Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

★★★★★

"God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so."

My Antonia by Willa Cather

★★★★ 1/2

"The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through by fingers...I kept as still as I could.  Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen.  I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.  Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.  When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee

★★★

"The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave."

The Pianist by Wladslaw Szpilman

★★★★

"And now I was lonelier, I suppose, than anyone else in the world.  Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being.  Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going.  But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror.  I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live."

Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz by Richard Newman

★★★★

The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany by Martin Goldsmith

★★★★★

"Such hope.  It breaks your heart."

The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart

★★★

"I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine's physical attributes...it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection of self-hatred.  As if readers will only like a character who's ideal - or completely shattered."