MAN this was depressing. Not a book to listen to when you are having the February/Marches.

What works: Letting the reader know right from the get-go that Isabel Gillies' perfect college professor husband "Josiah" was going to, almost without warning, leave her and their two small children. As things unfolded it was a bit like watching a horror movie. "No! Don't invited Sylvia over for dinner! Your husband is totally going to have an affair with her and he's going to tell you he wants a divorce and it's going to happen any minute and you don't even know it's coming and my stomach really hurts right now!"

What doesn't: There is a bit more jumping around than I would have liked. Gillies repeats herself a lot. And she seemed to have spent a lot of time in some crazy denial about the situation. ("You can't be leaving me because look how perfect our life is with our expensive wallpaper and our summers in Maine!") To be fair, though, the whole mess went down in less than a semester, so who can blame her for being gobsmacked.

Last note: I swear, every time Josiah denied that anything was going on between him and Sylvia and then accused Isabel of being jealous and irrational, I wanted to kill someone. Sack up, assholes.

Am pretty sure the author lives in the same town that I do. Or possibly the one down the road. Had to laugh (and then get mad on her behalf) when the author's realtor "duped" her by letting her think that she was moving into a culturally diverse area instead of the absolute Mormoniest spot of Utah County Mormondom.

Definitely worth a read. The author has a very positive tone, but she is honest about the challenges of moving into an area where everyone already seems to be tucked neatly into family/cultural/religious spheres and aren't necessarily looking to extend their circles.

This memoir is about one couple's jump to living off-the-grid in rural Canada. While not the best book of this type I've read (I skimmed through some of the chapters about things I wasn't terribly interested in, like assembling the wind turbines and sorting out phone lines) there is plenty of interesting material. It did a fine job of satisfying the "vicarious homesteading" craving I occasionally get. :-)

Not as gripping as I found the first one (I kind of rushed through) but maybe that's because I don't have the Februaries anymore. :-)

My spoiler-free (and so very brief) synopsis is that this is the story of a husband and wife. The wife goes missing under suspicious circumstances and the husband becomes the prime suspect. (As I read, I thought, "Huh. This seems pretty cut and dried to me, and yet I'm not even halfway through the book.") Except then you hit Part 2 and then things get really, really insane. There were so many twists and now I want to find somebody else who HAS read it so I can actually talk to them about it. (Warning: there is some really bad language, if that bothers you.)