Honestly, though, that amount of information from 1968 is not enough to answer many questions; it only opens up more possibilities and leaves readers wanting more, so don’t expect to be able to take much of a break between this book and the third, Voyager. That said, most of the book takes us along with Claire and Jamie as they try to change the future and prevent the Pretender Prince Charles from trying to take back Scotland from the Hanovers. Claire knows the end of that story and, having told Jamie, they both agonize over how to change it. Their attempt to do so takes them to France, then eventually back to Scotland. Diana Gabaldon introduces us to more characters and places and allows us to revisit beloved characters and places from Outlander. She entertains and enthralls no matter what the setting.

I just cannot put these books down. They are so rich in detail and vivid in setting. It is a pleasure to experience everything along with Claire and Jamie. Gabaldon makes us feel as if we’re not missing a thing as she tells us all kinds of what some may consider trivia that’s unnecessary to the arc of the story. But it’s all so fascinating!

Rated: Moderate. I’m going to say moderate for this one, at least compared to Outlander, though some readers may disagree a bit. I just felt this one was kind of on the line. There were maybe three uses of strong language; this book still has some sex scenes, but not nearly as many or as detailed as in the first book. It also has a fair amount of violence, and there is a rape scene. But I just didn’t find this book to be as heavy in disturbing detail as the first. The character from Outlander who is perverted and evil appears in this one, but there aren’t so many details about what he does or has done.

It all seems like it’s a worthless experience, something Hadley would rather do without. Then she meets Oliver. In the airport. They strike up a conversation, and it turns out that they’ll be sitting next to each other on the plane. They end up talking off and on the entire flight, and by the time they land in London, Hadley’s starting to wonder: could this attraction be something … more?

It’s at this point when I should say that I have Issues with True Love and Love at First Sight and Fate. Especially in stories. I find them to be copouts and prefer relationships that grow slowly. This book uses all three tropes. So, by any measurement, I should have hated it. The amazing thing is, however: I didn’t.

I think it was possibly because the book isn’t wholly about True Love. Sure, Hadley meets Oliver, they fall into … something … but it’s really about her relationship with her father, whom she hasn’t forgiven for divorcing her mother a year ago. It makes the book a bit angsty, but for me, her struggles to understand and accept her father’s decision, to realize that he’s not Evil (and neither is her stepmother) balanced out the sappiness of the True Love theme.

Except, the love part wasn’t sappy. It felt more natural — and even though Hadley’s hunting down Oliver when in London seemed improbable and a bit forced, I could still believe it — and because the book only took place over 24 hours, it made it less cloying. It was really a book about beginnings, sweet and tender. Sure, maybe Hadley and Oliver’s relationship will work out for Forever, or maybe it’ll fall apart once school starts, but that’s immaterial. It’s a beginning. It’s a story.

And that’s honestly the best part.

Rated: Mild for one instance of teenage drinking. (Oliver swipes some Jack Daniels on the plane and downs it.)

Tris, Tobias and their friends are on the run. After successfully (sort of) stopping the Erudite faction and their plan to exterminate the Abnegation faction, and the city government, they’re hiding out, regrouping. Their faction, Dauntless, has all but dissolved: half have defected to Erudite, basically becoming their thugs; the other half are hiding out in the Candor faction. Then there’s the “factionless”: those without a place to belong. In this fight which pits Knowledge and Brawn against Truth and Selflessness, it seems those whom everyone have been ignoring are suddenly quite important.  But the important thing is this: Tris and Tobias (and their friends) make their way through most of the factions, assessing and trying desperately to figure out what Jeanine (the leader of Erudite) wants so badly with the Divergent, so badly that she will kill for.

The action picks up immediately where Divergent leaves off, which is both a strength and a weakness. A strength because for this story, there isn’t a need for months in between plot lines. The action is too intense, too immediate for that. And Roth finds a way to build on the ideas of Divergent, taking the plot lines in intriguing directions. The weakness comes if you, like me, haven’t read Divergent immediately proceeding. Roth wastes no time on exposition, no time on explanations: if you don’t know what’s going on, tough luck.

