A MARRIAGE AT SEA by Sophie Elmhirst

Oh, this one had me from the opening sentence: Maralyn looked out at emptiness. There was little to see except the water, shifting from black to blue as the sun rose. A clear sky, the ocean, and themselves: a small boat, sailing west. Then all hell descends. The true story of Maralyn and Maurice Bailey, a couple from England, who sell everything they own, buy a boat, and set sail for New Zealand in 1973. For the socially inept Maurice, a self-ordained know-it-all and who dislikes most everyone except for his wife, heaven is no one knowing where they are. Until the boat sinks, and in the aftermath, they float for 118 days in a small rubber raft with no motor, no radio, and little food and water. I've never disliked a character in a book more than Maurice Bailey because he's real, and his egomania nearly cost them their lives. Elmhirst's writing reminds me of the best features Rolling Stone published in the 1970s and '80s. The reader is on the raft. The reader is hungry, thirsty, and scared. Maralyn's hopefulness is evident in her cleverness—her proactive mindset, as seen in her vow not to give up. She carries their story of survival and makes it a hero's journey. Loved!

Favorite line(s): After the wedding, after the honeymoon—well, then it's just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong. It's not as if we weren't warned. The old vows knew what they were doing: for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. The storms are right there in the words. Misfortune can seem abstract in the midst of celebration. At the beginning, we imagine the bad weather might pass us by. It's only natural, part of the long business of self-preservation, because how impossible it would be to go through life in full awareness of all that will befall us. Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we'll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?

THE POPPY FIELDS by Nikki Erlick

In a California desert, an experimental facility offers a sleep treatment for those grieving. Patients are willingly put into a medically induced sleep coma for one to two months in order to process their pain and hopefully wake to feeling healed from the sorrow of loss. There's a glitch, of course, when some of the patients wake not feeling anything at all about the loss—ambivalence—a nonevent. Which is better? To feel or not to feel?—and what does that mean for the four strangers trying to get to the Poppy Fields by driving cross country when their flight is cancelled. They all have different reasons for the journey. It's a story of found family and friendships, of forgiveness and self-discovery, and the cost of significant loss.  

Favorite line(s): The thing about grief is that it's never just grief. For Sasha, grief was also fear. Fear that she might never love again, fear of her unknown future. For Ray, grief was also anger. Anger at the way he'd lost his brother, at the place he blamed for taking him. And, for both, grief was also guilt. It was living with the question: How much was my fault? It was wondering what you could have done differently. Sasha's guilt lived mostly in her magical thoughts, in the actions she'd pondered but never took, and in not knowing, now, whether she ever would have. Ray's guilt was born in what he'd actually done.

THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah

Raised in the idyllic world of upper-middle-class Southern California, Frankie McGrath wants to make a difference in the world and follows her recently deployed brother to Vietnam as a nurse in the Army Nurse Corps. Once there, Frankie works in field hospitals helping to save the few combat soldiers not brought in near-death. The horrors are too numerous for the underprepared nurse to contemplate. The need is never-ending. The death toll and war statistics skewed for the TV news at home. She makes life-long friendships with her two roommates and falls in love with the married surgeon. The real work of putting her life back together happens when she returns home from the war. When she tells people she's a Vietnam veteran, they don't believe her. "There were no women in Vietnam," she is told. How does one live with PTSD when it's not recognized by her conservative parents and health care professionals? Frankie must rebuild a life with no support from the country she served and the people she loved. Hannah is a gifted storyteller with a knack for twists of fate that seem natural and unsentimental. But it's a tear-jerker for its realistic scenes, its well-researched facts about a war no one wants to talk about.

Favorite line(s): For the first time, she let herself remember all of it, here, in this room where she'd once been filled with hope. A different version of her. A different world. As she stood there, letting the pain in, remembering the whole of her life, she realized suddenly that she was young. Not even twenty-nine. She'd made some of the most momentous choices in her life before she had any idea of consequences. Some had been thrust on her, some had been expected, some had been impetuous. She'd decided to become a nurse at seventeen. She'd joined the Army Nurse Corps and gone to war at twenty-one. She'd gone to Virginia with her friends to run away from home, and when her mother need care, she'd come home. In love, she'd been too cautious for years, and then too impetuous. In retrospect, it all felt haphazard. Some good decisions, some bad. Some experiences that she would never trade. What she'd learned about herself in Vietnam and the friendships she'd made were indelible. But now it was time to actually go in search of her life.