The Assistants by Camille Perri is a quick chick lit read. It about a assistant who fails to return a check for over payment from boss and instead uses it to pay off her student loans. Another assistant finds out and things begin to snowball. This is a good, entertaining, chick lit book. Maybe slightly implausible but love the girl power angle.
It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years—since the day she gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking for her, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.
A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, and cursed with unnervingly dark eyes that absorb the light around them—and can pierce deep into a person’s soul—Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her mutt, Whisper, as her only companion. While she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed, she plunges into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.
The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wished had never been born. - Amazon
The setting is Vancouver, BC and I don't live far from the Canadian Border and Vancouver so I think this is what initially drew me to this book. It did keep me reading though I thought the author was trying to do a little too much with the plot. The topics covered - Alcoholism, Racism, Adoption, Stem Cells
Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim
This is a true story. It is Suki Kim's memoir about being a teacher to the North Korean Elite Children right before the end of Kim Jong-il's reign. Suki Kim was a journalist basically posing a teacher at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology with a Christian Missionary Group contracted to teach these children. I found this fascinating look at the children's lives and the general life of North Koreans.
My reading has picked up with the cooler weather, too! I know beach reads are always the thing, but I much prefer cozy, cold weather reading with a nice hot cup of tea :) Without You, There Is No Us looks really interesting. I'm requesting it from the library now. Thanks!
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