That said, she does weave bits of information into the chapters, enough so that I was able to remember the basic story of Divergent by the time I was halfway through. (It’s just getting to that point!) But, eventually, this story kicked in, and I no longer needed past information — admittedly, I did get tired of Tris and Tobias’s clandestine smooching, which lacked both intensity and passion — to carry my interest. The story is very much a middle-of-a-trilogy: things need to happen, pieces need to move, revelations need to come out (though, honestly, I felt the Big Reveal was a bit forced), in order for the story to move forward. There’s a lot of running around from faction to faction (on the plus side: you get to see the insides of all the factions), recruiting people, trying to understand what the Ultimate Purpose is here. Much like Katniss, Tris spends the book trying to recover from Bad Deeds She Did, though she’s a much more proactive character than Katniss. However, everything seems too cut-and-dried, too much like jumping through hoops. I wanted there to be more surprises. (There were a few; Roth, I think, revels in making characters who will do both “good” and “bad” things, within the space of a few chapters.)

I’m not sure it’s as good as Divergent was, but since it left us on a bit of a cliffhanger (Roth does know how to write an ending!), I’ll have to leave my ultimate judgment until the next book comes out.

Rated: Mild, for violence.

But, as I was reading, I felt that the plot was very jumpy. It went from one thing to the next to the next to the next and I didn’t feel I knew why things were happening or why I should care. I didn’t feel a strong overall conflict that the main character, Tristan, was trying to overcome. I started out loving the voice, the characters, the setting at Coney Island, and the interesting take on mermaids, but the plot felt contrived and it just ruined it for me. I found myself forcing myself to finish it by the end. A lot happens in the story as far as events go, but the pace felt slow because I didn’t understand why things were happening. Why does he go to the island? WHY does he even want to participate in all these events? I really just didn’t get it.

Overall, it had a very strong and interesting voice that I loved reading, but I just wish the plot was a little stronger.

Rated: High, for some mentions of teen drinking/smoking, several crude sexual references, and strong language (I stopped counting f-words after 10 or so).

One of my favorite things was how much the title had to do with the story. The word “crossed” weaved itself beautifully in and out of every aspect of the book and I found myself analyzing it and thinking about it a lot. It was so much more deep and thought-provoking than I thought it would be. The story leaves you hanging and eager to read the next one, but not in a huge cliffhanger way. The love triangle was one of the best and truly honest ones that I’ve read. Personally, I think that Matched and Crossed are better than the Hunger Games.

Rating: Mild, for some violence.

After the swift and unexpected death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed, only 22, thought she had lost everything. Spiraling downward in a pattern of self-destruction that included the end of her marriage, sex with strangers, drug abuse and even an abortion, Cheryl finally fixated on the idea of hiking the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mojave Deseret through California and Oregon to Washington State — and to do it all alone, with no serious long-distance hiking experience or knowledge of backpacking, all in hopes of finding herself again in the solitude of the trail.

This memoir is beautifully written and surprisingly honest, but I found it lacking in the depth that I expect from such a book. I kept waiting for the breakthrough, for the wisdom and healing, and while it did occur in small degrees, it was mostly her continuing to be selfish and self-destructive. There was no redemption, and that was what I expected.

So, as much as I wanted to love this book, I did not.

Rated: High. Frequent foul language, mostly the f-word; sex scenes and sexual references; author has an abortion and uses drugs, including heroin.

Okay, this was awesome. Like, ignore the family and the house to finish reading awesome. The angel lore and the paranormal world that’s been set up have enough detail and uniqueness that I didn’t feel like it was exactly the same story I’ve already read 10 times (although I admit, I have steered away from reading TOO many angel stories, so it may feel redundant to some readers; I don’t know). It doesn’t hurt that the love triangle was fantastic and wonderfully romantic. The mother-daughter relationship felt solid and yet realistic. I am trying to think of something I DIDN’T like. There wasn’t any particular character that drove me crazy and I am actually really interested in what happens next.

Rated: Mild for older teens. There are 13 uses of mild language and several steamy-ish make-out scenes, with clothes on.

A world away, in America, a woman and her Indian husband long for a child but cannot have one of their own.

Secret Daughter is the story of these two different families and the baby girl that connects their fates. Continually changing viewpoints and locations, the story takes us on a journey into the heart of what makes a family and the sacrifices we need to make when we truly love someone. From the slums of Mumbai to the streets of San Francisco, this book covers 20 years of growth, heartache, regret and discovery.

If a book can make me shed tears that feel real, that means something. I didn’t always love it; sometimes the white American mother felt a bit caricatured and I didn’t love how she was usually painted as the bad guy, but by the end, I felt I understood her better and it didn’t bother me so much. I really liked changing from the U.S. to India and thinking about how two lives can be so very different.

