful eye of her father, Kevin, mayor of Mapleton.  Kevin and the barely functioning Nora strike up a tentative relationship, but really everyone is avoiding committed relationships, given that one or both parties could suddenly go poof.  Life is uncertain anyway, though, and maybe that's Perrotta's point.  Enjoy what you've got while you've got it; attitudes of gloom and doom just make matters worse.  I loved the ending, which provides a glimmer of hope that not everyone will go off the deep end.

TAFT by Ann Patchett

John Nickel manages a bar on Beale Street in Memphis and has a thing for his new waitress, Fay Taft.  There are two big problems:  1) She's a teenager, and  2) She's white and he's black.  The race difference wouldn't seem to be that big a deal these days, even in Memphis (my hometown).  However, Fay, her troubled brother Carl, and Fay's mother are living with old-money relatives, and John knows that they would take a dim view of an older black boyfriend who runs a bar.  These various issues seem only to intensify the attraction between the two, but in some ways John is also father figure to both Fay and Carl, whose father has recently died, leaving the family destitute and forced to move from the hills of East Tennessee to live with the aforementioned relatives.  I couldn't quite grasp what it is about Fay and Carl that motivates John to protect them in ways that are not healthy for any of the parties involved.  One possible clue is the fact that John himself is father to 9-year-old Franklin, who now lives in Miami with his mother, Marion, whom John never married.  This is a sticking point with both parties, as she was ready to marry when he wasn't and vice versa.  Now he has developed a friendly relationship with her parents, still in Memphis, and a possibly more-than-friendly relationship with her sister Ruth.  Add to these Wallace, Cyndi, and Rose, who all work in the bar, and you have a nice ensemble of characters to keep the pot boiling.  The author, from Nashville herself, nails the dichotomy, or trichotomy, really, that is the state of Tennessee, with the mountain people at one end and the delta people at the other, and the less extreme valley people in the middle.  I've read that the author thinks that the title of this novel hurts its market potential, and I think she's right about that.  It's a shame this novel hasn't come to the attention of more readers.

LINCOLN by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal just passed away, and I realized that I had never read one of his books.  I had a copy of Lincoln and decided that now was the time to tackle it.  Historical fiction has the advantage (or disadvantage, in some cases) of a known outcome.  We know who's going to win the Civil War, but getting there seems almost impossible, given the Union's paucity of capable generals, the infighting among political leaders competing for Lincoln's job, the leakage of military plans to the Confederacy, and the bogus intelligence about the size of the Southern forces from obviously unreliable sources.  The book is overly long, but then there's a lot going on, including the plot by local Confederate sympathizers to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln.  The White House residents are aware that they may have to evacuate at any moment, given their proximity to the seceded state of Virginia.  Lincoln's wife's extravagance and migraines add to Lincoln's woes that include attempts to depose him for incompetence.  Eventually his foes in Congress and in his own Cabinet realize that Lincoln is the consummate politician who is wily enough to outsmart them and powerful enough to push them out of his way.  Some of his plans never come to fruition, due to his untimely death.  His ideas of reimbursing the slaveowners and relocating the slaves to Central America were not popular with his colleagues, but I couldn't help but wonder if the Reconstruction era could have been even more chaotic if he had lived.  One thing that I found disconcerting was that the author switched subjects or perspectives rather abruptly, and I had quite a bit of difficulty keeping the long list of characters straight.  No matter.  This book reads like a novel and reminds us that issues such as the size of the national debt and the separation of church and state are not new.  Imagine our current problems compounded by war on our own soil.  This book gives a glimpse of what was truly a turbulent time.

BELONG TO ME by Marisa de los Santos

Bad things happen to good people, and in this book all the characters are likeable.  Cancer can happen to anyone, and it's devastating.  However, Elizabeth's disease helps bring together two women—Cornelia, the petite newcomer, and Piper, Elizabeth's judgmental best friend.  There's also a surprising blast from the past that is sort of a mixed bag.  Any way you slice it, though, the cast of characters is delightful.  Cornelia is married to handsome oncologist Teo, and Cornelia's new friend Lake has a smart and congenial teenage son Dev, who has a new love interest in Clare, who visits Cornelia and Teo from time to time.  Cornelia and Teo would like to have a child of their own, now that they're permanently situated in suburbia.  Besides the cancer and a few spats due to misunderstandings, the worst thing that happens is that Dev's teacher in his previous school stifled his academic aspirations with a nasty putdown.  Lake, though, responds in the best way possible by moving Dev to a new locale, near Philadelphia, where our story takes place.  Dev suspects that the move has something to do with his father, whom he has never met.  Clare stirs the pot by encouraging Dev to try to identify and locate his father.  The result is that the kids get more than they bargained for.  Too bland a read?  Not at all.  The writing is lovely, and the lives of these nice people have enough bumps in the road to make us want to find out how they cope.