Review of Your Face In Mine by Jess Row

This is a book about how people see themselves and how they fit into the world around them. It's about what each individual regards as desirable physically and culturally.

The main character, Kelly, a caucasian male, was married to a Chinese woman. He had met her when he went to China to study. Eventually they returned to the U.S.  Kelly had been working on an advanced degree at Harvard when he and his wife had a daughter. Realizing that he wanted a steady paycheck at this point in his life, he took a position at a public radio station in the Boston area. A couple of years later his wife and daughter are killed in an automobile accident. Kelly is depressed and wants to move somewhere else where he hopes the memories won't be so strong. He accepts a position at another public radio station in Baltimore where he spent his teenage years. There he happens to meet up with a friend, Martin, whom he hasn't seen in twenty years. But now the friend looks like a black man.

Martin is a businessman. He wants Kelly to craft a story about how he, Martin, reached the decision to have "racial reassignment surgery" so that he can promote a business that will provide this service to the world and be viewed as acceptable and desirable.

Review of Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey

This book is about the end stage of the building of the 10-mile long sewer tunnel under Boston Harbor. The entire undertaking was an amazing feat of engineering, but the long drawn out and over budget project resulted in a disaster that cost lives. The author recounts in great detail the engineering and management challenges along the way. He brings to life the people who were involved, their various roles and actions and the results.

The book starts out with a horrifying scene in which divers near the end of 10-mile tunnel far under the ocean experience equipment failure that you know will result in deaths. The author then cuts from this scene to give us the background of the project and details about the individuals involved. The engineering is explained well enough that a lay person can understand. I highly recommend this book for its riveting story.

More information about the book: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/209340/trapped-under-the-sea-by-neil-swidey
Information about the author, Neil Swidey: http://www.randomhouse.com/author/129167/neil-swidey

I receive this book for free from Blogging For Books for this review.

Review of Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little

Jane Jenkins, the privileged child of a socially correct and high society mother has just been released from prison after 10 years on a technicality. She was only 16 when she was sentenced to prison for the murder of her mother. Jenkins has problems with her memory due to drug use as a teenager and cannot even remember what happened on the day that her mother died. She's not sure if she really killed her mother but her lawyer, Noah, believes that she is innocent.
Noah provides Jane with a new identity and she takes off to try to find out if there was anyone in her mother's past that might have wanted her mother dead. Jane ends up in a small town in South Dakota and slowly uncovers its secrets and her own family background.
I didn't like the character of Jane at first because I thought that she was too smart-mouthed and shallow, But as the book progressed, Jane's character grew on me. She turned out to be an astute detective who unearths the truth about her mother's murder.