The Indian parts of the book felt so rich and authentic; it’s a great cultural look for those who don’t know much about Indian life and, like I said, by the end I had a few actual tears. The lessons our orphaned girl learns really touched me and didn’t cheese me out the way I was worried they would. I think as a whole, I really did like it.

Rated: Mild for 7 uses of mild language and 1 use of moderate language

See, my ancestors — my grandmother’s grandmother, I think — went across the plains with the Martin Handcart company. I listened to my grandmother tell me stories of hardship and survival. It’s part of my heritage. And even though I’ve never picked up a Sandra Dallas book in my life (um, she’s popular, right?), I needed to see what this woman — someone who is outside of my “tribe,” for lack of a better word — was going to do with my heritage.

The basic story is that of the Martin Handcart Company: a group of immigrants from Great Britain (and Scandinavia, a fact Dallas omitted, much to my disappointment) who, for economic reasons, made and pushed handcarts across the plains from Iowa to Utah. It was an ill-fated trip from the start: the handcarts were made of green wood and weren’t very sturdy; they left late; and winter in Wyoming came early. Out of the 650 that started, more than 100 died before making it to Salt Lake City.

Dallas focuses on four women: Anne, whose husband is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but who has refused to join the church herself; Jessie, an unmarried woman with two brothers making the trip on their own; Ella, a pregnant woman who is crossing with her husband and sister; and Louisa, a young wife of one of the company’s leaders. Their stories never really intersect — I kind of was expecting them to, given the title — but, rather, the narrative switches to follow each one as they cross the plains and experience trials and hardships and setbacks and miracles.

While it wasn’t a great novel — Dallas never really got much tension going, and it seemed as if she was just checking things off a list (Mention Joseph Smith? Check. Polygamy? Check. Hardship and Suffering? Check.) — it was a good one, and she did treat the Mormons sympathetically. I liked how she had characters along the whole spectrum of faith: men who were overbearing and overly zealous to men who were sympathetic and supportive; women who were doubters, ones who were strong (both physically and mentally), and ones who were blindly following their husbands. It gave a more nuanced picture of our faith; unlike the way many books have portrayed Mormons in the past, we are neither all always gung-ho about the edicts we’ve been given, nor are we all dissenters. And that, in itself, was refreshing.

It’s not a great book, but it’s a good one, something I wasn’t expecting.

Rated: Mild. There are a few references to being damned and hell (the place), and to the physical suffering, but no actual swearing.

So there you have it. I got hooked on this book — and, most likely, the whole very lengthy series: there are basically seven books in the series so far, with an eighth set for 2013, and each is about 700 pages long. That is a LOT of words. Now, you ask, what is it about?

Well, basically, Scotland in 1745. A woman in 1945 England goes on a second honeymoon with her husband, from whom she’s had to be apart for some years because of World War II. They go to Scotland, find a charming bed and breakfast, and explore. Long story short, she ends up whisked back in time 200 years, and she ends up there for a good long while. So she makes a life there and even (re?)marries.

I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction; sometimes it can be dry or full of details that just don’t pique my interest. But this book can most accurately be classified as that genre, with sprinklings of all kinds of other genres mixed in, and I loved it. Diana Gabaldon has done her research, crafting a novel that just seems to capture the place and time in living color. I particularly enjoyed the information about medicine and how the sick and injured were treated medically or by “healers” using herbs and anything available naturally. Claire, our main character, was a nurse in the war, so she ends up being a healer in that earlier time, and she has to figure out how to adapt to what’s available, and I just found that whole storyline fascinating. We as readers also learn quite a bit about the Jacobites, how clans were run in the Scottish Highlands, and tons of details of daily life that Gabaldon manages to make interesting and relevant rather than superfluous or dull.

In addition to adventure, lots of action, and intrigue, readers get a really compelling love story. Claire’s love interest in her “new” (old?) time is a great character, and their interactions are passionate in every way. On top of presenting wonderful characters, Gabaldon also has lots of fun with humor as her characters interact.

Overall, this is just such a great book and series that I probably won’t be able to pull myself away from the thousands of pages that comprise the series so far.

Rated: High. There are four or five uses of strong language and some other moderate and mild language peppered throughout. There are a good number of moderately detailed sex scenes and a good number of crude references, which honestly kind of feel authentic considering the time and the characters involved. There is violence, and some is fairly detailed. Life in 1745 was pretty harsh, and there were some very unsavory characters. One character in this book in particular is cruel, perverted and just plain evil, and his actions at a couple of points are, frankly, more detailed than I would have liked and pretty disturbing.